Sitting, Waiting, Watching

I lived five years of my life in Jerusalem. My parents, who worked as journalists, were transferred there when I was five so we packed up all of our belongings and were on the next flight to the Holy City. Everything in Jerusalem was different. We were aliens. We were aliens who didn’t speak the “code.” The “code” was Hebrew (or when we went over the Palestinian side of the city, it was Arabic.) Everything was in code. It made sense, it was the national language, but since I was five and not very worldly, everything was made, lived and died in North America. There were no other countries besides Canada and the United States. There were no other languages besides English and French. There was no other religion besides Christianity. It was a total culture shock when I got to Jerusalem and no one spoke English beyond the confinement of my private school.

Even the television, on which I nearly relied on to live, was in Hebrew. There were only a couple of family oriented shows a night that I could understand. I grew to savour these shows over everything else. The spoke to me and I could relate to them. For a few hours every night, I was at home. The families on T.V. became my families and I absorbed every lesson they learned together like a sponge. If Danny and his Full House learned that it was wrong to steal your neighbor’s bike, I also learned that it was wrong to steal your neighbor’s bike and if Carl, Harriet and their kids learned that sometimes you had to deal with racism, then I also learned that sometimes, you had to deal with racism. I learned many life lessons from family shows from the 90’s. Because if a sliver of my evening spent in front of the television was the only connection I had to the English-speaking world, so be it. I would take full advantage of that. And I did.

I have always been addicted to television. Before we went to Jerusalem, while we were in Jerusalem, when we traveled outside of Jerusalem, when we moved away from Jerusalem. It’s always been such a guilty pleasure for me. It’s almost like a fetish. I can watch it for hours at a time, mesmerized by the screen, staring at the flashing images and not getting the slightest bit tired, or a splitting migraine. I’ll watch anything you put in front of me. I’ll watch infomercials, sitcoms, dramas, the food network, old western movies, T.V. land, teenage dramas, workout shows. If there’s nothing else on, I’ll even watch sports. I don’t know why I’m so addicted. I have a relationship with television akin to that of fat people and food. It puts me in my happy place where nothing matters but the images before me. Neither of my parents shares my addiction, nor does my sister. They can break away from the one-eyed monster anytime they want. They can leave in the middle of an episode of Law and Order and never wonder who stabbed the friendly old woman to death with the kitchen knife. If I don’t see the end of that particular episode it’ll haunt me. I’ll spend nights in cold sweats piecing the evidence together and trying to come to a reasonable conclusion. Even though all signs point to the cloistered housewife with the bloody rubber glove under her car seat, I will not rest until I see the case being closed.

When we got D.V.R., my addiction to T.V. grew. I could now watch anything I wanted, blissfully uninterrupted. I could just skip through the ads and resume watching my program, picking up right where I left off. If someone came to talk to me I could hit pause and my show would pause. If I wanted to watch a catfight or a tear jerking moment over again, I could. I exercised total control over my show. The only thing that put me off about live television was the endless commercial sequences and D.V.R. fixed my problem. I controlled them, they no longer controlled me. My Digital Video Recorder grew to be my best friend, getting me through more Friday nights than I’d like to admit. I recorded everything I wanted to watch and therefore didn’t need to spoil my precious hours of T.V. watching things that didn’t interest me. I always had a reserve of sitcoms that I could access at the touch of a button. If there was nothing on, I knew that there was something on D.V.R. that would occupy my attention until there was something on live T.V. I now had even less initiative to turn off the television, because I was always watching something entertaining. I wasn’t occasionally flipping to National Geographic when nothing was on. I didn’t peek at the History Channel while I waited for a crappy Lifetime movie to end. If there were a crappy Lifetime movie on, I would watch my D.V.R.

Another thing that has always been important to me is the English language. Not just the language itself, but respecting it. While my other schoolmates would slaughter their essays with typos and mistakes and dangling prepositions, I would respect the rules of grammar to such an extreme that it was almost frightening. I was a grammarnazi. I had accounts on the internet devoted to correcting people who used bad grammar in forums. I blogged about the importance of watching your spelling and punctuation and making sure that you know the meaning of a word before you use it. If there was one thing that could scare me away from television it was that it turned you brain to mush. I couldn’t bear the thought of my brain sliding around inside my head like a slug in a blender. The idea of making silly spelling mistakes and not having a vocabulary akin to that of Sir Oxford disgusted me more than not watching television.

