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I just read a book about reality television while watching reality television. Not at the same time; the activities were one after the other. But you get the point.

I’m not a big reality television person. We started watching Traitors this winter, and we finished 3 UK seasons and 1.5 US seasons. We definitely prefer the UK and everyone entering as strangers.

I saw 2 seasons of the Real World about 30 years ago. I’ve seen a few reality cooking competitions. I don’t know where that puts me on the watching reality television continuum. Probably somewhere near the middle? Maybe closer to the not watching reality television side? I have no clue how many people watch, but based on the number of shows, I would guess I am leaning toward the minority in reality television consumption.

I make this point because there was a line in the book (The Compound by Aisling Rawle) that captured something we talk about all the time as we watch Traitors: (1) What makes a person go on a show where they know they will be manipulated or voted out? (2) What makes a person watch someone else get manipulated or voted out?

One character says about the possible reason they went on the show:

I think probably all of us must have been very unhappy, otherwise why would we have done that to ourselves? I know we told ourselves that we wanted to live peacefully, but I think we were looking for new ways to make ourselves miserable.

Do happy people go on reality television shows? You have better odds of winning the prize than you do winning the lottery, but it’s still more likely than not that you will walk away with just the experience. Maybe with a travel show, the experience would be the greater prize than a monetary prize, but for so many of these shows — like Traitors — the end prize IS the point. And the friends you make along the way?

And then the other side — why do we watch reality television competitions? Sometimes when we’re watching Traitors, I feel terrible. I feel gutted for people who are certain someone has their back, only to discover they were lying the whole time. My stomach hurts when I hear them confidently state that another contestant is telling the truth when I know that they’re lying. What does that say about me?

I got super into Yoga Nidra when the kids were little. I remember it because I convinced the ChickieNob’s girl scout troop that it would be an excellent idea to Yoga Nidra session together as part of some health and wellness badge, and the girls shrieked with laughter through the whole thing because the person’s voice on my app did sort of sound like an animated corpse.

I stopped doing it soon after, and then saw it mentioned in an article recently, rebranded as a 20-minute no sleep deep rest or NSDR. If you go on YouTube, you can find hundreds of videos for this.

I don’t know where I would fit it in — I don’t really have the sort of day that lends itself to a 20-minute naplike session — but I’m curious about the idea of resting and recharging without sleeping.

ChickieNob and I found someone promising, and we lay down on the living room floor to take our 20-minute sleepless nap. Except YouTube kept interrupting the video with ads, and we’d startled and shriek every time it happened. So not successful so far, but we’ll keep trying.

I joined a writing group. Once a day, we get on Zoom, chat for ten minutes (sometimes about our projects, usually about something off-topic), then silence our microphones and turn off our videos, and write. Someone is the time keeper, and when their alarm goes off, they turn back on their microphone and video and tell us to return. We chat for five more minutes, and then hop off the Zoom.

I write about one to two pages each time.

I didn’t think I would enjoy it or stick with it as long as I have. I’m a solitary person; I like working alone and in silence.

But there is something about knowing that everyone else is a microphone click away that makes me focus and stick with the task. I won’t lie and say I never go down a rabbit hole of Googling elementary school classmates to see where they ended up (favourite time waster), but I do it less knowing that I’m going to have to get back on at the end and admit how much I accomplished.

I didn’t realize how much I wanted to be average until I started answering the 95 questions (side note: you don’t have to answer all of them to enjoy the experience) and wanted to see myself on what I silently deemed “the correct side.”

The results will change (I’m assuming) over time as more people answer, though they only show the results for questions that have over 500 answers. And if you look above the answer, you can see that most questions have around 44,000 answers.

I’m not sure how it performs on a mobile device — I took the quiz on a laptop — but it’s a very pretty interface, and it’s interesting to see how other people answered.

Anything surprise you when you saw the answers?

Is it more painful to shove all errands into a single day and take the other day of the weekend to rest, or is it better to spread out the errands between two days?

We decided to find out yesterday by shoving a trip to IKEA (Yes! And setting up the IKEA purchases — an equally terrible step), the eyeglass store (to choose new glasses), two grocery stores, and a hardware store (and installing all new smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors because we couldn’t remember how old they were) into a single day along with house cleaning, decluttering, cleaning up Quentin.

Happy weekend?