Two things

This is so depressing. There's a program on TV called Sit and Be Fit. It was recommended to me as a way to build up my strength and stamina, and seemed like a great idea. So, I Tivoed an episode, and just checked it out. For starters, it is sponsored by a company that sends bladder control products in the mail in discrete packaging. I am not making this up. A female physical therapist runs the program from a chair, and she has three other participants in the studio, also sitting on chairs. She has a gentle voice, and asks you to sit with your back up against the back of the chair, and have a towel handy. She starts the exercise portion, and while she is instructing me to make small circles with my arms, and lift my leg off the floor, and turn my head from side to side, really bad elevator music is playing in the background, and she is saying "Good job!" "Super!" Then she took a break to talk to one of the other participants, Rob, who is also a physical therapist and who is an expert on posture and the spine, and I just had to turn it off. The most depressing part was that when I turned it on, I was feeling kind of bored and lazy and ready to do something, and by the time I turned it off, after doing ten minutes of "shimmying in place" I was hot and winded and felt like a nap. It is the perfect program for me right now, and that makes me feel discouraged and sad.

But here's something else. I've been watching a lot of TV during the day, enough so that I am starting to know by heart when the Bernie Mac reruns are on, and when is a good time during the day for a nap, and I've been re-watching shows I've seen a hundred times; Friends, Sex and the City, and Gilmore Girls. Gilmore Girls is on the Disney channel, twice a day, and yesterday I saw a commercial on there that I couldn't believe.

Two bears, red bears, presumably a daddy bear and son bear, are playing football. The son bear is the guy who sticks his butt in the air to hike the ball to the guy standing behind him (my husband tells me this is called the Center.) He bends over, and there are little white flakes all over his bright red bear butt. Turns out, these are the Charmin bears, like the toilet paper, and this commercial is to advise people that if you buy Charmin toilet paper rather than another brand, you will have fewer pieces of toilet paper stick to your butt after you wipe. They then show a scientific looking experiment involving two brands of toilet paper wiping up some moisture side by side, and, wouldn't you know, the other brand leaves a bunch of toilet paper dingleberries behind. Is this really a problem for anyone? I have never had this kind of complaint about toilet paper. I've had other complaints, like its too scratchy, or too thin, but never about toilet paper disintegrating on contact. At the end of the commercial, after the son bear has wiped his big red butt with the right toilet paper, he sticks his butt in the air for the football game, and no longer has little flecks of TP on his tush.

What the hell is this? Seriously? And they're cartoon bears on the Disney channel!