Nov 08 2002
Love/hate: TV details
Will I ever learn?
It’s pouring with rain this morning (the storm door being open and all), so I decided to take the bus to work instead of walking. So I waited half an hour and the bus didn’t show up. I went back home and called a cab, which is what I should have done in the first place, but am soaked – including hair and new boots – and sweaty and enraged, and it’s barely 6 am. I’m really feeling the hate right about now.
Love/hate for Friday, November 8, 2002
TV Details
Though I do tend to focus on the petty things in life (the nice way of putting this is “detail oriented”) and always notice how things look (the truthful way of putting this is “shallow”), for some reason, I never really notice what the TV picture looks like. As long as I can see it, it’s fine with me. Maybe it’s because I grew up watching a tiny black and white TV set, usually quite snowy no matter what the outside weather, because we lived in the country, and TV was as carefully rationed as prescription drugs, so my expectations are low. Or maybe I just don’t care.
John, on the hand, feels the need to adjust the tracking, the brightness, the sharpness, the orangeness, and every other possible-ness, whether he is actually watching the TV show or not. If I am indulging my fondness for WB programming meant for people half my age, he cannot resist fixing the picture, even while critiquing the appearance of the characters and the story line, all while preparing to flee its mundaneness the second the adjustments are complete. There is no reason for him to care about it, but he just can’t leave it alone.
And if it’s a show we are watching together (you will be amazed to hear that despite the fact that we have no fewer than 4 VCR’s and tape something every day of the week, we only watch about an hour of TV a day), you can just picture the fussing over the picture. Yet the fussing always has to take place while something is happening on the show, rather than, say, during the credits.
I guess I’m just a TV slacker. The same thing that makes me just watch whatever picture the cable guy gave us that day makes me idly watch parts of movies which we already have on DVD, something which baffles John no end. He can’t understand why I don’t just get the DVD and watch it from start to finish, as nature intended. I can’t understand why he can’t understand that I am perfectly happy watching some of it now, and – gasp! – not even finishing it. Opposites really do attract.