THINGS TO DO WITHOUT
The only way you can rid yourself of unwanted encumbrances is to find ways to erase them from your daily routine.
That is a not so easy to, in spite of the advice you so frequently come across saying how easy it is to change such things. It takes some real work and a measure of self-discipline which is often the basic cause of it all.
It is right in tune with one of the latest television fads: “Makeovers.”Change things you don't like; modify those things you feel are cluttering your life
Tired of shoveling snow in winter and cutting too much grass in summer? Consider downsizing your home. Thousands of couples do it every year and find they can rid themselves of scores of those pesky little chores have been performing with almost religious intensity in exchange for the privilege of maintaining rooms they haven't needed since the kids grew up and left and Aunt Sophie, who used to “visit” for a month at a time, ran off to Florida. That's an accepted way to get rid of your local problems , if you have money to do so ...move to Florida, Haw ii or a mountain peak somewhere far, far away and start over again.. To me it would be too rapid. I'm a home-body and take part of it with me wherever I go.
I'd like to have TV programming without so many commercials. I see in the latest statistics that one group of stations, considering shortening their commercial load, admit they have been doing twenty minutes of ads in one hour of air time. If they admit to one hour we can estimate the time spent might actually be more (“We can't baby-sit local times sales!”}. We forget that the commonly accepted amount of commercial time in radio for years was three minutes at the max . For a fifteen minute show thirty-second commercial openings and closings were allowed plus two. one-minute commercials. That came to an end as pro programming gave way to cheaper disk-jockey laxity then with radios talk show it became even more difficult to tell when progamming ended and commercials began. If over-commercialization bugs you, don't watch those shows which offend you. If you can't bring yourself to be one of the first persons ever to do that, at least, don't complain about it. Your voiced disapproval, or worse, your written disapproval, only makes the matter worse because it shows, without proof of contradiction, that you,indeed, do watch the show regularly. It is,on that basis renewals are inked ...telling how many watched it- not how many liked it. We are beset with a problem very much the same as that we face in choosing the “best” movie. The proper standard of judgment is not how money people paid to see the movie, but how many people went to see it.. The more money that comes in makes the picture get better and better under the present plan.
And, be honest with yourself. You may say you hate commercial telephone calls at meal time. Tally up the score. How many such calls have you answered this past week? How, about the past two weeks, or the entire month? If it is still a big round “o” you a typical of people who make this complaint which allows them make use of a long word them have come to know - “telemarketers”. So much misery is make believe. What them don't like about calls at that specific time - usually they say as ”dinner”time, which is called “supper” in many average homes which occurs at times when some members of the family eat their evening meal together by chance. What is being interrupted by such telemarketers calls in not dinner – but the fact that the family members are watching Vanna White touch letters and solve puzzles while they happen to be eating.
Another favorite this we say we'd like to do without is ever-rising debt. It can be cut way down, if you throw away, burn or shred all of your credit cards.
One by one, you can get any of them under control but you have to work at it.
“Abbracadabba” no longer suffices.
A.L.M. July 18, 2004 [c713wds]
