We have cable now. This is something we obstinately refused
to have in our house in Idaho, and all I have to say about that is that I’m not
sure how we entertained ourselves…oh, right, we had a social life there. And
Netflix. Anyway, I’ve become especially enamored with the TLC channel, more so
during periods of time when I have a lot of other things to get done. This
Sunday on Sister Wives, the family is
(the families are? I’m not sure yet what the politically correct term is)
looking for a place to perform some type of commitment ceremony. Personally,
I’m looking forward to the drama that is likely to ensue. In the meantime, My 600-Pound Life is always good for a
little pick me up, especially if my pants are feeling snug or I’m trying to
squash a recurring Fruit Loops craving.
Through this new experience, I’ve discovered that one side
effect of television in high doses is a sudden and severe loss of faith in
humanity. Another side effect, and the one I’m usually dosing up for (because
90% of your first year in graduate school consists of feeling inadequate) is that
it makes you feel like you’re on the smarter end of your species’ IQ spectrum. This
is especially true of daytime television, where most channels are filled with
people screaming in other people’s faces about how “they don’t know them” or engaging
in heated arguments about which man belongs to whom, or which baby belongs to
which daddy, and all the while I’m just wondering if we can take the babies in
question far away from all these people so they can learn proper English and
grow up knowing that most dads have teeth.
Other channels show you where doctors go when they can’t get
jobs at respectable medical establishments. They now spend their days trying to
convince the masses that drinking grapefruit juice and vinegar is all they need
to melt off those extra pounds. This combination is also the cure for anyone
suffering from pretty much anything. How do you know if you’re suffering from
something? If you feel tired during the day, if your head hurts sometimes, if
you absolutely detest getting out of bed in the morning, if you blink too much,
or if you find yourself wanting to drink water sometimes, you’ve got big problems.
Just keep calm and drink your grapefruit juice and vinegar. If that doesn’t
work, try honey and cinnamon. If that doesn’t work, you’re probably human. Like
the common cold, a reasonable cure for that condition has yet to be found. In
any case, I started skipping these channels entirely after hearing a very
popular TV doctor’s claims that vaccines “shore up your first chakra”.
Somewhat more respectable channels, like Animal Planet, provide you
with shows like Fatal Attractions,
which you shouldn’t watch while eating, and which still diminish your faith in
your own species. This particular series focuses on people who like pets, but
aren’t satisfied with your ordinary, garden-variety kind of pet. They prefer to
take animals that are used to living in large spaces and feasting upon the raw meat of other animals,
and relocate them to their bedrooms or backyards. This generally ends up in
gore and death and denial on the part of the owner, who is convinced that
owning a large black panther is NOT the reason we all just saw pictures of her bare
skull after the thing pretty much scalped her.
One man’s voice-over, on a video of him training his 12-year
old daughter to boss around six full-grown tigers in a circus ring, claimed
that his wife shouldn’t be upset because he would never put his child in a
dangerous situation. Ah, yes, that fine line between a dangerous situation and
a situation involving six, non-restrained, full-grown tigers. I feel silly now
for confusing the two when the distinction was so clear.
Also showcased was the plight of an elderly woman who had
taken to feeding wild bears, a situation that went awry when she tried breaking
up a fight between a male bear and his cub. I’m all about protecting the
innocent from maltreatment, but if a bear wants to teach his cub a lesson and
you are, for some maniacal reason, standing in their vicinity, I suggest
looking the other way on that one.
Around the time they started in on people who keep bison in
their house (at least until the bison kill them, then I imagine the remaining
members of the family have the good sense to kick them out), I was considering
the merits and possibilities of selective breeding in humans. Then, when I saw
that the title of the next episode was “200 Snakes in My Bedroom” followed by
“There’s a Crocodile in My Bed”, I remembered why it was important to do well
in graduate school and promptly shut off the television so I could get back to
work (meaning: go blog about the horrors I just witnessed). Cable, on many levels, was probably a bad choice.
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