“Lucas, you need to stop watching television.” My mom said, talking over the stars of my sitcom.

I paused my program and shifted in my armchair. I wasn’t very happy that I had to stop my show for what promised to be a lengthy interruption.

“Why? Please don’t make me. I’m right in the middle of this.”

“You’re not using your brain. You’re just sitting there like you’re retarded. Shouldn’t you go read? When we were kids there was no television and look how I turned out. You’re a smart kid, don’t you have homework? Don’t you have anything to do?”

I spent just a split second imagining myself in thirty years, in my floating The Jetsons-like house, telling my kids: “Won’t you stop playing those virtual reality games? We didn’t have virtual reality games when I was a kid and look how I turned out.” I made a mental note to remember this moment in the future and to try not to pester my kids when they were doing something they enjoyed.

“But reading is tough. It’s such a commitment. I mean, I like reading, I just don’t want to read right now. I’ll read before I go to bed. For now, I want to watch television.

“But you’re wasting a beautiful day indoors. Why don’t you call a friend and get together? I’m happy to drive you anywhere you like. Just say the word.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll call someone. Just let me finish watching this. It’s almost done, I promise.”

That was a lie. It wasn’t almost done. There was still twenty minutes left and I still hadn’t discovered the hook. And there was still another episode after this one, then there was a whole different series that I needed catching up on. I needed my weekends to flush out my D.V.R. so that I didn’t worry about filling all fifty hours during the week. I wasn’t going to call anyone, I was going to stay right where I was and watch.

“Alright, fine. Just watch television. Turn your brain to mush.”

That’s always what scared me. I knew this interruptions always boiled down to one thing: the dangers of watching. Every addiction has its danger. Smoking leads to lung cancer, drug use leads to the death of brain cells, drinking leads to the loss of your job. I’d heard it before, and it always frightened me, but I’d tone it down for a few days and then inevitably start watching again. I’d convince myself that it was an old wife’s tale and push the thought to the back of my mind. My bond with television was too strong to be broken by a threat. It was a love so deep and thick and real that no one, even my mother, could keep us from seeing one another. Besides, I had demonstrated no signs of brain-deterioration and therefore didn’t have any motivation to stop watching. I needed a fire under my ass or I wasn’t likely to do anything whatsoever.

The first time I experience a scrape from my addiction, I was approaching the end of another school year and was writing a final essay for my American History class. The topic was to write about the people, events and documents that inspired the Constitution. I came to end of a sentence and re-read it. I stumbled upon the word “uncorrectly.” Or, more a combination of letters that I thought was a word. I couldn’t understand why Word had underlined my word combination in red. I was sure that “uncorrectly” was correct. So I thought for a few minutes and just could not figure out what was wrong with it. I stared at it and let it sit in my mind for a while, but that sparked no: “Oooooooh!” followed by a correction. I couldn’t spot the mistake. That was the scary part, not making the mistake in the first place, but not being able to correct it.

So I right clicked on the word and read Word’s suggestions. There was only one:

“Incorrectly.”

I nearly started to cry. My brain had liquefied. I could no longer construct a complex sentence. I could no longer wordsmith. I could no longer play with the language. The language wasn’t my friend anymore. Our relationship was purely technical. It helped me communicate, I helped it stay alive. I had finally done it. My brain had completed its transformation into mush. I hastened my atrophy by poisoning my mind with thousands upon thousands of hours in front of a television. I felt that this was the first of a string of stupid mistakes to come. I had begun my slow descent into ignorance. I was like George. I had built up to my acme, then slid back into the dark depths of idiocy. Or at least, that’s what I was certain of.

