do you like the people you're spending your evenings with?

No, i'm not going to encourage you to leave your partner and desert your kids.  :-)  I'm going to encourage you to turn the television off.

We were settling into a pattern with the grandkids at our house, when unhappy news reached us from Texas -- their great-grandmother had gone into the hospital for a routine procedure, but had taken a turn for the worse and passed away.  Thank goodness for modern technology -- their mother told them via FaceTime, and she and their dad were able to comfort the little ones themselves!  We had an appointment on Monday we shouldn't miss, but drove back to the Houston area on Tuesday with one day free before attending the funeral.

After the joys of greeting their parents and dogs, sleeping in their own beds, and seeing their bereaved grandmother, one of the things they got enthusiastic about was seeing the recorded episode of a favorite television show.  Now, my husband and I don't find reality shows entertaining, but we join the family in the living room and play games on our ipads while the rest watch and comment.  Enough content seeps into our consciousness that we have a rough idea of what's going on.

As I was composing my mind to sleep last night, I was thinking about the screen people -- and I concluded that if I knew them in real life, I wouldn't like their personalities or find them interesting at all.  Why on earth would I care to spend an evening with them?  Am I a hopeless intellectual snob?  I don't THINK so -- I've gotten along well with a wide variety of types during my 59 years!  These characters, though, display so much ego in the presence of so little apparent QUALITY ... and express themselves so abrasively, I have to wonder why they're so widely watched -- why people want to spend so many hours of their leisure time with them.

The people with whom we spend our time have a big influence on us.  Not only do we tend to mirror each other's personal styles of behavior and speech, but each other's moods and manners of thinking.  Mood is deeply contagious!  Being around cheerful people helps us feel cheerful, and depressed people tend to bring us down too.  The old adage that "whoever lies down with dogs is apt to get up with fleas" is very true.

So can we expect to maintain a good attitude when we're around discontented, petty, self-aggrandizing, bitchy people?  I maintain ... NOT.  If we want to BE better people, we need to hang around with better people.  That includes our choices of entertainment.