I decided to watch tv and Rock of Love Charm School was coming on VH1, so I figured I’d watch that.  I’d seen a few of the episodes.  A dozen+ girls who were formerly on a reality show called Rock of Love, where they vied for the attention of rock star Bret Michaels of the band Poison.  All of the girls were … um… unpolished, hence the name of the show: Charm School.  So this happened to be the finale episode from 10:00-11:30pm.

By 11:20pm, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open but thought I’d stick it out until the end.  I pondered just how attached was I to the outcome of the show?  I could see reruns of it if I wanted…  I could Google later and find out who won…  I was entering that alpha state where I was ready to drift off, but too lazy to reach for the remote control.  I see I’ve made it all the way to 11:26pm… and darned if the Bright House cable doesn’t go down!  I took that as a sign and turned it off, then fell asleep for 8 minutes and tried it and it was still off, so I just went to bed.

A lot of information is like that now, so easy to find after the fact on the internet, so I don’t freak out if I miss something.  Especially something like a tv show, that’s going to rerun like a million more times in my lifetime.   I was so confident I knew who the winner was, that I Googled “Brandi M wins Charm School” to find the episode review.  She’d been my favorite from the beginning since, as boisterous as she was, she didn’t play all the hurtful mind games the other contestants did.  She always played relatively fair.

So the last few minutes of Rock of Love Charm School that I missed was Brandi M winning.  I thought it was cool that on the VH1 page, she says: “My strategy was not to hurt anybody, because that’s not my style.  By the end, when I started winning the challenges, I could really feel victory.  It’s like The Secret: if you really want it, you have to really imagine it and see it.”

I liked that she mentioned The Secret.  That creates a whole new audience for the law of attraction and  for Abraham-Hicks, the people who watch those kinds of tv shows.  I like watching them because they are a study in human behavior under extreme conditions.  That is a whole segment of society that I never have occasion to interact with, and the show depicts situations that are not typical to daily life.   For someone like Brandi M., who initially came off like your typical tattooed, partying biker chick, to have the presence of mind to grok that, “It’s like The Secret: if you really want it, you have to really imagine it and see it,” I think that’s huge.

Just for anyone in the media to talk about creative visualization excites me.  Like when Drew Barrymore on Jay Leno several years back talked of The film What the Bleep Do We Know?! and said she “creates her day Bleep-style” by imagining it first in her mind ahead of time how she’d like it to go, before she even gets out of bed.

I took about ten years off from watching tv at the end of the last millenium, and just began occasionally watching a few years ago.  There are some very interesting science and health and documentary programs on now, and some fairly conscious programming.  I’m not really into crime dramas or sitcoms or game shows or the paranormal shows like Ghost Hunters, Ghost Whisperer, the haunting shows, Medium, Paranormal State, Supernatural.  I’ve seen a show here and there, but to me, that’s just talking shop.  On my off-duty personal time, I don’t want to think about work.

I like that tv in the past twenty years has become far more instructional, I like the cooking shows, the building shows, the landscaping and gardening shows.  I like the classroom learning, the cultural variety, the fact that an entire channel (112) is devoted to fitness and nutrition, with free daily workouts all day long.  If I want to catch up on current events, I’ll turn on The Daily Show or Jay Leno and see who they are mocking.  Their spin is no more radical than anyone else’s.

I do find sometimes though, that on a Saturday morning when the weather is beautiful outside and I can sneak an extra hour, I may be tempted to content myself with watching a gardening show rather that getting out into my garden… so I have to remain vigilant and remember that I am in control of the brain!  I am the one who chooses what thoughts I think!

Email me your thoughts to Horizonsmagazine@gmail.com