So I swore off television. It was to be regarded as the enemy no matter how hard that would be for me. I wasn’t sure if I was quitting because I no longer wanted to make mistakes of this magnitude or if I was quitting as punishment for making the mistake in the first place. Maybe it was both. But the important part was that I was no longer a student of the screen. I allowed myself to do anything when I got home from school besides watch. I could go on the Internet, self-indulge, work out, read, walk the dog, write, sing, dance or build model airplanes. I just couldn’t park myself in a big Lay-Z-Boy, with a Gatorade in one hand and the remote in the other and spend hours sitting, like a drooling primate, watching the flashing eyed Cyclops. It was too brainless an activity, and, as signs all over the city read in big, bold letters:

A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste.

So I decided that I wasn’t wasting mine.

I went to my basement, where I did most of the watching and pulled a plug out of the television. I didn’t know what plug I’d pulled. I didn’t know if I’d pulled the plug for the audio or the video, or the one for my D.V.D. player, or the one for my cable box, or even if I’d pulled a plug out of the television at all. But that didn’t matter. Pulling a plug was liberating. I was out of the system. I had disconnected. Pulling the plug wasn’t so much an action of anti-television-ism as it was a symbol of my new lifestyle. New episodes would air and I would miss them. I would lose track of what was happening on my Will And Grace re-runs. Infomercials would come and go and as much as the burned me, I would survive.

For the first few days, I didn’t feel the pain of not watching T.V. It was all a silly challenge to myself. I was still bloated with self-confidence (which would later be replaced by self-doubt) and willpower (which would later be replaced by horrible pangs of boredom.) But then, as time went by, I found my days teeming with extra hours. An hour when I got back from school, then an hour after I checked my e-mail, then two hours after supper, then another hour before bed. I was disoriented. I had built my whole life-schedule around television and now that there was none of it, it felt like time had compressed, leaving dry voids that it was my job to fill. The people who say that there aren’t enough hours in the day have obviously never quit watching television..

My sister and I shared a tutor and every Wednesday. She would show up at five in the evening and spent an hour and half helping me with math, then an equal amount of time helping my sister. My housekeeper would make food while I was having my lesson and my sister would eat her share, then we’d switch, and I’d eat while watching T.V. Eating would take me half an hour and watching my series’ would take me two. I’d stretch my in-front-of-the-T.V.- meals as to not feel guilty for binge watching. There was a first course of carbs (usually a plate of pasta) then there was some protein (chicken nuggets, steak or pork) then, there was dessert (a fudgesicle, an ice cream bar, a bowl of ice cream, a Popsicle, some chocolate…) After the meal, there was a snack. Usually something that was only eaten because it was a gastronomical delight, like Ritz crackers slathered in cream cheese, or a bowl or sugar coated cereal. The consumption of the meal took me half and hour, then digestion took one and a half. (Or so I estimated.) That came to two hours, which I would spend lodged in front of our television, motionless and engrossed by the beast.

But I couldn’t perform that ritual because I was forbidden from watching any T.V. So I sat in my kitchen, which overlooked the living room in which sat the 48-inch flat panel L.C.D. television, and ate in silence, staring at a blank screen. And so it happened every Wednesday after that.

The next time I was really bitten because I couldn’t watch T.V. was at the dinner party my parents were hosting for a colleague who was leaving the bureau and being relocated to the Middle East, where she had no friends or family. I wasn’t sure if my parents were hosting the party because they liked the woman who was leaving, or because they sympathized with her, but the important thing was that they were hosting a party and therefore couldn’t focus all of their attention on me. I, who, since I was not watching T.V., had nothing to do on weekends besides name and file every single one of 800 or so digital pictures or clean up my Word program. This was about week four of my six-week stint. I had filed every picture and every document on both computers and I was ready to go into town for supper, or to go see a movie, or go bowling. Just ready to do something to get me through another Saturday night.

But I had no parents that night and therefore no money, no car and no company (besides the forty drunk adults in my living room.)

