No Television

When I was transitioning from college to law school and living off campus for the first time, I was robbed. They stole my CD player (and whatever CDs were in it at the time) and my television with the cable box. The robbers neglected to ever look in my roommate's room that contained at least $50,000.00 worth of musical engineering equipment. The loss of the television was particularly poignant, as I had just gotten the cable installed the day before. (Yes, I know that it might have been the cable guy that robbed me.) However, I think I felt the loss of the stereo much more severely, as it was the only item I replaced that year.

It was odd, the amount I accomplished when I had no job to speak of, no classes, and no television. I started reading books all the time. It was as though I had one growing out of my arm wherever I went. Anywhere I walked, my book was sure to be in hand. I'd show up an hour early, waiting for a movie to start and just sit there reading. One day, I missed two showing of a movie I wanted to see because I was too busy sitting in Barnes and Noble reading this book I had just bought. "You're still there?" "This book is so good."

People would start talking about TV shows and I'd have no idea what they were talking about. "Alyssa Milano is a witch?" "What the hell is a Pokemon?" My life consisted of reading books and watching movies. I had high hopes of perhaps finding a job, but not a lot of places were looking for a person with a degree in history and the places one might think of a a good temporary career didn't want to hire someone with a BA. "Why would you want to work here?" They really made such an excellent point. Why would I want to work there? I actually didn't. And then, just when it was starting to look like I could become an assistant manager for a local drug store, I got hired as an intern for a very, very large company - in their information technology department.

The time I spent without a television was perhaps the most productive time of my life, if one measures productivity by getting out of the house and reading massive quantities of pages. However, law school helped to change all of this. By the end of the day, I could barely convince myself to read a menu, let alone another book. I spent no less than 8 hours (often 12) doing nothing but reading and editing all day long, and when I wasn't editing, I was teaching other people how to edit or the finer points of tort law. Television became an escape - a place where I could escape the pages that would haunt my sleep. (One really hasn't lived until they go through semesters with bronchitis and a sinus infection, hopped up on too many medications and too little sleep, having night terrors involving the Commercial Code or the Internal Revenue Code. Fuck the DaVinci Code. That thing has got nothing on the archaic workings of the generation skipping transfer tax system enacted under Title 26 of the United States Code.) Yeah, you English majors got to read Yeats, Emerson, and Shakespeare. I had foreign policy and history authors no one had ever heard of and now I had Congress and the Treasury Department. Something tells me one of us was having more fun.

Television is now no longer a luxury. It's one of the only places I can so easily escape from all the pages of words that surround me day after day. "How do we transfer our home without losing our save our homes cap?" Yeah, go ahead quote me some Whitman, but when someone wants to make sure their newly born daughter will actually be protected if anything ever happens to them, I know who they're going to call, and I better be able to tell them something better than "Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends."