A Love Affair

I hate TV.

No.  Wait.  I take that back.  I don't hate TV, I hate commercials.  I hate that they make me feel like I can't make a decision on my own.  If it weren't for them telling me what products to buy how would I know?  Its like they're telling me I have no brain of my own and I must follow what ever direction they tell me to.  Shenanigans.

I do dig the magic picture box though.  Its mysterious shape and funny knobs and buttons were a fascination from the start. I remember being at a friend's house when I was about 8 or 9 and the TV was on in the sun room.  I could hear the laughter from the TV audience in the background of some game show.  While my friend tried to pull me towards the game room where we would play dress-up or make up dance routines while listening to her Dad's old LP's of Beatles music (Rocky Raccoon was my favorite), my body was being drawn to the sun room like a gravitational pull.  Some kind of cosmic connection unknown to me was urging me to sneak a peak in that room and see what was happening on the TV.

Fortunately I spent more time playing dress up than I ever did staring into the magic picture box (which by the way is a nickname my family came up with eons ago to describe TV, we've used it ever since.).  Nope, instead of I Love Lucy or The Facts of Life I got the likes of; C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Burns and Garrison Keillor.  Not quite the same experience but looking at it now, I very much appreciate the extra effort from my parent's to educate us like that.

Don't get me wrong when I was a kid I wanted a TV. Bad.  I'm sure I drove my parent's nuts wishing and dreaming for a magic picture box of our very own.  I couldn't help but feel as though I was missing out on something wonderful.  A mystical magical place where the characters came alive and almost jumped out at you.  Its a different kind of joy to watch the story happen than to imagine it in your head.  There seemed to be nothing more exciting and sintilating than those stolen moments here or there when I was allowed to enjoy a program.  Usually things like Reading Rainbow or anything on the Discovery channel were granted permission.  But Saturday morning cartoons at my Grandparent's were like a super stickey sweet treat.  In a word; awesome. 

At some point, and I'm not sure when or who decided to give this a whorl, but at some point my parent's figured out how to hook up a VCR to a Computer Monitor which then gave us the ability to watch movies.  Heaven.  This opened a whole new world to me and it was everything I could do to contain my desire to pop in yet another video.  A few Todd family favorites?  Check this out - Space Balls, The Princess Bride, Full Metal Jacket, Apocolypse Now.  What?  Yes that's right, my uber strict parent's with their crazy TV rules were totally cool with these random movie selections.  They are in no particular order here, and not the only movies we had around the house...Just a few that I will always think of as movie's I grew up on.

The other day my brother, sister and I shared a brief moment together in regards to Space Balls and it put such a smile on my face.  It was like we three just went there together. Went back to that place where we can share a knowing smile about our unique relationship with the magic picture box.

Nowadays TV has lost some of it's luster.  Our lives are so inundated with technology that it can often feel like sensory overload to me.  I find myself having to tune out, unplug and disconnect to catch my breath.  Come to think of it, there's probably an App for that.  For me, the worst part of TV is not the enormity of bad programming clogging the prime time slots, but rather the ridiculous amount of commercials zipping past at a million miles an hour screaming at you what to wear, what to listen to, what ailments you might have and what remedies you cannot live without.  If one more money grubbing company tries to get me to buy a Snuggie I'm going to freak out.

Even though I hold a lot of angst towards the marketing companies shoving their agenda's down my throat I still love a good TV show.  I caught a show on the Science channel about a month ago that completely blew my mind.  It was about how galaxies and stars are formed.  For a couple weeks I kept bringing it up with my husband.  I haven't really stopped thinking about it, the cool thing is that this show actually had that affect on me.  It made me look at the world from a different perspective and made me ponder things I never really had before.

So no.  I guess I don't have TV.  You could say I've had an on going love affair with TV my whole life.  A confounding relationship where one moment I want to throw the damn thing out and moments of mind expanding pleasure.  I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that I had very limited access to the magic picture box growing up.  Did it make me want it more or less?  Some days it's hard to tell but here's hoping it's the latter.