More than just a simple prop to occupy my time

I really just hate the word “diet”–it evokes deprivation, desperation and those obnoxious Kirstie Alley weight loss commercials. Nevertheless, I’m forced by my unfortunate online habits of sifting through countless entertainment sites and blogs of people I know and have never met, to do pull a Weight Watchers and start counting some calories.

If you’ve read the “About” page, you know that the reason this blog exists is because my computer crashed, and I learned what life is like without the internet at my fingertips. Except for the amount of time spent working at internet cafes (resulting in an empty wallet), I was actually enjoying my time away from my laptop.

But ever since getting it back on Sunday, I sort of gorged myself on the tastiest kinds of Internet junk out there: media sites, gossip fluff, blogs of B-list TV stars, etc.

So now I’ve finally launched this site, and am feeling pretty good about it. But I’m launching it on a day that’s really going to test my resolve with this diet.

Way back in 1996, an ancient time when I still had a Compuserve account, I started foraging online sites breathless for new info about this band I loved called R.E.M. A devoted fan since around 1994, the internet fed my curiosity about those obtuse by lovely Stipean lyrics, the band’s catalog of obscure cover songs, Monster tour reviews, and any iota of info I could digest and obsess over.

Ten years later, I haven’t listened to an R.E.M. album in ages. I own all their albums save their last one–it had just seemed really bad, and my loyalty finally wavered–but only three of them made it onto my iPod.

And then tonight I came across a link about how the folks at Stereogum have created DriveXV, an online tribute album for the band’s Automatic for the People, which is 15 years old. It’s the age of a teenager, an album I wore out in my broke-down, 5-disc CD player when I was a teenager.

So I listened to DriveXV, and read the accompanying essay by an articulate person who makes me realize in a rush why I fell in love with this band–and eventually so much more amazing music–in the first place. And he has a blog where he’s writing about each song in the entire catalog. And I’m reading his essays and wow, hey “Time After Time” from Reckoning, haven’t listened to you since people feared the Y2K bug, and oh look, “Good Advices” from Fables, I think I have you sandwiched on a mixtape somewhere between Spacehog (!) and the Beach Boys. All you songs, you’re all still holding up well, aren’t you? Wow, I should totally hang out with you more often.

So now I have a new, ironic problem. This band led to my overall enmeshment with pop culture. (Quick timeline of how this love of pop culture evolved: First I was music obsessed, than movie obsessed, now I’m TV obsessed with a taste for celeb gossip).

The more I read about and paid attention to pop culture, the less I listened to new music or my old albums. Especially working at home, my new audio wallpaper has become an Ellen DeGeneres monologue or Alton Brown explaining how to prepare an indestructible soufflé.

And if I start going down this R.E.M. path again, looking for YouTube clips of their concerts in Germany from 1983 (yeah, I already did that) to reading new interviews and reviews about this live album I just heard about them putting out…oh, I’ll be in trouble.

This whole music nostalgia trip has also reminded me that I’ve gone down a strange path with my online reading experience. I started by deciphering Murmur lyrics on fansites that took ten minutes to load, to now staring bewilderedly for ten minutes at Carrie Bradshaw’s comforter-cum-wedding dress with oddball peacock feather on a fashion blog.

So this blog is not just another way to procrastinate from doing more important things during the course of a day. It’s supposed to get me back on the right track, which includes turning off the TV and listening to my CD collection again. (FYI, the iPod I bought in Jan. 2005 has had a stroke and I’m currently unable to revive it.)

I’ve concluded this: if I’m getting back on that Rapid Eye Movement train and going to be reading about them again, I still have calculate those hours as part of my weekly account of how I wasted my time for the week. Sure, R.E.M.-related content is definitely healthier than reading TV spoilers about shows I don’t even watch, but an hour is an hour.

Who knows how many hours I’ll have accumulated after this week if this only Tuesday…