I Never Met Their Mother, Yet I Care

        I just read how the sitcom How I Met Your Mother ends. It was one of my favorites before I went on TV hiatus. Perusing online, I ran into a story about the sitcom's final episode, and couldn't resist.  Is this cheating?          
       Here's what happened: After not watching any episode for weeks, a picture of the characters on the Internet and a headline about the ending stirred my curiosity. I clicked, and there it was, a whole recounting of the final episode.
        Keep in mind, the story is told in retrospect, by one of the characters, who in relaying to his kids how he met their mother years before, also relays the situations and interactions between him and his New York buddies. Episode after episode, season after season, we get to know him and his friends, but not the mysterious mother. That is until the last season, when she becomes one of the characters. And then, according to the article, a twis in the final episode. Also according to the article, Twitter reaction to the last episode's twist leaned negative.
        I never met their mother, but from the characters I did meet, I like the ending, which I didn't watch.
        So here's something: Even after months of not watching TV, I find myself somewhat invested in the final episode of a sitcom. TV is powerful. But maybe the real power is storytelling, linking events and situations in ways that engage you, even when you're not watching anymore.
       Cheating or not, now I know. Just like Cinderella got her slipper and her prince, Ted finally found the love he always wanted. Good for him! I can move on.
       
      
       
      

Finding Resonance

       By now, I'm not missing TV, really. It's been nearly nine months, and I've had zero TV, except for a portion of some major events: some winter Olympics, part of the Oscars, the decisive NBA match back when, the first episode of House of Cards (on Netflix), and a couple of episodes of Food Network's Chopped, just because I absolutely love this show's creative challenge. I do very, very little cooking, but whenever I watch this show, I get inspired to chop more garlic, or ginger, or both, add more cream, do something interesting with the onions.
       But by and large, I'm sticking to my exercise, and I'm finding it isn't that hard.
       I find that I spend more time on the Internet, which can become an equally addictive waste of time if I don't pay attention. With the Internet, though, I feel I have more control and am more likely to hit on instructive entertainment. For one, I remain fascinated with the Ted website, where I can watch and listen to some of the most intelligent presentations, from speakers throughout the world. How cool is that?
      I also discovered I can watch and listen, live, to any author presenting at my local bookstore (Books & Books in Coral Gables, FL, www.booksandbooks.com). Earlier this evening, I caught the question-and-answer session with Ediberto Román, lawyer and author of Those Damned Immigrants: America's Hysteria over Undocumented Immigration (Citizenship and Migration in the Americas).  Román, I thought, was a little bit combative when answering one of the questions. But for sure, he was unscripted.
      Separately, I ran accross one more message resonating with my TV-less life.  The message came through work, in an unintended way. My boss sent me a link to a page discussing a topic she'd like to see in the corporate magazine. I explored the site, www.newdream.org, and found this message:
      "We work too much, we consume too much, we don’t have enough time for friends and family, and we’re constantly being bombarded with marketers' manipulative messages. It’s time to help Americans live lives beyond consumerism. It’s time to build a society that has transcended an economy based on artificially stimulated consumption and unsustainable growth and to develop instead an economy and culture that are centered on maximizing well-being."
     

      I haven't fully processed the fact that it was my boss who pointed me to this link, which is somewhat incongruous with the commercial real estate activity of the company, an activity that thrives on consumerism. But for now, that's a separate story.
     What is relevant to my exercise is that consumerism is related to TV-watching, of course: "Americans spend more than four hours a day watching television and are exposed to 52,500 TV ads a year—that’s 15.5 days of advertising annually!"
      Okay, I probably was watching half  that much, which is to say two hours. Two favorite sitcoms (it isn't hard to come accross them on any given night) and a favorite one-hour show or news program, and you've got two hours. But if  I found three favorite sitcoms playing in a row, or a re-runs fest, then I could run into three hours. Then figure in the ads that accompany those - at least 30 per hour - and we're still talking a lot of TV ads. 
       To be sure, there are a couple of ways I can think of to avoid watching ads, if you don't mind watching programs after their original scheduled time. Even so, it takes effort and planning to record your programs, or watch through Netflix. So, more likely than not, we're all watching a lot of ads, and that's the price we pay for entertainment or information, in addition to our cable subscription. (Wasn't cable supposed to be ad-free?)
     Then I found a link to this: http://www.screenfree.org/ From May 5-11, this international coalition organizes and sponsors a movement to turn off all screens, except when necessary for school or work. The idea is to organize your daily activities for a week so they don't include the use of any screens.
      Hmm...I might be looking at an interesting, and potentially very rewarding challenge. Seven days, five of them with school and work, so we're talking basically five evenings, and two weekend days. Seems very, very doable. Can I get my 14-year-old on board, she who is thinking she might like to study marketing?
      No Internet, no iPad for my daughter, for one whole week. Can I take it up that one more notch? Let's see: mealtime conversation, maybe a swim, maybe playing some classical music (I can hear her, "Mom! What's that?!), maybe teach her how to sew a hem, go to the bookstore, come up with knock-knock jokes, or invent a new ice cream flavor. 
      Somewhere, somehow, between insanity and absurdity, this seems like a good idea. Mark my calendar.
     

