Monday, November 23, 2009

Don't blame me--I'm TV free

Yet another confrontation with my cultural cluelessness via facebook the other day when a high school acquaintance put up an enthusiastic post about someone named Elizabeth Mitchell. Of course, I thought he was talking about the children’s folk singer, whom we are crazy about around here, but whose popular appeal, it would seem, in no way rivals that of the TV star he was talking about. As I have since learned from Wikipedia, Elizabeth Mitchell played the scheming doctor on Lost (now starring in the updated version of V--which of course I had no idea they were even doing…).

Why, you may ask, am I so out of it? Well for one thing, we are essentially TV free around here. When America went digital, we went dark. We decided to stick with our trusty old Panasonic and just say no to the converter box. Not that we were big TV viewers before the digital revolution… As a single person, I was always too busy working/having a good time to watch much television. I have also been consistently unwilling to pay for cable/satellite, preferring to spend my discretionary income on clothing and booze as a single person and on swim classes and Starbucks as a parent.

We’ve always only had one television, which is located in our bedroom and not in a common area, so it’s never just on the way the radio is sometimes on, as background noise. Now that we have no reception whatsoever, we use our set to watch dvds, mostly riveting material from the local library. We are, for example, currently struggling to stay awake through season one of The Tudors (not sure if it’s the time change or Sam Neill…). Henry gets to watch one dvd a day (two if I’m feeling antisocial) while Coco naps (this is, of course, is mostly to preserve my sanity). Colette, I am happy to say, does not really watch anything. We stick to the AAP recommendation that kids don’t watch television before age 2 (although I’m still not sure why there’s always a bloody Disney movie showing in my pediatrician’s office…).

I’m not necessarily anti-television per se. Christian and I actually wind up watching quite a bit of TV programming on dvd (I still miss Tony Soprano). I do have issues with advertising and am entirely grateful to be out of the loop on the latest in prostate health. I’m also determined to have television play a very small role in my kids’ lives (although I do have mixed emotions when I’m feeling bloggy and Hank declines to watch a video because he’d rather play Legos with me).

There are things I feel I’m missing out on (Californication, Nigella Lawson, Roger Federer…). People keep recommending hulu, but our problem is that (since we have an analogue set) we’d have to sit on hard chairs in the kitchen in front of our iMac—no thanks. We recently inherited a converter box from my in-laws who are once again on the cutting edge of technology, having picked up a flatscreen from Costco. I have a feeling we'll eventually cave and install the thing before the 2010 World Cup. Gotta watch the French team cheat its way to victory--n’est-ce pas?

2 comments:

English Teacher X said...

it probably wouldn't be too difficult to connect the laptop to the TV and watch Hulu on Tv. I don't exactly know how, but it's possible.

Queen Mahin said...

Hey, cool. I'm tv free, too. Wondering how I'm going to keep up in the bloggy arena since I'm pretty oblivious to any pop culture references. We do watch hulu on the laptop, but it is uncomfortable enough that limits our watching - which is a good thing.