There's An Off Button For A Reason

My husband tonight made the romantic gesture of handing me the remote when I got home from work. He was working on grading some papers, and in a tiff we had last night, I brought up the fact that I never got the remote. Once the "power" was handed to me, we went out to dinner, but when we got back, I settled into the chair and left the remote right where I left it. I went online and started looking at the things I wouldn't normally look at while I'm at work. He settled on the couch with his book. No one reached for the remote at all. We just sat in silence for about an hour with our respective forms of entertainment and it was heaven!

When I was younger, I was glued to the television. I read that statistic about the average adolencent watching three hours of television a day...and I realized I was "above average". I would get home from school and I had my schedule of programming from the time I got home to the time I went to bed all planned out. Weekends was nothing but television, from Friday night TGIF on ABC to Saturday night SNICK on Nickelodeon to Sunday night Nick at Nite. I would only fake sick until I was tired of trying to find something good on daytime television. And summer vacations started to get real tiring around August when there was nothing but reruns on.

When I was first learning to read, my mom got me the book "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV." Admittedly, I would read that from time to time as I grew older (when I realized I was bored with television, but couldn't think of something better to do). Basically, Mama Bear decided her family had been spending too much time in front of the television, so she turned it off for a week. The bears had to find other means of entertaining themselves. At the end, they were involved in other hobbies that once TV was no longer banned, they didn't want it. So I tried the experiment a few times throughout the years.

Usually, I realized how slow time moved without the TV. I realized I had to check the clock more often because I didn't have my usual schedule as a time-marker. (5:05-6:05 on TBS, "Saved by the Bell" was always my benchmark for when my homework should be done by...if I did it, that is.)

I learned how to knit, I taught myself basic sign language, I read all 32 of my collection of "The Baby-Sitters Club" books a few times, I memorized the order of birthstones, I looked up random words in the dictionary and tried to memorize them so I could impress people, I went through an entire cookbook of microwave recipes (and learned to always mix in baking soda really well when making brownies...blegh!), I made Creepy Crawlers, I played kickball with the neighbors, I played Mario Paint (I didn't count that as television for some reason), I listened to music with my dad, I taught myself multiplication (no, really, I did--I was in the bathroom and decided I wanted to learn and figured it out with the help of a calculator I brought in with me...I really was a weird child).

But, sooner or later, I'd go back to television. I was, however, trained very well in the art of turning the television off. I wasn't allowed to fall asleep to it, either. It was off at 10 when I went to bed. If I tried to turn it on, my mom would see that glowing blue light from under my door and yell at me to turn it off. This love of the television is still the reason today I don't like really crunchy foods. See, I had a television with an actual volume knob you had to get up to adjust, so I only ate chewy foods that I could hear the TV over, instead of loud crunching. Many Cheetos were sucked upon until they were the correct consistency to hear over...or I would simply suck all the cheese off, then throw the corn puffs away.

In high school, I didn't have a TV in my room. I watched Jeopardy in the living room with my mom and grandma with our little TV trays, or I would watch the TV in my mom's room. But that was also when the internet started to take off, so I had new and different entertainment to keep me satisfied.

Once I got to college, I had to extrovert myself a little, so the TV was out of the picture pretty much...until I discovered DDR, which, again, does not count as television. Once I moved back home, I had a TV in my room again, but I didn't feel the need to watch it a lot. Maybe a movie now and then, but that was about it. I was too busy being social and working.

Then came the summer of nightmares. Almost every night for an entire month before my junior year of college, I was having terrible nightmares. These were nightmares that made me wake up screaming, crying, sweating, panting, you name it. And it wasn't all monsters and stuff, it was nightmares about things happening to my family, friends or, the scariest of them, my future children. That was when I started falling asleep to the Disney Channel. Nothing bad happened on the Disney Channel. I could hear it during the nightmares and I was able to concentrate on it enough to wake myself up before a dream turned into a nightmare.

For the next five months, I couldn't sleep without it on. I remember wanting to so badly, too, but every time I would turn it off and lay in the darkness, I would get mini-anxiety attacks worrying about having nightmares and not being able to wake up when I wanted to.

Once January hit, though, I made it my New Year's Resolution to fall asleep without the television. If, for nothing else, so I could get a good night's sleep and not be on edge the whole night with background noise. One night turned into two, which turned into a week, and, before I knew it, I had gone a few months turning out my light, turning off the TV, and falling asleep.

Since then, the TV has been sort of like a pair of earrings that don't necessarily go with everything, but there are a few key outfits that look great with them. If that didn't make sense to you (I realized I could come up with a better analogy if I really thought about it), television went back to being a sometimes thing.

My husband, however, loves the TV. When I lived with him and his parents, it was very rare I came home to a turned off television. It got to the point where I could here the buzz from just the television being on, even if it was on mute, and it would give me a headache. Sometimes I have evil fantasies about my husband coming home and finding the television stolen, just so I can walk in the door to him. Not "him sitting on the couch watching TV", not "him sitting with his laptop, not even watching the TV, but it's still on", not "him shushing my until a commercial break"--just "him".

So, tonight was a real nice night for me, it really was. He's now in the other room and I can hear a clock ticking and his sighs of tiredness every so often. And it's the most relaxing sound I can think of to listen to.

Oh, and this was the inspiration to finally write about my anti-TV ways I thought were crazy.