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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

I will do anything to lose weight...but I won't do that...

I just got T.V. back in my life, I didn't have T.V. for the past four months.  It was interesting, but when you go back to watching television you've got to ask some basic questions.  First of all, how come it's not weird to me that people on TV are so little.  I don't remember it ever bothering me.  I don't remember ever running scared to my parents screaming, "Who are these freakishly small people?"

It's funny how the mind just accepts that people are tiny on TV, depending of course on the size of your TV.

And then there are commercials.  Have you seriously ever bought anything because you saw a commercial for it?  It's kinda crazy that it supposedly works as mind control but you don't realize it's controlling your mind.  But come on we've all bought something in the middle of the night from an infomercial, I just saw one of my purchases in the garage, "Facial Magic."  Exercises for the face to make you not age.  It's a VHS tape and I still believe in it because of the infomercial I saw like fifteen or so years ago.  I'm gonna hoard it, OK?

My very highly educated parents in fact want me to try this new product they saw on Zee T.V. (Indian channel) called Metaslim or some such name.  I told them flat out that it is idiotic, the company doesn't even have a website.  So in exchange I said I would try something that Dr. Oz recommends, he hoards websites.  This is what my fabulous life has come down to, recommendations from either Zee T.V. or Dr. Oz.

Apparently I will do anything to lose weight, but I won't do that...

I mean when you watch T.V. you wonder why everyone is so pretty.  Even the men are pretty.  I don't know where they find these people, but you gotta check out the Spanish channel sometime if you want to really feel insecure and quite frankly ugly.      

Then there is the notion that there are these other people in the room when you are watching TV, like you have a crowd of people that are hangin out with you.   Al Pacino is hangin out with me at two in the morning right now.  When I was manic, I truly thought that famous people came on the TV to tell me special messages.  That was a scary and interesting time, but it was easy to be crazy with all these celebrities at my finger tips.  T.V. promotes crazy.  I mean entire people are having real life conversations and you are not involved, or are you?

Now that I'm not manic, I still think famous people are somehow part of my insignificant life when I turn on the tube.  Don't get me wrong, I no longer think these people are especially talking to me, I just think they are somehow in the room, in my space, in my head. 

"Orange is the New Black" is the greatest new show, but it is about women in prison.  Sometimes I think I'm in a prison of my own making, until I see what prison is actually like.  I have to be careful again what I watch, because you can become what you invest yourself in.  I'm not particularly a fan of how much killing there is on the tube, in fact there are alarming statistics that show that by their teenage years kids have seen murder upon murder on T.V.

That might be why some kid in my eighth grade class I was teaching wrote an Ode to a Grenade as his final poetry project. I can only see this being because of T.V. or video games, which I don't even know enough about to properly hate.  

I always think about how the T.V. is watching you while you are watching it.  The ratings of the shows that have the most killings go higher and higher because we as a society are attracted to that.  We as a society have created this violence by watching and enjoying it.  

If you were watching a T.V. show and suddenly someone shot someone in a grocery store, you would not even be surprised and hardly moved by it.  That says something about me, you and the T.V.  Would you really be surprised at this point if it happened in real life?  You've seen it happen so many times on the screen that it becomes second nature to you.  Maybe you would even react in a cliche way, they way they do on T.V.  Maybe our reality is so fake that we can't even tell what's real.

When Duck Dynasty was blasted for being a show about low class punks, I use the term class particularly because those who are idiots to me are low class, I for one was not surprised.  I am however surprised that others were shocked, I'm shocked that anyone would watch a bunch of drunk gorillas playing verbal ping pong.  I watched the show once because I good friend of mine happens to think it's hilarious, and I wasn't even sure if it was on a proper channel at that time, I thought I was observing something on National Geographic. 

Reality T.V. has made us think that these twisted weirdos are real, they are about as real as the barbie dream house that the "real" housewives of wherever live in.  Reality is about the guy who literally doesn't have anywhere to go when it's below thirty degrees outside.  Reality is we don't want to see his face.  The reality is when we see our own face we might notice that he looks like us.    

I guess the question is, is life imitating art or vice versa?  Is the T.V. just a mirror or are we the mirror?