I'm SO Over Dr. Phil (and other news)

I actually deleted my DVR season pass to record all of Dr. Phil's new shows. I think the Octomom killed it, but really I was getting fed up already with his trend toward more sensationalistic programming. Sure, he was doing more Hollywood Babylon pieces (what's up with Britney/Lindsay/Rihanna) and he was doing tabloid crime pieces (who killed Caylee Anthony, etc.) but even his more normal, mainstream folks were running off the rails. All the domestic drama had to be Bigger! Scarier!! More Out of Control!!! than our lives.

I'll admit this -- no matter what the sensational topic, Dr. Phil himself had good common sense advice about it. It's just that his advice to the Octomom has absolutely nothing to do with my life. At least when it was money problems, I could take some nuggets and apply them to other aspects of my life. ("You don't solve money problems with money.")

Also, there are now programs that do what Dr. Phil does, better than Dr. Phil. Intervention, that wonderful program on A&E, does a better job documenting and dealing with drug and other addictions. The Biggest Loser, which I don't watch, must do a better job of dealing with weight loss issues because Dr. Phil adopted that format for his weight loss series. And we personally love Supernanny for her common sense approach to household issues -- and we don't have kids!

It is evidence of something (I'm still trying to work out what) that Dr. Phil rates a blog post after more than a month of no posts at all. My life is both so boring that it really doesn't generate a lot of great stories, and so complicated that it would be nearly impossible to explain. In the boring category we have our recent trip to the Lodge at Woodloch (a destination spa) for some R&R to celebrate our one-year anniversary. Very restful, but not terribly blog-worthy.

In the complicated category, my work in therapy continues. It's very scary, powerful, painful, productive, and nearly impossible to explain. I want to present the efforts of therapy in a positive way, but I need to respect the obvious fact that not everything that goes on in my life is suitable for publication.

So there you have it -- Dr. Phil rates a mention because pretty much everything else is too boring or too complicated to write about.

And you wondered why it had been five weeks. Silly reader.