Last week at work everyone was buzzing about Emmitt Smith winning some sort of television show about dancing.
Since I am totally divorced from the magical land of time-suck known as television I thought they were just putting me on. You have to admit, it does sound improbable, aside from the fact that it’s altogether blasphemous for such salt-of-the-earth Philadelphians to be happy about a former Dallas Cowboy winning anything.
Yet, strange as it all seemed, it was true. My work friends once again took this opportunity to mock me for my self-imposed teevee blackout, as if i had given up using adjectives or basking in the light of the sun.
I wanted to shoot back, “How many concerts have you been to this month? How many have you recorded? And how many blogs (over a thousand) have you read?”
Of course, my weirdness doesn’t end in my eschewing of the boob tube. Another point of endless fascination is that I don’t drive – I don’t even have my license. I’ve had my permit a few times, and am actually flirting with getting it again, but when it comes down to it I’m distrustful of cars, and moreso of the people who drive them.
Still, people always ask, “Why wouldn’t you want to own/drive a car,” and in my head i complete the sentence “…in the city recently named as the second-most expensive in the country to do so?”
Usually my tv blackout wins out against non-driving as weirdest trait, but a competing one is my flirtation with vegetarianism – which is patently ridiculous, as my current state of consumption is incredibly lax in comparison to when I was a rules-obeying vegetarian for my latter teen years.
By comparison, my current rules are so loose i can hardly coin a term for them … lacto-ovo-pesco-broth-o-vegetarian? I’m not trying to make a statement; i just don’t like red meat, and i eat healthier on the whole when I can’t rely on variations on chicken nuggets for every meal.
A few years ago it would have all gotten under my skin, crawling around in my subconscious, making me doubt myself. Now it’s more like, eh, if they tried it they’d understand. Because, all weirdness is relative.
I don’t do TV either, and I didn’t learn to drive until I was 23. I grew up outside Washington, DC, so I felt like, are you kidding me? Then, in college, I lived in a place where it was feasable not to. I really didn’t think I’d ever learn to drive.
Unfortunately, where I went to grad school there was no choice. Now I do it, but only when I have to.
I was trying to explain this to a potential suitor once and he said, “So you don’t drive and you don’t have a TV. Are you a Mennonite?”
It’s the only explanation!
I have to say the *one* thing that sometimes makes me feel a little funny about not having a license (or any intention of getting one soon) is the knowledge that my baby brother is going to be able to drive me around in the near future.
reading websites (I have ~150 on my feed thingie, plus the lj friends page) feels like a HUGE waste of time compared to watching tv, though. I don’t know why that is. maybe because with TV I always turn it on for something specific … but the internet I turn on whenever I’m not doing something else (or, especially, when there’s something else I want to avoid doing).
I think television is weird because people seem to care more about what’s going on with celebrities and fictional characters more than they care about their own lives.
When I gave up the television was also when I found the spare time to design, blog, and read books with words.