What is the point of having free cable in the dorms if nearly half of all programming is infomercials? Who buys this stuff? Does anyone really believe that the George Foreman grill helps you to eat healthy? Maybe, if dumping the miniature grease traps every 30 seconds counts as exercise … sure. Maybe just the sight of all that greasy run-off will make people realize how bad their diet is to begin with. Maybe a waterfall of animal fat is just the mental image you need to keep in mind while sucking down food you love but know is bad for you.

And why would anyone spend over a hundred dollars to buy a machine that makes pasta which you can buy for less than a dollar?

If you like beef jerky so much that you need to buy a special jerky maker, then you have bigger problems than which credit card to put it on.

My friend’s wife goes shopping every day. I don’t think she has missed a day since she was sixteen. This isn’t hyperbole. A day without shopping is like a day without sunshine for this woman. God love her, I mean mastercard sure does.

I think she studied in Korea under a consumer arts master for years to achieve a skill level unprecedented in the West. She has a black belt in Icango. As in “Icango shopping with my husband’s money, he doesn’t mind that much.”

She’ll buy anything: clothes, appliances, knick knacks, rare, imported 19th century bilge flotsam, expensive, post-kitsch German porcelain wundercrap.

A nice enough woman, but I do have to wonder what kind of hole a person has to have inside of her that would require filling it with home-shopping channel mall crap. But who am I to judge? A hotdog makes me lose control.

Food I understand. It loves you unconditionally. You need some of it just to survive, and then you get carried away going to the BK every day.

Gluttony has always been common. It was a popular past time for our ancient Roman friends who built magnificent arenas with specially designed vomitoriums so that revelers could binge and purge with ease. Maximum convenience.

It’s 100 percent true, folks.

Recently, a traveling group of well-meaning Christian nutritionists designed a new diet which operates under the theory that when you eat more than you absolutely need to survive, you are confusing the emptiness in your soul with physical hunger.

Instead of piling on the cheesecake you should be loading up on the sweet, candy-coated lovin’ words of Jesus.

Now I, of course, took this to be just another in a long-running series of con jobs pulled by well-intentioned Christian folk on unsuspecting populations of the needy and vulnerable.

But after much consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the basic principle is correct.

We all have these holes inside of us which manifest themselves in different ways. Some people are restless, others are depressed, some lonely. Others are just in need of something to do to fill the time between now and death without going mental.

Everyone you see everyday fills their void with whatever works. Some people dig food. Some people are workaholics. Some are avid readers of mystery novels. Some like to play role-playing games and some people like to shop until they or their spouses drop.

Sometimes we overindulge. We eat too much, shop too much, waste hours in front of the TV watching rare clips of Swedish, hermaphroditic pornography … where was I? Oh yeah … but the one thing we all have in common is the need to fill the void with something that satisfies.

So upon reflection, I think that those Christian weight-watchers were not so far off the mark as I had originally suspected.

Their main point is entirely false. The void that they believe can ONLY be filled with God can be filled with just about anything, and they are, at the very least, misguided for trying to convince people that there is only one thing to put in that hole in your heart.

It is a good kind wrong, though. Like when you give money to a heroin addict because he said he was going to buy coffee with it.

Or when you kill millions of innocent aboriginals in a humane attempt to save their souls. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Speaking of hellishly good intentions, if you feel yourself succumbing to the old ennui of college life, we have more clubs than a golf-playing caveman. Games, political, departmental, social.

If these don’t float your boat, you can always take advantage of the counseling services on campus. You can’t get better for free, that’s for sure.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily