stretchy dog
Archive for August, 2005
my summer web design job ended recently. this means i’m back looking for employment again, and once again i have a lot of time to make jewelry and sew and play with the dog. this is in some ways a relatively good thing, but it also gives me time to think about scary things:
1. when i was little, we spent two weeks as an arbitron ratings household. this meant that we kept a little card on top of the tv, and every time we watched something we had to write it down on the card. my sister and i didn’t write down everything we watched, because we didn’t want our parents to know how many hours we spent in front of the tv. but i did make sure to write down my favorite shows in all caps so they wouldn’t get cancelled. so somewhere in a box or a filing cabinet or a landfill, there’s an arbitron ratings card on which i wrote “DOOGIE HOWSER, M.D.”
2. i’ve noticed lately that when i sew or make jewelry or do anything that requires me to view things at close range, i let my glasses slide down the bridge of my nose and look out over the tops of them. i find i can see things better this way. i’m only TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. that’s way too young to need bifocals. isn’t it?
the ernest hemingway collection? what an odd name. “the hemingway collection. gets your living room ready for the drinkin’ and the fightin’.”
the floaters
we only had cable television for a few years when i was little. i think my parents got it so we could watch fraggle rock on hbo, and they didn’t see much use for it otherwise. but i remember our babysitter kneeling two feet in front of the tv to watch the “sweet child o’ mine” video. her obsession with axl rose was as bewildering as my fourth-grade obsession with def leppard’s “pour some sugar on me”; when the mtv countdown put the video at number one, my friend nancy and i danced around the living room. “you guys are weird,” my sister scoffed. my dad got rid of the cable not long after that.
there was cable in the dorms during my two years at ut austin, although most of that time is blocked out in my memory. but i checked the weather channel every morning before class, and i watched the first-ever behind the music on vh1. you know, the one about milli vanilli. when i moved back to houston my parents didn’t have cable, and i never had it when i lived alone.
if my calculations are correct, i’ve spent more than 17 of my 27 years without regular access to cable tv. but i think i watch too much tv in the first place, and anyway i’m happiest with my many simpsons tapes or some dvds of shows i like. sure, a lack of cable tv makes for a few holes in my media knowledge. i’ve only seen two episodes of the sopranos. i’ve never seen monk or queer eye or trading spaces or anything like that. and don’t ask me if i ever saw the video for ____________, because i did not see it. and that’s okay with me.
but today we got directv. a guy came out and tested our satellite signal. he put a dish on our patio, a cable under our carpet, and a receiver on top of my vcr. this wasn’t my idea, but i guess it’s okay. living with a six feet under-obsessed film major means that these things happen. and now we have 150 channels and a pretty remote with lots of buttons.
thus far i’ve found cable tv pretty bewildering. why are the local channels and cable channels separated by thirty pay-per-views? i have to scroll through a bunch of hitches to get from craig ferguson to family guy. how am i going to remember which channels correspond to which numbers? and why are there so many channels in the first place? i can only watch one thing at a time. and when i’m watching that one thing, i can’t concentrate on it for worrying that there might be something better on another channel. there are too many choices! am i missing a buffy i’ve never seen?
it’s very stressful.
the guy who came to set up our directv couldn’t get the vcr and the receiver to work at the same time. so we have 150 channels and no vcr, and since the dvd player is hooked up through the vcr, we have no dvd, either. which means that for now i can’t watch my simpsons tapes or arrested development dvds. and i’d choose those over all the channels in the world.
when “heat of the moment” started playing, ryan and i were the only ones in the crowded theatre who laughed. if i never felt old before…
