TIME TO GET A LIFE
... And the TV is not part of it.
... And the TV is not part of it.
I’VE decided to turn my TV off sometime soon and leave it off for a month. You see, I find myself watching a lot of junk these days. I switch the TV on to watch something meaningful, like the news, and before I know what’s happening, I’m surfing channels and watching little bits of this and that, in a bid to find something interesting.
Then before I know what’s happened, a couple of hours have gone by and my brain is full of snippets of stupid reality TV programmes.
Even when I think a particular programme promises to be entertaining, I’m often disappointed. Take the other morning, for example, when I switched on the idiot box to watch the Oscar presentations.
I usually don’t have time for such frivolity in the middle of a weekday morning, but I was rooting for Meryl Streep and her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, George Clooney and his role in the movie The Descendants, and a few others.
However, before I got to the part where the names of the leading actors and actresses were to be announced, I was forced to watch an awful lot of made-up celebrities in designer frocks and suits behaving as if their good looks and ability to regurgitate lines had made them the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel.
If I had Rudolph Valentino begging me to wear one of his one-of-a-kind dresses, and Van Cleef & Arpels demanding that I wear one of their million-dollar necklaces, and had a make-up artist who could wipe 10 years off my face with a brush, I’m sure I could also look gorgeous. Well, gorgeous-ish – if viewed in the right light at the right angle. But I wouldn’t let it go tomy head. Well, not too much. Okay, I would confine my over-exuberance about the state of my gorgeousness to those moments when I’m off-camera.
I certainly wouldn’t strut my stuff the way Angelina Jolie did when she went on stage to present an award. She approached the microphone, stuck her right leg out through the thigh-high split in her dress, and left it there at an awkward angle. Then, before she even uttered a word, she smiled and looked at the camera with an expression on her face that said, “Hey, look at me! I can stand on one white boney leg and talk at the same time!”
As she announced the nominees for Best Idiot In A Frock, her right leg remained sticking out of her dress at that weird gravitydefying angle. If someone had so much as sneezed in the vicinity of her odd pose, she might have fallen over.
After Meryl had received her Oscar, I switched my TV off and began thinking about my mindnumbing waste of a morning.
I considered, at length, my television viewing habits and the impact that all those stolen hours might be having on my life.
Two hours every day over the next ten years adds up to 456 sixteen-hour days, after taking into consideration that the average person needs eight hours sleep per night.
In that time I could learn a language, or earn a Bachelor’s degree in cinematography, or write several books, or train for and take part in several marathons.
But if I continue doing what I do, I’ll probably end up with nothing more than a muchexpanded derrière and repetitive stress injury to my thumb from surfing the channels so much.
When I told my partner that I wanted to stop watching TV for a month, so that I could get it out of my system, he laughed. He seems to think that I’m deluding myself.
“It’s like being borderline alcoholic,” he explained. “If you want to prove to everyone that you can survive a month without a drink, you will be able to do it. Not because you don’t have a drink problem, but because your desire to prove to everyone that you don’t have a problem is much greater.
“Then, when the month is up, you will feel so deprived that you will binge drink to satisfy your raging thirst for margaritas.”
As if I would binge on reality shows.
I remain undeterred. The only think I have to do now is decide when to start going cold turkey. There’s some tennis on this week that I want to watch, and American Idol seems interesting this year, then there’s a cooking programme ...
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