As I was about to take a nap, I thought I'd check my blog prompter, just to see what it had to offer.  Today's idea is something I think is good to talk about so I'll go ahead and post it... in one day...

Well, the truth is that I do avoid watching tv and reading fashion magazines, but not because they make me feel unattractive - I avoid them because they're misleading and foolish.  I'll explain...

I lived in LA for eight months and I worked in the Hollywood scene.  I met and worked with a lot of well-known stars on a lot of well-known television and movie sets. (Look me up sometime if you want stories - I've got lots to share!)  What was so interesting to me was the truth behind the scenes of what people were watching.

For example, there was a casting call looking for teenagers to be in an upcoming Disney movie.  The producers saw my picture and asked me to come in to test... I was 25!  When I got there, I found myself in a room full of 20-somethings with a few 30-somethings thrown in for good measure.  We were all there to test for characters who were still in high school.  Huh?!?

When the movie came out a few months later, it was wildly successful and kids wanted to emulate the stars.  They wanted to dress like them and look like them and act like them.  The problem is that these pre-teen kids were trying to imitate people twice their age!  The people they were trying to emulate required a lot of make-up and safety pins to look that good... hardly realistic.  What's worse, these actors could behave in their wildly stupid ways because they're adults - yet kids thought doing the same things was appropriate.

In America, we've become obsessed with what the media tells us is attractive.  We diet, we pluck, we bleach, we spend in an effort to look like the image we're told to look like - but the image is fake!  The teenage beauty queen on the screen is really a 20-something girl wearing somebody else's clothes and spending two hours in the make-up chair.  She doesn't eat because she wants to be skinny and she's popping pills to keep up with her party lifestyle.  She sees a doctor every two weeks to have her face "touched up" and she's had two boob jobs so she can get on magazine covers.  She hasn't seen her parents in months and she's suing her ex-boyfriend because he's got a video of her he's threatening to put on the internet.  Her only value is in her appearance and she realizes that once she's no longer "it," she'll disappear.  Some role model - you think I'm exaggerating? Look it up!

So why do we do it?

That's where "foolish" comes in.  There's not really a good reason.

I used to watch television all the time - at one point from the time I got up until I went to bed at night... I could justify it, I worked from home.  I intentionally gave up tv over a year ago and I rarely go to movies.  When I do happen to catch what's on, I'm amazed that I was ever hooked - it's silly!

That's my challenge to you.  Stop watching.  Do something else... spend time with friends or alone.  It's amazing what's going on in the "real world" outside the box.  I've met a lot of people who wish they had better things to do with their time than to sit and watch tv... but I've never met anyone who intentionally gave up television and wish they hadn't.