The Maroon Diaries

It's a long, hot day. There's been a lot of these lately; it's that time of year. I've had a certain song stuck in my head lately, just because it's called 'One Long Day.' The Summer. Sometimes that word sounds like a prison sentence to me. This is a hard time for me, every year. I don't cope well with the heat. I can't stand the bright sunshine. On days like these, I just have to stay indoors, and stay still as much as possible. If I move around too much on a hot day, that's enough to get overheated and feel terribly sick. So I spend most of these long hot days lying on my bed with the fan on, napping or reading or doing puzzles. I've certainly been getting through a lot of reading lately. Several excellent books have helped make the days fun and exciting, as long as I stay in the book. Then the sun goes down, and it gets cool, and I am reprieved of my sentence once more, until dawn. I can breathe again, I can move again. I have

Like most of my generation, I grew up watching an awful lot of television. An awful lot of crappy, often American television with all the brainwashing advertising in between. I certainly developed addictive behaviours toward televsion viewing as a child. Once I was grown up, I decided that that was bad. When I had my own place, I lived without television, and had no doubt that I was better off. When I thought of people who use television to deal with their moods, I had nightmarish visions of overweight women in pink, Tim-Tam-crumb-infested nighties watching Ricki Lake and home shopping infomercials. As long as I didn't have a television set, that could never be me. I sure as hell wasn't giving up the Tim Tams. However, I did go out of my house sometimes. Sometimes I was in other people's houses. So I still got to see plenty of television here and there over the years. And I came to understand that there's a lot of really good stuff on television, too, and to appreciat