The Great Media Famine of 2011

The roomie and I decided to go the entire month of November without indulging in any frivolous media - no movies, video games, or music for the whole month (with a few well-deserved exceptions). We had several reasons for doing this. He wanted to cleanse his palate, as it were, of some of the more distasteful media influences he had let into his life. I wanted to keep distractions from my writing project to a minimum. Both of us wanted to discover just how much free time we would have to dedicate to other endeavors if we kept pointless distractions to a minimum.

Also, we both got REALLY FRICKIN' BORED!

Things started pretty well, actually - we'd come home from work or school or whatever, and we'd do a bunch of reading, clean the apartment, go for a walk, write a couple thousand words... whatever, you know. Then, we'd look around, smile at everything we'd accomplished, and say, "Boy, we sure feel swell. What an achievement.

"...now what?"

See, we managed to spend our time pretty well, up until about 9:00 at night. At that point, we both kinda realized that we'd run out of things to do. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem - we'd just pop in a movie, break out the video games, or do the funny video rounds on YouTube. However, for a whole month, we decided to forgo those activities completely. As a result, we completely wasted our time on SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT frivolous activities. For example, we read the entirety of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes in about a week, because there was NOTHING ELSE TO DO.

In the end, we wound up missing relaxing movie time. There's a difference between unwinding at the end of a long day of hard work with a good movie and a day completely wasted in front of the boob tube. We gave up the latter, but, in so doing, we weren't ever able to indulge in the former, and that just got us frustrated.

So much so, in fact, that we started making little exceptions to our rules that allowed for some frivolous media to slip in to our lives, like "Movies are okay in a social setting" and "We can watch videos if someone sends them to us ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn Facebook." That all probably sounds a little silly, but when you realize that WE were INVENTING RULES to CIRCUMVENT OTHER RULES that WE IMPOSED UPON OURSELVES... it stays pretty silly.

Also - and this has absolutely nothing to do with how starved for entertainment we got - we both decided that Patrick Stewart teaching the Sesame Street crowd about the letter "B" is the funniest darned thing ever.

You know what else starts with "B"? "Beautiful."

Well, it's December now. Going a month without movies didn't really kill me. Hopefully, I've learned to be less dependent on external media stimulation. Hopefully, I'll be more discerning in the things I choose to watch or listen to.

More likely, I'll go home from work tonight and play video games until my brains fall out my nose.