"Living Oprah"

OK, so it's been a while. My apologies, I'll admit to being a Winter Olympics junkie, so I've been spending time watching the games on TV nearly every waking moment once I come home from work in the evenings. It goes pretty late into the night and into the wee, wee hours of the morning and I've been recording every minute of the games so that I can watch those parts of it I've missed later on. In the meantime, I noticed a book at work one day that caught my eye, "Living Oprah: My One Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk" by Robyn Okrant, so I picked it up and began reading it. Well, I finished it after work this afternoon and here are my thoughts on this book: Ms. Okrant decided to do every single thing suggested by Oprah on her TV show, her web site and her magazine, for one year, and blogged her progress and the financial and emotional cost of said project. Frankly, I cannot imagine surrendering my life to a talk show host's suggestions on how to live one's best life possible. I mean, let's face it, Oprah makes tons more money than just about any of us, and cannot possibly relate to ordinary people's lives. Okrant gave it her best try despite not being particularly affluent herself. She chronicles her ups, her downs, her near addiction to watching Oprah every day, her observation of the frenzy that female audience members are whipped into by Oprah's mere presence, and the fact that whenever Oprah endorses any product, it begins flying off of store shelves. People, she seems to think, want to be like Oprah so badly that they snap up anything that Oprah mentions, read whatever Oprah reads, and watch whichever movies Oprah watches. It's our entire celebrity worshipping culture that makes people like Oprah so powerful. In the end, Okrant seems to be relieved that the entire project is over after spending an entire year trying to live up to Oprah's standards. She admits that she became completely addicted to watching the Oprah show, ended up with a house full of "O" magazines, but after all was said and done, she felt a bit like she'd been insincere with herself by trying to live up to someone else's expectations instead of her own. I found the whole idea of trying to live the Oprah life for an entire year, soaking up everything that Oprah said to buy, do, watch, read, etc. to be a bit creepy. No one should be able to wield that sort of influence that someone becomes almost an Oprah automaton. I was glad that, at the end, Okrant seems to have come to her senses and realized that this was a bit like what happened to her and took her own life back, several thousand dollars poorer but at least having learned some valuable lessons about herself and the almsot crazed Oprah devotees who eat, live, breathe and sleep her world daily, in hopes of finding some sort of fulfillment in so doing. Well, I can think of far better ways of finding oneself besides worship of all things Oprah. I was glad to find out that Okrant finally came to that realization herself after a year of "Living Oprah".