You know how you can have too much of a good thing. Halloween candy for instance. First few pieces are yummy to my tummy. But pieces 12 through 20 make you feel as scary on the inside as you presumably look on the outside.

Here’s another example. My son is obsessed with Country Roads. Ever since I downloaded the song onto my iTouch before venturing up to Morgantown for the Villanova game, Miles has demanded we play it whenever we’re in the car. Not the studio version mind you but the live rendition that features the crowd clapping along to John Denver and his band. He calls it “Wes Irginia” as he smacks his hands on his two and half year old thighs, shaking his head back and forth in a rhythm that would make Stevie Wonder jealous. I just hope that it’s not the line “miss the taste of moonshine, tear drop in my eye” that he relates to. I’ve heard rehab is almost as expensive as pre-school.

On a related note, am I the only one that thinks ole Johnny D looks like a Muppet?

He looks likes Animal’s understudy in this picture. Am I wrong?

Back to the topic at hand, I was trying to watch a short film online for our IMC 619 midweek post. While I could easily adjust the volume of Robert Downey Jr. in Volvo’s The Route V50, I was unable to mute the noise of people walking up and down the hallway outside of my office. Here’s tip number one to any IMC neophytes in the reading audience. Unless you have one of those remotes from the movie Click, it’s best to leave the office when you’re trying to get ahead of your homework during your lunch break.

The same could be said for competing noise at home. As I type this my wife is getting caught up on her weekly fix of Gossip Girl and the new 90210 (because the original left so many unanswered questions). As much as I would like to fill every second of the commercial breaks explaining why all shows in the 30-year-olds-playing-high-school-kids genre actually suck the very life out of any human that watches so much as one second of the Kevin Williamson inspired dialogue, I understand that it’s my penance.

It’s my cross to bear for being non-existent on Monday and Wednesday nights as I plow through the final drafts of my papers and posts over the course of the past two years. IMC tip #2: Understand that even though you may be physically present more often than a graduate student attending an in-person class at a brick and mortar campus, you are going to be mentally absent if you truly put in enough time to get something out of the program. Make sure you budget for some time to engage with your friends, partner, offspring, or pet. And when you’re busy writing, learn to tune out their mindless programs, cause everyone needs a way to unwind and escape from the pressures of the day to day. For me, I’ll take a few minutes of ESPN, The Colbert Report, Charlie Rose or Dexter.

For others, its One Tree Hill and Privileged. To each their own.

To wrap up my sixth IMC Student Blog post, I want to briefly come back to online videos. Our lesson this week focused on the growing trend of companies creating film-like commercials that focus more on plot then a traditional sales pitch, without sacrificing product placement. Many of the examples my classmates and I dug up can be found on YouTube. Many of them feature Hollywood stars like Uma Thurman and John Malkovich. So my question is, have any of you ended up on YouTube, either on purpose or by accident? If so, please comment below and leave a link to the video, if you are so generously inclined. I’ll get things started. Here is one of my finer moments from college, as posted by some of my old Ohio University friends. Enjoy…and don’t judge. It was the mid-90s…grunge was still in.

-Matt