you CAN make a difference in television!!

the other day i got a phone call. and by "i," i mean "a person 18 or more years of age who lives in my household." but still, i'll take what i can get some afternoons. so the caller and i proceeded to talk about my television viewing and local newspaper reading and radio listening habits. (i guess it was better than the phone survey where i had to rate caribou and starbucks in like 750 different areas, but still: yawn...) so i was answering all her questions, even though i was bored out of my mind (i don't watch local television, i don't read local newspapers, and i don't listen to local radio, so i figured it wouldn't be much of a commitment to agree to the survey). then when we finally finished, she told me they would send me more surveys in the mail and wouldn't i please fill them out because my input really does make a difference, yada yada. and, she said, "be sure not to throw them away, because there will be a small cash payment in there for your troubles."

geez.

a few days later, sure enough, i received the envelopes, with two seperate booklets of surveys, one of which was a "television viewing diary." luckily i never watch television, so i only have to check the "no" boxes in front of every single 30-minute interval, all of which are listed covering a period of 7 whole days.

so, since they actually did send a cash payment ($7 in cash bizarrely taped to the letter enclosed with the booklets...), i decided to do it. i mean, really. fuck it. you guys know how i love taking surveys. so i took the non-diary book with me to java monkey, and then sat for like an hour and filled out that mess. but the thing is, the questions just depressed me! the one that really got me was the question "in the last 7-day period, about how much would you say you've walked?" the options were: less than one mile, between one and three miles, and more than three miles.

now i just think that's really sad. i mean, we live in a society where walking is so seldom done that we as a population routinely go a seven-day period without walking one mile. and who can blame us? in atlanta where are we going to walk to? i am supremely lucky because right now i live close enough to campus to be able to walk. but when i move this summer i probably won't be able to afford a place this close. and aside from distance, there are the problems of sidewalks in disrepair, insane drivers, and extremely poor city planning.

what really got to me, though, was the question about fast food restaurants we had visited in the past seven days. there was a whole page of options. literally, the options covered more than one whole page, single spaced, small type, average size page. and we wonder why americans are overweight. we refuse to and/or cannot walk anywhere and we drive everywhere, especially to our precious fast food restaurants. or starbucks. to read our local paper. then come home and watch our local news. or dr. phil. (or check our myspace messages...)

the options for how much have you driven in the past seven days went up to "over 100 miles," which just makes me wonder: where are we going??

well, i'm going to walk to school, do some work, work out, then walk home. i hope you guys have a good evening.

charity :)