By Beauty Damned

TV Gets A Bad Rap

Darcie wrote in her Friday confessional about how she's finally surrendered and acquired a television. I could count on one hand the number of times Darcie and I have watched tv together in the 11 or 12 years that we've been friends. It's hard for me to even picture her flipping channels.

I was raised pretty much without television. It wasn't really a plan on my parents' part when they had children, but once we got to be kids old enough to sit in front of the tv, they started to worry about what was happening to our brains. One night when I was about seven years old and my brother was about nine, we were watching L.A. Law or Moonlighting (one of those shows), and my dad told us it was time to turn off the tv. I remember hearing my dad and getting up to get ready for bed. My brother just sat there, slackjawed, eyes wide, head cocked backward looking up at the television. My dad asked him again to turn it off, but Josh was entranced. He didn't budge. That was when my dad went around to the back of the little television that had once been my grandmother's - and one of the only things we had of hers after she died - and he unplugged it from the wall, and he picked it up and carried it out to the back of our apartment complex on Sepulveda Blvd, and he hoisted it into the dumpster. And that was that. No more tv for the Carreons. My dad says that the Christmas following that incident was one of the most peaceful ever, because none of us whined about not getting what we'd seen on tv.

But if you think that's the only story I have involving televisions in my family, you're about to hear another one.

A few years later, while living on Bay Street off of Pico, my parents drove us one night to the Westward Ho supermarket for a couple groceries. While my dad was inside the supermarket, and taking forever, as he always did when he stepped foot inside a store, my sister started to wiggle and whine about needing to go pee. She was about five at the time. My mother tried to tell her to wait, but there was no way. She was pitching a tantrum. So my mom took her behind - guess what? - a dumpster and some bushes in the parking lot, and let my sister go pee. And guess what they found there? A television. A brand spanking new Mitsubishi television with one little scratch on it where it had apparently been dumped on the pavement. When my dad finally came out of the store, my mom showed him the tv. He lifted it into the back of our car, and we drove it home. In Tibetan Buddhism, female goddesses are called Dakinis. My parents always dubbed that "Ana's Dakini pee." We purchased a VHS player and my parents would rent movies and sometimes even video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. We still never watched television with commercials and my parents listened to NPR, so they never watched the news on tv, but at least we were not totally out of touch, because we got to watch movies.

To this day, if you go to my parents house, they have a big television in the living room, but it is never on unless someone is watching a movie, and they have one of those cool big screens that pulls down from the ceiling in their bedroom with the mounted dvd/vhs projector. It's awesome. You know they totally watch lifesize porn on that thing.

The result of this lack of television in our house is that everyone talks to eachother. There's a lot of conversation and communication. I think part of the fact that my parents have stayed together for 30+ years is because they have never lost the connection with eachother where they share ideas and talk about what's going on in the world and in their lives. Television has never been allowed to be an interference or an influence. Not to say that tv causes divorce, but you never know...it could.

When I moved into the apartment I live in now, I purchased a television of my own for the first time in my life. I like watching it, but I've never made a habit out of coming home, plopping down and watching tv. I plop down and do other things and watch tv when I really have the conscious urge. But that is not to say that I'm not a junkie. I love cooking shows. I could watch the Food Network around the clock. I actually have watched it incessantly in the past. Rob convincing me to get DVR was the best thing ever though. There's nothing quite as satisfying as fastforwarding through commercials and being able to pause the tv. I feel like I'm able to enjoy television more without all the stuff I don't want to see like the bullshit advertising. I also think there's a lot of quality programming on tv if you just look for it or stumble upon it.

Darcie's confession was that she cried while watching "Save the Last Dance." I cry all the time while I'm watching tv, as embarassing as that is. Cried watching Beaches recently. Cried while watching Dirty Dancing. But the worst was how hard I cried when I was watching Oz on HBO the other night and the state was getting ready to execute a mentally challenged inmate named Cyril O'Reilly. His brother Ryan had Cyril convinced that he was just going in for a special shock treatment. Cyril's eyes were so innocent and trusting - no idea what was about to happen to him. And everyone was crying. And the music was heartwrenching. And it was so real. I cried like a baby AND it made me angry as shit about the death penalty. So there you go. TV is good for something. Though I'm grateful that I grew up pretty much without it, as an adult I've learned to appreciate it. But it's likely I will raise my children similarly to the way my parents raised me when it comes to television. They're going to have to find other things to do with their time and tv will be on a serious ration, because no matter how good it is sometimes, it's not very productive.

Posted by Maria at September 24, 2005 01:34 PM | TrackBack