Despertar

strike out

I'm always acting in opposition to myself. Always. Here comes a nebulous example.

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I love stories more than anything else, just about. Love them. I love to hear them, read them, tell them and retell them. I love to take everyday events, garnish them with colorful verbs and comparisons and turn them into little jewelstrings of meaning. People profess to love this about me.

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I also love television. As a mass media source, it has such potential to unify us, to give us a common knowledge base of pop culture. Even when it's bullshit TV, really bad reality shows or a bunch of noisy women around a coffee table, it gives us some universal markers against which to measure ourselves and each other. It's nice, in a sick way.

That said, it's dangerous for someone like me. I have a TREMENDOUSLY addictive personality; one taste of something good and I'll lap it up till it's gone. (Example: I had a slice of turkey bacon yesterday, and it was so good that, within four hours, I had cooked and eaten the rest of the pack of twenty-four. Not sure whether that's compulsion or addiction, but either way, really.) That coupled with my love of stories makes me a really easy target for serial programming of any kind.

In elementary school, I followed Full House, Saved by the Bell and the whole TGIF lineup, religiously, as well as a bunch of syndicated Fox cartoons, not so much religiously, but daily.

In middle school, I got into The X-Files and some edgier Nickelodeon stuff.

By high school, my interest in The X-Files was completely disproportionate to my interest in anything else. One episode a week wasn't enough for me; I stalked the FX rerun schedule and found a way to watch all the back episodes I'd missed, consecutively, in sequence. Once I was caught up, I got frustrated with the lack of new material, and I manufactured new ways to incporate it into every hour of my life. I had a friend, Katie, who liked the show approximately half as much as I did, and who indulged me in a constant exchange of notes in which we gossiped about the characters as though they were as real and as close as classmates. When she and I hung out after school, which was rare, because we were magnet nerds who lived thirty-five minutes from the school in opposite directions, we ALWAYS watched taped episodes from the fifth season, our favorite.

"Requiem" aired at the end of my freshman year. The subsequent semester, I almost failed Chemistry, that's how caught up I was in Scully's mysterious pregnancy.

I was a crazy, crazy kid.

There were also, to lesser extents, Friends, Will and Grace, various short-lived game shows, The Apprentice, Passions, Project Runway, Flavor of Love, I Love New York, Work Out, a brief stint with Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Late Night With Conan O'Brien, Saturday Night Live, Curb Your Enthusiasm, ER and South Park, which brings us current with today.

One summer, I had to be away from home for a month, and I paid my brother ten dollars a week to change the tapes in my VCR so I had a full chronicle of everything that had happened on Passions while I was gone.

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If I let myself get obsessive about a show, the obsession will grow until it eats my life. I could try to be strong and moderate it, or whatever, but what's the point? I'd rather just not watch new shows. I intentionally never watched Lost, because I heard it was one of those shows where you have to pay attention and watch every episode and time your trips to the bathroom just-so, and who needs that when you're trying to make something of yourself?

So now I don't watch new shows. I watch Conan when I remember, and I'm excited for the new season of South Park, which starts in early March, and Justin keeps blah-blahing me about how I have to get into The Office, but that's it, nothing else, I'm not getting sucked into anything else. I'll never graduate if I do.

The only time I even noticed the strike, besides every time it came up in the newspaper, was when I saw Conan's beard, and literally recoiled from the screen.

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I hate silence, though. I can't sleep or study with the TV off. I've devolved to the point where I can only really function with the maximum possible stimulus blaring at me. In the car, that means music; in class, it means Internet; in my room, it means both of the above, plus TV. I need the constant murmur of human voices, but I usually don't want to have to interact with them.

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So, my TV-watching, at this point, is for the ambient noise, and that's it. I watch the same few movies, few reruns, over and over, which completely undermines my love of a good story.

Doesn't it suck how the things we love best are so awful for us?