I’ve been under the weather lately, so it was good to finally start feeling better, get out of the house, and do a few things last week.
Thanks to my youngest brother, I got to go out of state to West Virginia one night for my nephew’s college cross country meet. We left around 3:30 p.m. and got home at 10 p.m. Whew.
It was fun. My brother and his family have going to cross country meets down to a science. They make a pit stop at the best, closest gas station with nice bathrooms before the meet. Then on the way home, the first stop is the gas station with nice bathrooms before heading home. It’s a good time to pick up snacks and drinks too. No porta-potties for us.
Anyway, since it was West Virginia, the meet was held at the only flat spot within miles of my nephew’s college, and it was a really nice place. It was an old horse farm with white fences cutting through the green grass like ribbons.
Cross country is a sport where the spectators get lots of exercise too as they race from spot to spot to see the runners speed by. I set up my folding chair along the course and didn’t see it again until after the race. My nephew ran well, and his team came in second at the meet. It was a wonderful night.
A few days later, after consecutively going to a football game the next night and a festival the following day, I wasn’t feeling so lively. I saw a quote that I can agree with on the internet. It read: “I used to think being at home doing nothing all day was boring, but as an adult, it’s literally my definition of a good day.”
It’s even OK if I’m home working, just so long as I’m home.
As a person who enjoys watching certain television shows like “I Love Lucy,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” and “Newhart,” the best news was recently released.
It was a study from the University of Georgia which found that binge watching television shows can be beneficial to your health. This is a study I can endorse.
Here is what they found: Binge watching (two or more shows at a time) or even better – marathon reading – can strengthen the way people remember stories and it’s a relaxing activity.
I love marathon reading. Sometimes, I just can’t rest until I have a book to read. I have to get into that long story line and live somewhere else for a while.
Back to the study, the memories from binge watching or marathon reading make themselves at home in your brain and contribute to increased imagination and it can strengthen memory. Sign me up.
Bingeing can help people reduce stress and cope with challenges. It can help build mental models that allow a person to develop their thought processes to understand and reason.
There are still bad things about binge watching too, but I’m thinking you could just stand up and walk in place during commercials for a little exercise or get out the hand weights.
Joe and I recently were binge watching some historical Star Trek documentaries about the popular shows and movies. The Star Trek phenomenon began Sept. 8, 1966, when the first show of the original series aired on television. Our parents let us stay up to watch it.
The documentaries were really interesting until they got to the part where they were looking behind the scenes at the sets and the costumes and the models of the ships. I nearly had to avert my eyes. I don’t want to believe that Star Trek is not real.
Everyone on the ship works together to create win-win solutions, like the episode called “The Devil in the Dark” where a creature called a Horta is misunderstood and its eggs are being destroyed. In the end, the miners digging for a vital element and the Horta help each other. We can all believe in a better world because of Star Trek.
