In seventh grade, I was dubbed with a nickname, which became an AOL account that has existed for the past decade. Its potential for e-mail exchange has been marred by an endless stream of spam.

I don’t hate all advertising. I know plenty of advertising majors. There are instances where advertising can be both clever and amusing. It just so happens that all the rest of advertising sucks so much that I try to avoid it entirely.

Comedy Central, after a certain time at night, is notorious for horrible commercials, but it is not the only offender — it’s just the only offender that infuriates me to a point where I want to flip off a kitten or something. Every single commercial break I have to get that steel drum followed by the giggling and goofy announcer voice talking about “girls exposing their bodies” and I sigh. Girls Gone Wild, even with the premise of naked women, can’t get me interested in their products. That is a monumental failure.

If they need somebody to blame, it can be the gelled up “new haircut” guys with faux tan bodies who are always sticking out their tongue or doing something stupid with their hands. They look like people who failed to get into Zoolander. They are the worst kind of men.

They should be excited for the next kind of commercials, though. First it was a grinning weirdo named Bob who subtly advertised a product called Enzyte. He was buried in euphemisms and socially awkward situations, grinning all the while because apparently a ‘supplement’ changed him from a person into a walking nightstick with a human attached. Nowadays, it’s a generic infomercial-type interview slash promotion with seemingly uncomfortable people. Extenze has gotten a chuckle out of me due to sheer poor acting, which is almost as bad as The General insurance commercials.

It has come to a point where I consciously attempt to avoid commercials and advertisements almost in their entirety. Food commercials make me hungry, starving children commercials make me feel bad and previews for the next WWE Raw make me confused and uncomfortable.

That is the whole gamut of emotions I don’t want to feel.

All of this exposure to advertising has caused some sort of regression in my personal decisions. I put my new car under my parent’s name and get to cancel my All-State policy, and they won’t bother me anymore about their deals. I purposefully have nothing mailed to my apartment at school, and I try — to the best of my abilities — to be unscathed by these dumb ads at any given time.

It isn’t like I can’t avoid this stuff. Nobody forces me to sit down and watch TV and then stay there for the commercials. I guess if they’ve been on the air for so long there has to be someone that has been roped in by the whole package.

I just feel like most of the spam I get, the banners on the Web and the crap on TV and on the radio are some kind of retribution for the stuff I do enjoy.

Contact columnist Ron Soltys at [email protected].