Midlife on Kauai Watching TV

Wow I can't believe how quickly a week goes by! Since I have nothing pressing to address, do you know why time flies by faster the older you get? The explanation I remember (and I forgot the source, sorry!) was that as you get older, each day/week/month/year represents a smaller and smaller percentage of your life so it seems shorter and shorter. For example, to two-year olds, one year is half (50%)of their lives! To 50 year olds, it's just 2%, a very small fraction in comparison to what they've experienced. That makes good sense to me. Have you noticed that when you go on vacation, if you go to a place you've visited often the days pass by faster? If you go to a new place, however, time there is more memorable and seems to pass a bit slower. So it makes sense to me that time passes more slowly for kids since for them, almost everything is "new".

What I thought I'd write about today has to do with television. Big surprise. Who watched David Blaine last night? Not me..well I watched a total of maybe ten minutes off and on. I don't like to see anything that makes me uncomfortable or sad or mad. That leaves a lot of programming out, but my blood pressure is healthy. I enjoy David's street magic, though. I'm also a curious person who has to know how things end, so I got online to google David to see what happened. Everyone seems annoyed at him. Maybe because he didn't die? I think it's shameful the way people were insulting him online, and I hope those comment posters were stupid kids and not stupid adults. Kids, to me, are not necessarily under 18...many 20somethings are still kids (as I was until perhaps age 25). I had to leave a comment that although I don't care for his strange feats, I did admire him earlier in his career and that was enough for me. After all, how many people impress me? Relatively few, so if you impress me once that's pretty good. I wouldn't scorn him for putting on a two-hour program that ends in what apparently was a screwed-up trick (his "death fall").

I do scorn, however, the network and sponsors that produced the program. They only did it, however, because they know that viewers would watch. Online, people were grumbling about wasting two hours watching, about David taking 5 minute upright breaks, about him falling 40 feet but being attached to a wire (uh, duh!), etc. Oh my god, they confuse human being David with cartoon character BatMan, it seems. How sad is that? Why do people criticize people that they are not obligated to watch and who do extraordinary things (albeit not necessarily valuable)?

Do you hear me publicly criticizing Cloris Leachman for still being on "Dancing With the Stars"?? I just switch the channel in annoyance instead and silently berate the viewers that voted for her. I don't really blame her for her mediocre dancing and hamming it up with the judges, I blame people who vote for her because now I'll have to channel surf when she appears again. Her antics got old for us the second night. Upon seeing her voted through last night, I promptly protested by watching the Travel Channel's Hotdog show and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Haha, I always said I'm a dog person.

My hub and I enjoyed watching people scarf hotdogs all over the U.S. It reminded me of my current favorite fictional heroine, Stephanie Plum, the bounty hunter. Steph is a notorious junk food junky from New Junky..I mean Jersey. She exists on take-out food, Tasty Kakes, and doughnuts. Yummm!

Steph is fictional,so she can eat all the chili dogs and Tasty Kakes she wants, but don't do it! Take this Chinese milk situation. It's a particularly tragic example of what technology and greed can do. The same thing is happening to us in the U.S., only less noticeably. I know of too many people under 60 who have passed away or have serious health issues. My mom's generation seems healthier than ours because they haven't been eating junk food all their lives. The majority of us are existing on pesticide-sprayed, genetically altered, overprocessed food with unpronounceable food additives.

America is so proud of democracy, capitalism, and free enterprise, but there may come a day when some historian says "guess it wasn't such a great system after all!" The idea is great, it's the human element that I worry about.

To end on a lighter note, my mom's friend claims she lowered her blood pressure by eating dark chocolate every day. Time to experiment!