The Month of March

For those that know me, I am a supreme pop culture junkie. If I'm not sleeping, or out running errands or busy at work, I tend to take in a healthy dose of movies and television programs for my viewing pleasure. Most of the time, I tell myself that watching all that crap is necessary to help build inspiration for writing or film projects. However, I've come to the realization that it's not really true. All those hours upon hours of entertainment was just plain and simple procrastination and it has become a bit of an issue and has stunted my productivity drastically. So a couple weeks ago, I had an insane idea. What if I take a month and dedicate it to not watching television or movies and use that extra time to get my life in order? Because for years I've been putting off important things and waiting until the last minute mainly because I've been sitting on my ass in front of a screen and taking in loads of media that does nothing to enhance my life, but instead tranquilizes me into a state of temporary bliss. In the 27 years I've been alive, I've seen around 5,000 movies and spent an immeasurable amount of time watching other forms of entertainment. My DVD collection consists of 1,028 titles and is continuing to grow. I haven't been writing enough over the last seven years and this lack of finished personal projects has been weighing on my head for much too long.

What I look like watching TV

So I've decided to perform an experiment and see if it can improve my quality of life and make me really absorb the world as it exists outside my door and not on a television screen. Yes, I am not going to watch any movies or TV for the entire month of March.

Now this is a major sacrifice for a guy like me because I live on websites like Netflix and Hulu and I get a neat little thrill when I stick a disc in my blu-ray player. And not allowing myself to do that for a month will probably make me go a little nuts with withdrawal. But there's more that I'm giving up. I'm not just limiting it to television and movies, I have more habits I would like to absolve. As some of you know, about three years ago, I developed a taste for the smooth flavor of tobacco and I started smoking. I also take four nights out of every month to get immensely shitfaced on alcohol. So I'm giving that up too!

Hopefully kicking the smoking habit will stick and I'm okay with keeping off the bottle for a bit. The hardest thing though will be not watching my precious TV or my awesome smartphone. I know these are slightly drastic measures that will add discomfort to my very comfortable life. But I have short term goals I need to accomplish. Goals that I won't list here because I'm not entirely clear on what those goals are or in what order to tackle them in. But in performing this mental detox, my hope is that it will free my mind into a glorious green field of creativity where I'll write more, learn more and appreciate the reality around me. I'll update 'Murphology 101' with my progress as the month wears on, I hope it is entertaining and informative to my many (nonexistent) readers.

So wish me luck, gang. Because this month is gonna suck!