my mother was right. television rots your brain. to be honest, i'm not sure if my mom ever really uttered those words, but someone's mom did somewhere at some point, and now i'm learning it firsthand.
about a month ago, i started watching gray's anatomy from the first episode on dvd. i finished the first two seasons and then moved on to glee. i've also been keeping up with american idol, the office, 30 rock, and snl. now, my most faithful of blog-readers will have connected by now that it has been just over a month since my last post and, that's right, i'm blaming tv. the shows that are airing weekly, which i enjoy via dvr, are not so much the problem. it's those confounded shows on dvd that ruin my life. i will come home from working 2 jobs and think to myself, "katie, sure you have something brilliant to write about - an insightful piece of perspective or didactic little short story - but no, you deserve to sit and watch 3 episodes of gray's stupidity. sure, your room needs to be cleaned and the kitchen floor is sticky, but instead of seeing to those things, you should probably watch glee until your eyes start to close."
ahhhhhhhh is all i have to say about that. anyone who knows me knows that if i am watching something on tv, be it "good" or "bad" television, or even a movie (though i have less tolerance for bad movies) the rest of the world fades away. it's strange, really. the house could be on fire, and still i will gaze upon the flickering screen. i can't really abide chatter during movies or television, unless it adds something or makes me laugh - it's part of my condition.
all of this to say - i think i enjoy television and movies more than a lot of people, but it's for that reason i feel the need to temper my consumption. kind of like an alcoholic with booze. i know what you're thinking: "but katie, an alcoholic probably shouldn't have a tempered amount of alcohol, they should have no alcohol at all." and to that i say: "well, friend, that's where the analogy fails." seriously, i just need to really monitor my series-on-dvd consumption and i'll be fine. if, let's say, in a few months, i haven't written anything, you come to my house and find me in a katie-shaped hole on my couch and a remote fused to my hand, that's when you can stage an intervention. it's not so much that i watch an unhealthy amount of tv (or have been recently), i have just been spending an unhealthy percentage of the small amount of free time i do spend at my home, watching tv instead of cleaning my house or writing - two things that i used to be pretty good about keeping up with.
i hope you know that i'm being unnecessarily dramatic and don't think me some sort of recluse. on the contrary - if i were smarter, i would connect this problem to my general lack of down time. the fact that i really enjoy sitting for so long should probably clue me in to the fact that i do too much general "going." i will not, however, come to this conclusion, but will simply say that i should write and clean more, even if it means watching less.
as a sort of side note, i would like to say that i don't think that i really like gray's anatomy. the more i watch it, the more i feel like the characters aren't real people, and i must have real people. they do crazy things all willy nilly and often out of character, it seems just for shock value. i have the first disc of the third season from netflix, so we'll see if that ever finds its way into my brain before it finds itself back in the mailbox.
glee, on the other hand, is much more clever. it is obscenely cheesy, but so full of self-mockery, that you can't help joining in. i'm trying to finish the dvd episodes before it starts airing again. that way, i will have no more shows on dvd, hopefully, and my life can return to it's previous prolific and organized state.