I knew that all I had to do that night was talk to my parent’s friends. I had to be interesting, funny and charming as hell. I had to fight for their attention. I had to have the spotlight on me at all times, because if it focused in on someone else, I knew that it was hell to get it back. I had to be the male Stephanie Tanner and sacrifice all my self-respect just for some attention. When adults have parties, they’re very selective about who they invite. I used to go to “EVERYBODY’S INVITED” parties all the time. Teenagers are vicious creatures, but their totally indiscriminate about their party guests. The more the merrier. But adults try to strike the perfect balance when they have parties. You need to have the meek, but intelligent woman, the bitch, the cocky guy, the married couple, the dyke and the divorcee. There’s no such thing as a good party that doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of labels. So when, as a fourteen-year-old, you’re attending an adult party you have to fight to not be the odd man out. You have to give witty yet meaningful replies to every question that you are asked and you have to be able to carry on a conversation no matter where it goes. If it comes to sex, so be it, politics, bring it on. They cannot feel like they are talking to fourteen year-old. They have to feel comfortable talking about anything. Because, as I’ve learned, it’s better to be in a horribly awkward, boring or otherwise unpleasant conversation than not to be in a conversation at all. I had read enough threads and perused enough forums and been on the CNN website enough times to spend the night as an adult. I was ready.

Turns out that all they wanted to talk about was Gilmore Girls and how tall I was, which I could deal with. People remarked all the time on how tall I was. I had my answers down pat. Besides, I’d never met these people. All the jokes that seemed stale to relatives and friends were, to them, fresh and new. They thought I was inventive and humourous but all I was doing was spitting out lines that I’d had my entire life to rehearse and revise. The Gilmore Girls talk was what was really killing me. I watched the show, but the series finale had aired during my period of abstinence and I knew that any time someone would blurt out the ending and go: “Oooooops. Sooooorry. I forgot!”

But then they started getting drunk and I started feeling like a real prude. That’s just what happens when I’m sober around people who’ve been drinking. I start feeling like they can sniff me out and realize that I’m not like them. They’re like bloodhounds. It’s like they’ve told me a really dirty secret and that I’m not telling them one back.

This one particularly drunk woman started telling me a story about this other time she was drunk.

“You know… When I’m drunk… I’m really clumsy.” She started off, looking into what she thought were my eyes

“Oh, is that so?” I answered, catching her glimpse so that I didn’t feel uncomfortable. This puzzled her and probably made her wonder why I was so fixated on her forehead.

“Yes. Yes it is. One time…” She said, before swallowing and stopping.

“One time…?” I started her off after a lengthy pause.

“Oh, yes. One time I was totally drunk and I mean shiiiiitfaced. But I decided to do the dishes. But I was drunk and the soap was really slippery and I tried to grab a glass but it slipped. It just slipped and smash! It slipped out of my hands and smashed on the floor. So I got down to pick it up and I was picking up and the pieces, one by one and then I saw blood. So I wondered what the blood was and then I looked at my wrist and I had a big gash! Isn’t that so funny!”

Throughout her story this woman was holding in her laughter. But she figured it wouldn’t be a quality anecdote if she’d opened the floodgates right in the middle of it. So she let the laughter build up inside of her and when she was done she exploded like an over inflated balloon. She laughed so hard that she caught the attention of two other drunk women who obviously recognized the first. She gave them a brief of what was going on and they started laughing as well.

I wanted to tell her that her story wasn’t at all funny and stare her down until she finished laughing, but she and her boozed up cronies were all laughing so hard that I knew that unless I laughed, I would forever be the sober kid who was really stick-up-the-ass and judgmental. So I faked it. I fake laughed until I almost fake passed diet coke through my nose. I don’t think they would’ve even remembered had I not fake laughed, but I did. I wasn’t ready to be judged by the drunken ladies. So I fake laughed until I felt that the trio of women had accepted me. I l fake laughed until it didn’t matter that I had no alcohol in my system, it just mattered that I’d “laughed.”
On June 22nd, 2007 I started watching television again. It was the day after the end of 8th grade. I watched the American Office on D.V.R. and enjoyed it much too little. Maybe I wasn’t addicted to television in the first place. Maybe it was a phantom addiction. Maybe television is something that you don’t appreciate until it’s gone, like a pesky younger sibling, or a full head of hair. Maybe it was only once I stopped watching T.V. that I realized I needed it to live. Maybe I had only wanted to watch it because I couldn’t.

I didn’t know the answer to all of those questions, but I did know this:
Next time the three vodkateers get together for drinks and a screening of the series finale of Gilmore Girls, they’ll remember me and my snappy insight and think: “Wow, that was one cool kid. (With a damn good sense of humour!)”