 

While Not Watching TV, I found St. James and Thoreau

   So what is this exercise of not watching TV really all about?  I forbid myself from watching TV, write a blog about it which very few people read, and then what? Self-imposed deprivation of some of our culture's most creative and clever writing...for what?
   I was pondering these questions and considering the option of stopping this blog and looking for something else to write about -- in the end it is a fetish with written words that keeps me blogging -- when I came accross a wonderful book: Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James. As happens with most books I pick up randomly at the bookstore, I was drawn to the size (not too big), cover design (simple, with a lot of white space), and last, a bargain-price sticker.   
   The second step is opening it to a random page, which turned out to be a chapter about rethinking meals with friends, and opting to have them out in a restaurant, instead of going through the required, time-consuming preparations of cooking at home. My thinking exactly! (I love it when a published author and I are on the same page.) Goes without saying that having friends over for dinner is always an option, when you're up for it. The point is that if the prospect of having to plan and prepare a home cooked meal will delay and ultimately prevent  you from getting together with friends you really enjoy spending time with, then it's time to rethink the meal part of the get together.
    I took the book home with me and kept finding more messages, beginning with this on the front jacket: "'Simplify, simplify.' That's what Henry David Thoreau urged his fellow Americans to do a hundred and fifty years ago."
    I was a big fan of Thoreau back in my high school days when our English teacher introduced us to him, and here is this 21st century author bringing him back to me in 100 different ways to simplify my modern life. Bonus: None of them require me to go without electricity or hot water or, thankfully, build a cabin in the woods with my own two hands.
    Guess what I found today as I kept perusing randomly through my book? Chapter 25: Turn Off the TV. In seven short paragraphs, St. James goes over all the reasons I decided to take a hiatus, from mindlessness drama to manipulative ads, even as I sometimes miss the good stuff that TV does have. The last paragraph: "If you're addicted to television, kicking the habit will certainly simplify your life. People who've done it say it's one of the best things they've ever done."
    It got me all excited again about this personal exercise. I got Thoreau back in my life, which is to say, I got some insight into why I'm doing this TV-less exercise: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.
    The house is quiet and dark except for my desk lamp. I hear the hum of the AC, and my daughter already sleeps for her 5:30 a.m. schoolday wake-up. I am but a speck, but I fill the space. What a good feeling to go to bed with.
    

  

Netflix's House of Cards -- Power Too Wrong To Resist

        One peculiar thing about my self-imposed TV hiatus is that sometimes I feel its power even stronger than when I wasn't in hiatus.
        In other words, I had to watch House of Cards, a relatively new series created by Netflix.
        A friend kept insisting, "You have to watch it", repeating this message every time after he  watched it, as if every next episode raised his opinion of the show. A co-worker endorses it strongly. And my boss says she's hooked on it.
       It was beginning to feel like the whole world had come upon a revelation, while I remained in the dark.  So I finally caved and watched one episode, the opening episode.

       The series, starring Kevin Spacey, is about a U.S. senator and his underhanded schemes to gain and exert power, which involve using and destroying others, if that will suit his purpose. His motivation is exacting revenge and getting his due after being passed over for promotion to U.S. Secretary of State. The series is in its second season, and won actress Robin Wright, who plays the congressman's wife, the 2013 Golden Globe award for best actress in a TV series drama.

                             

                                                               

       When people rave about the series, I hear echos of Downton Abbey and Scandal.Those were major hits too, practically until the other day. What is it about these shows that hooks us so?

