Recently I was getting dressed for work -- I do most of my best thinking in the morning -- and started to contemplate the nature of entertainment. My life is completely consumed by it because it is ubiquitous in American culture. I demand to be entertained, either by my television, radio, the internet or a live event. What occurred to me was that even at work, my focus is on entertainment. I'm a sports writer; nobody knows exactly why, but we humans categorize sports separately from entertainment. In actuality, sporting events are one of the oldest forms of entertainment.

This is hardly surprising when one examines how the media -- the principal liaison between the public and performers -- treats athletics. Athletics on all levels are analyzed and scrutinized numerically and statistically. What is a team's record? How many RBI did Manny Ramirez have last season? Who is the all-time assist leader in the NBA? We want to know who is performing at the highest level, those are the athletes and teams that truly matter. They are playing the game the "best."

What Americans believe to be mainstream entertainment doesn't lend itself to this kind of scrutiny. Movie reviews, for example, are admittedly subjective and aren't allowed the opportunity for statistical analysis because the director has however many chances he or she needs to get a scene right. What's left is a discussion of how well the film's interpretation of "right" meshes with the public's. Oftentimes financially successful movies get critically bashed. This I suppose, can be attributed to the movie-going public's appetite for escapism. People who pay to see Tyler Perry movies aren't probably aren't going to critically analyze the film with their family on the way home. They were either entertained or they weren't. The art form itself is lost in the discussion.

Sports and "Entertainment" do share a common venue: television. Ironically, I heard a woman speaking on television this weekend about how hard it was to go a week without watching TV. I then contemplated how much of my time is actually spent in front of an electronic box. We've all done this from time to time. It usually ends with depression or a an internal acceptance that television is a fact of life. After my initial realization that I watch entirely too much television I decided to abstain for a week myself. My first thought was, "Oh no, the NCAA tournament is this week, I can't do it now!"

I had convinced myself that watching sports on TV (which is mostly what I watch) didn't constitute watching "real" TV. This was about the time when I accepted that I am more or less addicted to the entertainment of athletics. I am no different that someone who couldn't miss a segment of Will and Grace or is consumed with the drama on American Idol. My version of Will and Grace is a Kansas State basketball game and my American Idol is this tournament.

So today, Tuesday March 25, I will begin a week-long haitus from television. I will still get my fill of sports because I'm paid to cover them, but I won't be consumed by sports for my whole day anymore. What will I do? I honestly don't know. I am roughly 250 pages into Anna Karenina, my goal is to at least get that knocked out this week. Beyond that I'll write in a journal, exercise (another sport-related activity), go golfing, be active and introspective. Maybe after this week I will get to know someone I've been neglecting too much: myself.

Here's an interesting related article from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/busine...