Another Six Months?

     It's been so long since I posted, that I'm impressed I actually remembered my user ID and password to get into my blog. Could a better memory be one of the benefits of not watching TV?
     But the more crucial question is this: Now that I've completed my six-month TV hiatus, have I gained anything, and will I continue it?
     To the first question, have I gained anything, I think the answer is a definitive yes. Which of course compels me to articulate now what it is that I have actually gained. I think one of the things is that the word "articulate" now comes easier to the fore. I have been reading more, and reading, as we have all been told by wise people, has a definite impact on your vocabulary. Then again,  "articulate" already was in my vocabulary. However, I wasn't using it often enough. And I love that word and its meaning: convert thought into words.
      And maybe thought is the first thing I have gained or re-gained from not watching TV. I either have more thoughts now, or I'm more aware of them. I like that, even if sometimes it feels like a burden, carrying thoughts around. The cure for that, or course, is to read. The amount of thoughts that is unloaded in a book or a story or an essay is like a party where the reader's thoughts can let loose. I think when I watch TV, I just suspend thought.
     
      In case you're curious as to where I have unloaded my thoughts over these past six months: The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankel; Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson; The End of the World as We Know It, by Robert Goolrick; No Regrets, Coyote, by John Dufresne; The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat; Coming Apart, by Charles Murray; The Old Man and the Sea (re-read); The Great Gatsby (re-read, because the movie came out.); and a long-lost friend, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, because reading that book always makes me feel smart, hopeful and understood.
      Some of the others are memoirs and some are other forms of non-fiction, and even those that are fiction are based on historical events, like the brutal expulsion of Haitians from Dominican Republic in late 19th century (The Farming of Bones), and the forced encampment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor (Snow Falling on Cedars). So much of the wonders and horrors of humanity escape neat scripts with happy endings.  
      It doesn't seem like a lot for six months, but I read a book the way I drink coffee -- slowly, to savor every molecule in it. I also discovered what I consider a gem in the Internet, TED, a think tank whose website contains 15-minute talks by experts from all over the world on possibly every field, and more than once I've found myself late at night perusing the site's topic selection, as if my mind were a hand dipping into a potato chip bag.  (Check it out, www.ted.com)
      I've refreshed my awareness that life isn't a scripted story. I've reacquainted myself with the loose ends and uneven edges in my life's narrative, and stopped feeling compelled to disown them. I like loose ends and uneven edges. It's the stuff of open waters and new pathways. TV stories present lifestyles and characters that are pretttier and shinier than day-to-day drudgery, but from a distance, I can't help notice how hard it is for the script writers to take characters out of a scheme. How is anything fresh in your mind, never mind your life, going to come out of a dead-end scheme?    
      The best part of not watching TV might be the underexposure to advertising. What a detox. On the one or two recent occassions when I allowed myself a peek -- to take my temperature, so to speak -- I was almost propelled off the couch by the first set of commercials. How dare they interrupt the story? And the noise pollution! (Sorry, Papi, with all due respect to the fine art of advertising, which sustained our family. But at heart you were a poet.)
      To be sure, sometimes I feel like I'm missing something, I know I am. From more than one person I keep hearing how good the TV series Breaking Bad is. I also have to bury my curiosity about new shows and what novelty they bring in looking at life. And when I see billboards or ads with the characters from my favorite shows -- Big Bang, How I Met Your Mother -- I feel a nostalgic urge to reconnect. But then, reconnect would be the wrong word.
       Everything else that I'm doing instead of watching TV, that's reconnect, even if it's in silence, with a keyboard. So to answer the second question, yes, I will continue my TV-less life. Another six months? I can do it.