Low Carb Confidential

While LCC is outside getting his vitamin D and clearing out the electronic cobwebs, I’ll take a stab at entertaining our visitors who, by their presence, obviously need their fix.  This is a low carb blog, but some people turn up here for a variety of reasons, one of which is to be entertained in some manner.

I’ve read about this “week without stuff” (see the previous post) before, and on the surface, it sounds like a good idea.  Giving up anything for a while helps you appreciate it more.  If you’ve ever been in a situation where you didn’t have access to indoor plumbing and hot water for any appreciable time, you know how much you have to be thankful for with every flush and every time that heated spray drenches you.

Does “doing without” decrease our dependency?  In some cases, yes.  During the Writer’s Guild of America strike that ended recently, our choices of entertainment were drastically curtailed.  More than a few critics suggested that this extensive period without the television programs we had become accustomed to would change how a lot of us spent our time when these shows returned.  I had assumed, during that media dry spell, that I would wind up finding something to watch, even if just reruns.  Oddly, I found other things to do instead of sit in front of the television.  Now that my regular favorites are back, they get recorded on the new DVR we have and I’m building up a backlog of things I think I want to see that just don’t seem important enough to find time to sit down and watch.  Mrs. Megamas watches much more TV than I do, and has her own favorites in addition to the ones we both like, so the living room TV is usually tied up anyway.

Many of us are creatures of habit (I certainly am).  LCC has mentioned that if he changes something in his life, he usually replaces it with something else; this makes perfect sense, because you can’t eliminate something you were doing and then live in a vacuum during the time you used to devote to that thing.  You wind up doing something else, maybe something constructive, maybe something less distracting.  It might be reading a book, it might be writing one.  Could be gardening or exercising or meditating.

I’ve always thought of entertainment as a natural necessity of the human species.  Way back when, somebody came up with the idea of telling stories, maybe as a way to perpetuate historical events.  This involved acting, of course, and eventually, after the development of the written word, our world began to fill with all sorts of entertaining things.  Live performances were interactive events.  The advent of film, and later, electronic broadcasting, removed the audience’s ability to provide immediate feedback to the performers, reducing viewers to simple objects.  When I was a boy, I saw many a motion picture at neighborhood theaters that had been important venues for live performances years earlier.  Although we were all just watching a movie, at the end as the credits rolled, everyone would invariably break into applause unless the flick was just awful.  It was sort of our show of approval to each other that we’d enjoyed what we’d seen.  I’m not sure when it happened exactly, but at some point, we stopped applauding.  Maybe it was the realization that it didn’t make any difference; maybe we got so used to being mere objects at home in front of the small screen that it didn’t make any sense to react in front of a large one.  I’ve tried to start it off once in a while at the end of a really good movie, but nobody gets it, and I quickly settle down and plod out of the show with everyone else. 

What amazed me a few years ago happened on the first intercontinental flight my wife and I were on.  We were on our way to Italy for a vacation via an Italian airline, and the plane was loaded with natives apparently returning home from the west.  Neither of us speak Italian, so most of the conversations going on around us for the eight hours or so we were in the air went over our heads (no pun intended).  It was a pretty uneventful flight, so we were not prepared for what must be a custom in other parts of the world: as the wheels touched the ground, the entire plane broke into thunderous applause and shouts of praise obviously meant for the crew.

Where was I?  Ah yes, interaction.  So, after about a half century or so of learning how to be couch potatoes, along comes this wondrous thing called the World Wide Web.  The dead art of writing letters gets reborn as email.  People start blogs about all sorts of things, and other people read them and reply.  We still watch television, but now there’s a universe of interactive things related to what we’re watching in which we can take part if we so desire.  Want to learn a foreign language for free?  It’s on the internet.  Buy something from someone a half a world away?  Net again.  Need to find out how to fix that leaky dishwasher?  Nothin’ but net.  How about that low carb diet thing, what’s THAT all about?  Yup.  We’re interacting fools! 

So, out here in the old (or is it new?) blogosphere as they call it, if you want to entertain, inform, or inspire, you’ll find an audience.  Someone out there is reading, or listening, or watching.  And every once in awhile, I swear I hear someone clapping.