Relative Something

I’m sorry. I tried. I really tried. I had high hopes of not following up yesterday’s whine-free post with a whimpering blather of all the things that continue to wrest my attention from the serene calm of blissful focus on the wealth of things healthy abiding in each moment. Then, BAM!, along comes the real world.

I don’t know why I didn’t notice the Charmin-squeezing ads of my childhood as being an offensive way to sell toilet paper. Maybe it was because they weren’t offensive. Stupid, yes, but not anywhere near as offensive as cartoon bears with tp shrapnel stuck to their behind. If I live too long, will everything continue to devolve to levels even lower than society has already accomplished?

As a kid in the era when the only big admonition about watching television was to not sit too close, I learned to mimic the sounds I heard in commercials, like, swelling hemorrhoidal tissue or bronchial spasms, long before I had any clue what these things were. Maybe that was outlandish back then, but it doesn’t seem to be near as outrageous as the bodily functions now being talked about on the air. They are definitely giving me more information than I want to hear.

I won’t waste much time on the grief of television commercials now blasting at increased decibels over the regular programming, even as published reports profess they aren’t actually louder, just compressed differently so that it seems louder. Yeah.

Meanwhile, my loyalty to my old school classmates is being used by one of the notorious online sites claiming to offer to bring us together. Over time, I have come to see them as only peripherally interested in my connecting with classmates. They spend more energy on ruses to separate a person from their money than they do in actually facilitating genuine school-mate re-connections. For a while, I was a paying member. I never understood why I didn’t receive any response to my public queries at the time, until I learned from a person with a non-paying membership that you can’t respond unless you are a paying member.

My paid status has long since lapsed, yet I continue to get frequent emails alerting me that someone has signed my guest book. If I want to see who has tried to contact me, I need to become a paying member. Thanks, anyway. It’s so nice that they invite folks to register a user account for free, isn’t it? Apparently they aren’t making enough income from the ad sales on their site to allow the free accounts to enjoy anything approaching actual value upon logging in.

All this inspires me, just in time for the warm season of outdoor cycling, to put some distance between me and the source of these irritations. I have successfully broken the daily habit of watching television news. Now I need to move to the next level and break the habit of watching television. That may take a bit more effort, since that is where I fulfill my desires for hockey and baseball broadcasts lately. And in a few short weeks, World Cup Soccer will be on the air.

The online irritations are a whole ‘nother issue. I may hang on to that annoyance to allow myself continued access to a certain community of virtual friends and this here blog thing for the foreseeable future. I’ll just aim to practice a little less whining about the related things that irk me.