Category Archives: television

why i’m not doing much writing

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1.  the loud jingly music from the ice-cream cart that goes by my apartment every day is just too damn distracting.

2.  television is rotting my brain.  wanda sykes says “you can’t blame the blind man for crashing the car when you’re the one who gave him the keys.”  craig ferguson thinks that all this celebrity inbreeding is going to create a brand new race of supercelebrities.  i like scenes from a hat.  tv funny.

3.  my life is really, really boring.  i’m boring.  i’m so boring even the dog thinks i’m boring.

4.  all day i make jewelry and sew and sew and sew, and nobody wants to hear about how i added darts to some pants to make them fit, or that i’m running out of black thread but i still have tons of yellow, or that i somehow managed to acquire a whole lot of bias tape even though i don’t really know what it’s for.

5.  i came to this passage in the great gatsby the other day:

“If it wasnít for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby.  “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Daisy put her arm though his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.  Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.  Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her.  It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.  Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

my enchanted objects, i’ve decided, are the things i have that came from people i don’t see anymore.  phil’s bookcase and coffee table, folded and stacked under my bed.  marisa’s coin jar.  the green post-it pad on which yanda drew a picture of a person in profile.  the books that d loaned me, which i never read.  they’ve all acquired special significance based on their previous owners.  i can’t bring myself to get rid of these things, but i can’t think about them either.  it makes me too sad.

anyhow, i was going to write about that.

6.  when i’m on the computer, my time is spent looking for jobs i’m not going to get, browsing ebay for things i’m not going to buy, and feeling guilty about not emailing people back.  how can i possibly fit any writing in with all that other stuff i’m doing?

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can’t see with my

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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?

and nothing’s on

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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.