Becoming American

Cable TV

The Beginnings

Get Smart (source)

One reason for or cause of living a bachelor's life is cable TV. It takes and demands a lot of time which can most easily be gained by stopping doing other things. Dish washing takes you away from the TV as does showering, cleaning, and many other household chores. So after I had developed my bachelor style, grown tired of the somewhat limited entertainment value of broadcast TV, and returned from my trip to Greece, I decided to try cable TV.

When I was growing up color TV verses black and white was the more important and pertinent issue than cable verses broadcast. I remember when the nearest public television station began airing the first season of Doctor Who which was filmed in black and white. A friend asked how I liked having to watch the black and white programs. Of course my answer was that all of them were black and white for me.

The first specific memory I have of watching cable TV was near the age of 28 when I did a lot of traveling for business. I remember Delicatessen … by Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Bravo, some cartoon on MTV about a girl and a monster (The Maxx), Shania Twain country music videos, EWTN's Mother Angelica, and down at the far end of the dial there were one or more scrambled adult channels like the strip clubs just past the last respectible business on the highway heading out of town.

The Maxx

On one of the occations I traveled with a group from my office and since my hotel suite had a kitchen I invited co-workers over and prepared dinner one evening-something simple like pizza potatoes. The night before my guests arrived, just before I turned off the TV to head to bed, I had surfed one by one up through the cable stations from the station I had been watching finally convincing myself that there was nothing I wanted to stay up later to watch as I neared the edge of town. So my co-workers began to arrive and made themselves at home as I finished things up in the kitchen and found the necessary utensils for the table. Of course there is little to do in a hotel suite away from all the distractions of home, and it was only a matter of a few minutes before someone turned on the TV. To everyone's amusement and my embarrassment I had left the TV tuned to one of these scrambled adult channels which could periodically be seen to be what it was and could more clearly be heard to be what it was. I'm not sure what everyone thought other than finding it quite amusing. It's an experience I wished I could have planned, but must admit to it being totally happenstance.

Making the Decision

Not only is cable TV a way to spend the time freed up by bachelorhood, it is also a way to explore Americana. With the stage thus set, the moment of decision came about because of rearranging furniture. When I look for ways to make changes in my life, or when I need to get off dead center, I usually rearrange furniture. After the dust settled my television was in a different location, one where the rabbit ears did not receive certain stations very well. About this same time I spent one long day in the mood to watch something on TV and not being able to find anything worth watching. The answer to numerous questions was cable TV. With the excuse of becoming more American easing the funds from my pocketbook, I went ahead and signed up for cable TV.

My Initial Cable Experience

Right away I knew I was in for it. I knew there were two cable companies in my area. The new company had come around my entire apartment complex installing new cable jacks in each unit. I decided to try the newer one, but couldn't remember which was which. As the cable guy was in my apartment hooking up the line, I pointed to the newly installed jack and told him, "This is the one. " He tried it with no success and then tried the old one. I had guessed wrong. Oh well, I wasn't going to keep it forever anyway. Who knows? I might decide to try them both to get the complete cable experience.

So I began watching it and watching a lot of it--my watching habits shifting from watching primarily movie channels, to a few days enraptured by the Discovery Channels, to filling up a VCR tape with Get Smart in the middle of the night, to getting pulled into HBO's Sex and the City, and finally settling back in front of my computer.

Of course there were the frustrations with surfing through the channels to find something to watch without missing 15 minutes of it while surfing the numerous other channels. I guess this is what put me back in front of my computer. I got a little tired of watching movies in bits and pieces and seemingly in reverse. I can't tell you how many movies I ended up watching in at least three pieces this way. What Planet Are You From? was watched in reverse in four pieces.

The Scent of Green Papaya was the straw that broke this camel's back. One night I surfed past it twice on the Sundance Channel and found it increasingly interesting-- so much so that I decided I wanted to watch it in its entirety. So I scanned ahead in the channel's schedule, but couldn't find another airing. On my computer I was able to see a schedule further into the future and found another airing a week away and made a note to myself. When the day came I flipped on the VCR to set the record time only to catch the show in mid-broadcast. I had gotten my a.m./p.m. confused and missed it yet again. Back on the computer I was unable to find it anymore on the schedule. I had botched catching all of the last three airings. Frustratingly, I didn't just miss the last three, but stumbled onto every single one of them midway through.

Lessons Learned

So I got back to broadcast TV and perhaps had a setback in becoming American, but there are other ways to be American and other lessons to be learned. On my Road Trip 2002 I learned the lesson of TiVo.

The clouds parted and a bright sun shone down on me. Frowns turned to smiles. The world didn't seem such a dark and sorry place anymore. There was TiVo to wrest sanity out of the insantity of cable TV and I'm not the only one to think so.