Sick? Depraved?

For most of my life, the one activity that has given me the greatest pleasure (No, get your minds out of the gutter!) has been reading. Last week, I sat in a coffee shop and read for a couple of hours, and, when I stopped, I felt really relaxed and calm (an unusual state of mind for me recently). I love - perhaps loved - reading. In the last few years, unfortunately, I seem to have lost the reading habit. I'm not really sure why.

Last night, I realized how far I had fallen when I stopped my channel surfing to watch professional wrestling, realized that I had seen that "match," and still continued watching anyway. When you start to care whether ECW is better than WWE or whether Triple H will get another shot at the title, you really need help of the psychiatric kind. When you wish that the Spirit Squad would get pounded to a pulp and squished flat, you really need to get your life's priorities back in sync. I can't believe that I even know who these wrestling "actors" are or that I'm looking at Rey Mysterio's back tat and thinking, "That's cool.".

I wonder if my tv has the ability to block inane television shows. If people can sue McDonalds for selling food that is bad for them, can we sue the producers of programs that rot our brains or turn us into couch potatoes?

Even the better shows may be problematic. There're like sugar. Too much of it is not good for me. I know more about forensic science than I ever I could have imagined ten years ago. I love CSI (New York, Miami, Las Vegas), NCIS, Bones, SVU New York... If I don't get out of the house and to the gym in the evening before one of those shows comes on, I generally don't move at all. And all for what purpose?

I need someone - like my mother - to say, "You can only watch two hours of tv each night. You decide what you want to watch and then go do you work," or perhaps, "Go outside and play."