       For House of Cards, at least part of the answer is a carefully calibrated combination of viewer preferences, according to this really interesting article in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
        Netflix used its accumulation of rental data to arrive at a sure recipe. Not by accident, House of Cards combines three powerful rent-demand drivers: Kevin Spacey (a hot seller, who knew?), director David Fincher (he directed The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo and The Social Network) whose work people love, and, lastly, a previous and similar BBC mini series also called House of Cards, based on a novel by Michael Dobbs, and which had flown off Netflix's shelves. Netflix adapted that BBC production into the U.S. version.
         It's like improvising a cookie recipe by combining Godiva chocolate...(okay, I'm gonna stop this analogy, because I'm also on a diet and if I keep going, I won't be able to resist getting up for the Chips Ahoy bag.)
         So the other night I watched the first episode. Being that it was on Netflix, which is to say without any commercials, it was pretty engaging. It's safe to say that watching Senator Underwood (Kevin Spacey's character) is probably more interesting than any real life political debate about health care or immigration. Underwood is very troubled. So is everything and everyone around him, from his calculating wife to the desperate newspaper reporter who hooks him as a source
         Maybe that's one of the things about TV that hooks us -- how overdone the plots are. People aren't just damaged -- they are really damaged. They're not evil, they are super evil. They're not plain ol' good, they are heroic. It gives definition to the blurry gray areas, inconsistencies and contradictions that make up real life and real people.
         But I think the most resonating element of House of Cards is the root of the drama, which is Underwood's injured pride or vanity, along with a sense of betrayal. All his actions -- and they are not pretty -- are propelled by that injury.
         As I write my silly blog, I wonder if Netflix calculated one more element when creating the series: how powerless we are against someone else's decision to use or betray us. Underwood is the "bad" version of seeking reparation, of setting the score even. He is an anti-hero, and we love him.
         Hmm...Makes me think of another series I've been hearing raves about: Breaking Bad. I haven't watched it, but hear it's about a high school science professor who begins finding it more rewarding, financially and otherwise, to cook up drugs in his lab and sell them.  No more Mr. Nice Guy.
         Hero or anti-hero, maybe we're all tired of getting the short end of the stick and it makes us happy to see Mr. Nice Guy grow fangs.
         I think I get it. One episode will do.
        
        
        
        
        
        
     
    
   
  
       

       
       

Golden Globe for Best Unscripted Story

     So I learned this morning that the Golden Globe awards were last night.

         I didn't sit to watch the pageant of beautiful gowns, hear the jokes, and learn how recent movies and TV shows fared with the foreign press. I just wasn't there from my living room, as I have in past years. The way those events are covered, and with the TVs we have nowadays, even from your living room you feel almost as if you are there. But not me this year.

         Instead, I went to my sister's house to celebrate my nephew's 40th birthday. No awards, no speeches, just family. And I don't know about yours, but my family events are sort of unprogrammed round-robbins, in which you talk for 15 or 20 minutes with someone or group of someones before you're compelled to change interlocutors.

        Given a very diverse group of guests, I got to exchange thoughts about diverse things. Favorite places for brunch, for example. On this round, I ended up with the impression that I'm not a very sophisticated bruncher, because my current favorite is Cracker Barrel, which, I learned, doesn't meet the definition of a "pretty" place for brunch. But trust me, its pancakes taste like platanitos fritos (fried plantains) and it has a charming country store in front.

         Brunch aside, after last night, the opera now beckons me. Turns out the sister hosting the party, a retired college math professor, has somehow become a member of the chorus in an upcoming opera performance. If your sister is in an opera, you go see her, especially if she has a couple of complimentary tickets.

         I also learned about the trials and tribulations of being a judge, from a criminal-court judge who is related to my niece-in-law. I learned she hates it when a lawyer goes on and on just for show, but is learning to be gracious about it. She has no patience for an unprepared lawyer. Loves it when a lawyer brings to the courtroom a case on which the law is still evolving. And when a case involves child abuse, she goes into a mental zone where feelings of horror get churned through a machinery of objective composure. 

         One of my cousins, who is a lawyer, chimed in this conversation, from a lawyer's perspective. This cousin is headed cross country to celebrate my aunt's birthday, 95th, all her mental faculties, and most of her physical ones, intact.
         It is from this aunt's account that I've taken notes on the story of my grandfather's origins in Asturias, Spain, before he left for Cuba in the late 1800s. In Cuba he married my grandmother, who was 16 years younger than him. They had four daughters, including my mother. When my mother was 40, she got pregnant with me, her eighth child. We, all 10 of us, left Cuba three years later. I grew up and went to Wellesley College. In Wellesley, as it turns out, I met briefly the aforementioned judge, also a Wellesley student, as we were both Hispanas. Little did I know that decades later we'd end up in the same family parties.
         That ended up happening in a spiral of events that took place over several decades. My sister, the one now in the opera chorus, 30 years ago met a widower who had a 10-year-old son. The widower and my sister married and the boy became my sister's son, and thus my nephew, the one who just turned 40.
      My nephew grew up, and then met, fell in love and married a young woman who was friends with another sister's daughter. The young woman who married my nephew has a brother. The brother, it turns out, is married to the judge, the Wellesley grad. And that's why my fellow alum, now a judge, and I, find ourselves in some of the same family parties, decades after graduating and following completely different paths. 
       Movie and TV plots engage our interest because of how they interweave characters' lives in intricate, surprising shapes and patterns. Funny how real life does the same.
         And so the Golden Globe goes to...all of us, including you, for the uncanny twists and turns in our lives, taking us to so many surprising places and people.
     
