Friday, February 12, 2010

Believe it or not, there is life without TV

I did it. I had my cable disconnected. What a bizarre feeling. I imagine I'll have a life in about two weeks or so, once the shock wears off. In the meantime, I invaded my friend, Helen's house, yesterday, while she was out of town, and watched three hours of I don't know what, just to get a hit of what I thought I was missing. Guess I was missing commercials...I counted them. during the course of an hour I was subjected to over 70 commercials, most of them repeats. This was on the FX channel, and there were 10 commercials in every slot. Bam Bam Bam...buy buy buy...now now now...
buy Pizza at Papa John's...Eat greasy wraps at Micky D's..don't forget your valentine,
hate your body? join Jenny Craig and on and on and on it went. Meanwhile I kept losing track of the show I was trying to watch because of all the interruptions.
At the risk of showing my age, I do remember when "pay TV" reared it's ugly head. Americans were horrified at the thought of paying for TV. The big selling point was that if you paid for TV you were spared all the tedious commercials. Boy Howdy, that's certainly changed. Now we pay for the privilege of being bombarded with ads, we pay for shirts with company logos on them, we pay every which way. We pay every day in every way.
I'm going through withdrawals, have spent 45.00 this week alone renting movies, but I suspect that will slow down. Meanwhile, I've finished knitting a sock and have started on the second one, I've finished reading a book and have started another one. I'm not falling asleep on my couch everynight, and I'm actually making progress on my to do list. With any luck, I'll wake up enough to start making art again. Part of me is feeling happy and free. The other part is sniveling and whining, longing for the good old days of NO-THINK.

1 comment:

  1. I'm proud of you! I watch a ton of tv, but have dreams of one day, just maybe, giving it up. Now you can just download the shows you wanna watch or only watch what's on Hulu.com and suffer only a couple commercials per episode.

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