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.        
       
  
        
         
    
        
          
   
        
       
   
        
        

Can I Let Go of the Heat?

       As I continue my exercise of avoiding TV for six months, I'm confronted with a dilemma: the Miami Heat are playing in the NBA finals.
       I began my six-month TV-weaning exercise on June 1. Full disclosure: On Monday (June 3) I just had to watch. It was a decisive game. So I watched the game and nothing else. Nothing before. Nothing after. Just the game. The game that would decide whether the Heat moved on to the finals.
       The stuff on the screen was gripping, inspiring. There was LeBron James strategizing cryptically with his teammates, orchestrating plays that turn a sport into art. There was Dwayne Wade executing his unique style of court acrobatics, snaking through places only he can see. There was the towering Chris Bosh shooting three-point baskets, the universe suspended for an instant. The Miami Heat did amazing stuff, and I sat on the couch and watched it on the screen for three hours.
         Okay, I can sort of let that one go by and still consider myself good for the exercise. But now come the finals.
         Some things are worth watching. Some things are worth sitting three hours for. Men able to suspend themselves in mid-air after running through multiple giant human bricks time and again might well be one of them. Further, by watching it  Monday, I got to participate in the collective glee they brought to my town. Sweet, really sweet.
         But, if the finals that begin tomorrow stretch out for all seven games, watching the worthwhile could amount to 21 hours, or almost an entire day sitting in front of the TV. Even if I just watch decisive games, am I sticking to the exercise?
          On the other hand, if what is being shown on the screen isn't a scripted show and could be experienced live if one were to have tickets, does it count as TV? What counts as "TV"? Is it simply anything and everything that comes through the apparatus, or only that which is scripted? Is there a difference between those two in terms of how one experiences them? What if I went to a sports bar and watched the game there with a group of friends -- would that count as sitting down and watching TV?
          I guess I'll wrestle with this at 8 p.m. tomorrow.
          
       
        
        
        
         
   

       

Insiduous No More

         The low point might have been the one hour I spent watching, actually sitting down and watching, an entire episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. If there is a reality show I always knew I'd never watch, it was this one. Don't ask me why these three sisters are famous, because I couldn't tell you. I had come accross photos and photo captions of them on celebrity magazine covers while in line at the supermarket, and always looked at them like I would at a beef jerky: Who would consume this and why?
         Yet here I was, slouched on the couch, following the non-plot of their show as if any scene or any dialogue in it would deliver resolution and satisfaction. (If you haven't traveled this path, trust me, it doesn't.) In my defense, I could say I sat to watch it because my daughter likes it -- supposedly because of the fashion and the seemingly glamorous lifestyle they showcase on TV -- but I sat watching long after my daughter had turned her attention to something else (namely, texting on her iPhone, which is another story). So, while the sane me watched the demented me passively viewing this atrocity, a nasty suspicion started creeping into my semi-comatose mind: TV was overpowering me.
         I looked at the apparatus. It is beautiful. I bought it earlier this year after my pre-historic, bulky, hugely three-dimensional box that weighed as much as an elephant finally gave out. After four days of void in my household, my daughter and I went to Best Buy and found an incredible special sale for a top notch plasma screen high definition something something that I think it's 36 inches, out of which the brightest images and sharpest sounds explode to fill our living room with more beauty, excitement and drama than that contained in the collective lives of my entire subdivision of 500 homes.
        TV is good. It tells good stories, entertaining stories, imaginative stories, even instructive stories. But none of them are your story, your imagination, your learning, all of which you give up at least in part when you watch TV, even good TV. Get distracted, and the apparatus will make you watch three sisters you don't know and don't care about talk endlessly about the nothing that passes as their personal lives.
        Tomorrow is Monday. Know what Monday is? The day for How I Met Your Mother. I love that show. When I see it in the program guide, it's almost as if my heart jumps.  It has a fresh format: Each episode revolves around the life of five young professional friends in New York, narrated by one of them, Ted, who is recalling the events as he tells his children how he met their mother. Episode after episode we go through humorous situations with Ted and his friends, without yet getting to the part of how Ted actually met the future mother of his children. And you want to get to that part as badly as Ted wants to fall in love, get married and raise a family.
         At the end of the show's past season some two weeks ago, the story line got closer to that critical moment, giving all the indications that she will become a character in the next season. How do they actually meet? How does he conquer her or fall for her or recognize that she's the one, after all the women we've seen  him get involved with? Meanwhile, Robin, his lingering flame, is getting married to Barney, the perennial bad boy, even though neither one seems quite ready for it. Will they go through with it?
         I guess I won't find out, not for the next six months anyway.
        Ted, I'm really going to miss you. But I'm looking at the bright side. I'm also getting rid of the Kardashians.