I said earlier that getting into my new Brooklyn life should give me no excuse not to update this blog. Well, I underestimated the time I spend outside in this pretty city and just how burned out I sometimes am at the end of a day spent writing for my internship. Nonetheless, I am taking the time now to talk about the other reason that has been eating away at my productive time: television.
Obviously, I will admit that I let it eat away at my time willingly; I’m the one who chooses to turn it on or to sit down in front of it if someone is watching it. My biggest surprise is just to see how different it is to actually have access to a TV set compared to just watching TV shows on hulu or Netflix.
I spend a sizable amount of time on hulu. Often, it’s playing on one of my tabs while I am doing something else. And because I haven’t had a television for a year, I had forgotten what it was like to live that experience: the endless, bad quality commercials and mostly the all-powerful remote control, made to let me escape programs I’m not interested in.
Until these past weeks–I will have officially been here 2 weeks tomorrow–I had fooled myself into thinking that my menu selected television consumption was the same experience as turning on a TV set and watching what comes on. On one hand, you know what you want, you’re watching it and feel satisfied. On the other, you’re searching blindly, and the more channels you have, the more you find yourself thinking entertaining the possibility that there is something better on the other channels; the hunt never ends.
It makes watching television so much more distracting than I remember it! And the worst part is that evidently you won’t always be pleased with what is offered at the time you turned the TV on, but now that it’s on, it’s somehow a problem just turning it off because you’ve already reached a semi-lethargic TV-watching state , which only gets worse once you decide to settle for a subpar option.
All in all, I’m really glad I have a lot of things to do during the day because otherwise, the TV monster would get me.
My Secret Activity 