I am taking a class, “The Artist’s Way,” based on the book by Julia Cameron. It is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it. It is filled with exercises designed to help you reconnect with your creative self. I love them all, except one. Media Deprivation week. It just  may kill me.

For one week, we are not allowed any television, radio, books, magazines, or media of any type. My husband, the couch potato, volunteered to participate in media deprivation week with with me.  I regularly pick on him for the amount of television he watches, and was sure he wouldn’t last a day.  I, on the other hand, thought this would be relatively easy for me… the writer, the artist, the high brow.

I was wrong.  Four hours into the first day, I was begging him to turn on the weather radio.  On the second night he caught me eagerly reading the “DeKalb County Sanitation Residential Collection Procedures” brochure cover to cover. I am reading cereal boxes and laundry detergent labels like they are Proust.

I am a junkie.

I have been on 31 diets in the past 30 years.  This is by far the hardest one to stick to.  I have learned:

• I have a lot more free time than I ever dreamed.
• All the free time in the world still doesn’t inspire me to clean my house.
• No wonder couples in the 18^th and 19^th centuries had so many children.
• I don’t have nearly as much writer’s block when I’m not blocking myself with other people’s words.