It’s all Tim’s fault.
A few months ago, my friend saw an opportunity to please my eleven-year-old son and gain an excuse to get an X-box – and donated his Playstation 2, games, instruction books and all, to my household.
Jake more or less ignored the package, until friends showed him how to play; then, he was quickly hooked by the booming sound effects and dreamlike graphics. After that, it didn’t take long till I’d had enough of the repetitive base line and the game cartriges piling up on the living room floor – and suggested that we move the whole kit, including the ancient television in my kitchen, to his room.
Hmm. Now I was without entertainment for dishwashing and crepe-making. I whined at a party, and a friend talked up Hulu, so I watched a few episodes of TV shows I’d missed. No commercials! I discovered, too, that shows like “Rachel Maddow,” “Frontline,” and “The American Experience” were available on line, any time – and so was the NPR stuff I most listened to, but that didn’t always come on the local station when it was convenient for me.
Suddenly I was unbound by TV and radio schedules – I could watch or listen to anything I wanted, even if I got home from a run or ride at 8 pm and the show came on at 6.
For years, I’d had a high speed internet connection, and friends told me that instead of manually switching wires between the laptop and desktop computer, I should purchase a wireless router. One rainy day I did – and was astounded. You mean all I had to do was plug in three connections, restart the computer and modem, and I was doing internet from my living room couch? It was that simple? That meant yes. I could now stream Hulu and Netflix directly to a screen on my lap.
TV on demand was getting awfully convenient – and scheduling my evening around favorite TV shows seemed, well, antiquated.
Right about then the cable bill arrived – $147, every month. A lot of money to a budget strained by running shoes, race registrations, airline tickets and vet bills.
Was it possible I could do without cable? I’d tried before. In college at University of Washington, I had no TV at all – and survived nicely on NPR and (pre compact-disc) cassettes. But once I got out of the cultural hothouse of Seattle and into the wasteland of Artesia, New Mexico, for an oil field job, the first thing I bought was a small black and white TV set.
In no time at all I developed a “Dallas” addiction. And after I got married, we ate our meals to “MASH,” then “Star Trek,” “Cheers,” “Third Rock,” football games of course the TV seemed to be on all the time. I tried to cut it off when once again I lived on my own, but found I was too lonely in my tiny house, thinking about the sons who were elsewhere, getting used to another mother.
Cutting the cable off this time meant no TV schedule at all, though, and that felt obscurely scary. What if I find myself craving the comfort, the certainty, that, tonight, the wives on “Big Love” will quarrel but will make an uneasy peace eventually, that Keith Olberman is bound to so fiercely inveigle against something that the tears come to his eyes, that the Marines on “The Pacific” will exhibit incomprehensible bravery, and that Tim Gunn will sing out “make it work!” on the way out of the work room? Can I bear the silence?
I decided to table the final decision until I picked Jake up for his next weekend with me, then put the question to him on the way to my house. “Anything I wanna watch on the Cartoon Channel, I can see online, mom. If you have WiFi, that means we can both be on at the same time, right? And it saves you money? No problem!”
So this time, I hope, it’s different. This time, everything I want, I can get via a URL. And if I don’t get to see, in real time as defined by the networks, Henry Eight decapitate his whorish fifth wife, or all of Tara’s new personalities, or whether Nurse Jackie prefers, on a given night, her husband or her drugs – well. I can watch it all next year.
Still. As I handed my box and remote over to the cable employee this afternoon, and saw my connectivity bill cut by a C-note, I felt a mixture of joy and – fear is the only way to describe it. Because 7 p.m. will roll around tomorrow night, and I’ll be alone, and I’ll have no appointments or commitments. Even to my TV set.
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@msn.com) of Colorado Springs is a special education teacher at the middle school level. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
