Idle musings on a Friday morning

I wrote this earlier today...

<idle musing>
I am sitting in the waiting room of a car repair place, waiting for an oil change to get done. In the background is the obnoxious babble of a television. It is impossible to sit anywhere without its loud invasion of my senses. At least I can sit where it isn’t smack in my face.

Have you noticed how it is virtually impossible anymore to enter a place of business without being confronted with the television’s in-your-face babble? And the few places that don’t have the tube blasting at you instead have a music track blasting&mdashyes, blasting, not just as background music anymore, but blasting. Am I getting old, and so these things are starting to bother me? Or are they really getting more in-your-face? Interesting question; I haven’t seen any data, but I suspect the volume level has increased.

I am somewhat of a fitness/health nut. I want whatever I eat to be beneficial to my health. I don’t always follow that rule; I eat my share of junk food—especially this time of year : ) But, as a general rule of thumb I eat well—lots of fruits and vegetables, very little grease and oil, practically no corn syrup, etc.

I also like to control what I feed my mind. Whatever I consume mentally has an affect on how I act and think. In our culture, that can be/is a losing battle; the latest figures say that the average American is bombarded with over 15,000 advertising images per day. That’s a lot of subliminal (and not so subliminal) inducement to consumption! Have you noticed that we aren’t customers anymore? We are now consumers.

We can still control what we voluntarily feed our mind, but do we?
</idle musing>