        
    

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.

          

Four Months Without TV and Counting

       

       Today marks exactly four months since I decided to go without TV for a six-month period, a kind of Thoreau-like experiment, saving the distance, of course.
       I haven't cheated, except for Game 7 back in June, when the Miami Heat won the  NBA championship. Game 7 was a the deciding, nerve-wracking, nail-biting game, and no, it doesn't count as cheating.
       Aside from that, nothing, nada. I literally haven't had TV.
       Here's what happened.
       Shortly after the Heat game, I got my bill from AT&T U-verse, and almost fell to the floor when I saw that the monthly amount for the TV had almost doubled. Turned out that the promotions I had gotten when I first signed up were now expired. And hey said no, there wasn't anything they could do for me now. Hello? Didn't they know that if there was ever a customer they needed to woo, it was me? Hadn't they read my blog? Apparently not, so I just cancelled. Radical.
       I promised my daughter I would look for a cheaper provider, and to just bear with the silence for a few days. Or maybe we would talk more, and not even notice the silence. In any event, a few days turned into a few weeks, in part due to a frustrated attempt with Comcast, in part due to other things calling for my attention, like gardening and reading. And we did talk more over dinner. Heck, I actually cooked dinner. The rest of the time, as the evening wound down, we had only the muted noises of a quiet household: the cat prancing around, the AC humming, a question about homework, pages turning on a book, texts buzzing back and forth on my daughter's phone.
       Then, just as my daughter was beginningn to contemplate running away from this TV-less home, a new offer from AT&T arrived in the mail, at the same price as before, maybe even a couple dollars cheaper! Today, four months into my six-month hiatus, we got hooked up again. A test from the universe, of course.
        When the technician turned on the set to check if all was working properly, the list of shows brightly displayed on the screen made me feel like a kid opening a chest of forgotten toys. On top of that, radio ads for new season premieres have been playing on the radio: How I Met Your Mother, Two Broke Girls, Big Bang Theory, and tons of new shows. And pretty soon, people will be talking about the more serious shows, like Scandal, and already I'm out of the conversation when it turns to Breaking Bad, which I have no idea what it's about.
       But no, I'm not falling off the wagon.

       

        An interesting thing in the first TV-less trimester is that it happened to include a short visit to Los Angeles, the cradle of TV. We toured one of the major studios, of course, Warner Brothers, chosen because it contains remains of the set for Gilmore Girls, one of my favorite TV shows ever, ever, ever. We saw the front of Luke's Diner, and I could imagine Lorelai prancing in and ordering coffee. (Gilmore fans will know what I'm talking about.)
        We saw New York and Chicago street alleys that looked so real, you expected a garbage truck to come by any minute. We saw the office for The Mentalist, as drab and cluttered as so many offices I've been in. We stepped in the coffee house for Friends, and learned that if you put a big couch right in front of the camera, the stuff behind the couch looks small, which in turn makes the overall space appear much larger on the screen. And we saw the perennially broken elevator and stairs that lead to Sheldon's and Penny's apartments in Big Bang Theory, another favorite of mine, which is still filming, but whose season premiere I won't get to see. 
         Learning the visual and engineering tricks of TV production was a lot of fun, as entertaining as the make-believe stories that are played on it. It makes me question, what exactly is the evil of TV that I seek to escape?
         There's no evil in TV. It's make-believe as engaging as storytelling has been since the days of Beowulf. (Not that I know exactly when that was, except for a notion that Beowulf is one of the first pieces of literature in the English language, if not the first.  English lit gurus, feel free to set me straight.) What is TV if not story telling? One story, after another, after another.
         While in L.A., I spent time with flesh and bone friends, friends whose story lines I know since childhood, and whose lives have continued to unfold with expected and unexpected twists and turns that don't lack for drama, as much drama as any soap opera, as much humor as any situation comedy, as much uncertainty as any suspense series.
         We write the plot and the lines as we go. You look good. You are so smart. So brave. So kind. A pain, sometimes. Me, a pain too? Ha!
        The laughter isn't canned. The jokes aren't scripted. The fears that are part of life, as real as it gets. And so is the affection. Our outcomes may or may not be perfect, we don't know. But the hoping for and rooting for and cheering on and arguing against and laughing at is live, the kind of live that goes through someone's skin. 
        There's no evil in TV, it harbors as much creativity and healthy entertainment as it does mind-numbing noise and distorted reality. But away from it and with real life friends I have a role in the story, a story that really makes me vibrate with laughter and wonder.