Screen break: living without TV

[Gutenberg]

Here you can read Eva Wisemans story about what happens when she involuntary is deprived of
television for a month...

"Screen break: living without TV

A month with a broken television teaches you a lot about the poor fools who choose not to watch – and about just how long a January evening can be."

Read the article here.

[TerryS]

What a strange article. The author describes the horror of living a whole month without TV. But if she was really that desperate she could easily get a cheap TV (to hold her over until she gets a better one), or borrow one from a friend.

And yet she hesitates, all the while decrying no-TV people as sad souls “living only half a life”. It kind of seems like she prefers life without TV, but doesn't want to become one of those awful anti-TV people who are just too snobbish for words.

Or, maybe the whole thing is just a ploy to get people to come back to her column to see... will she or won't she, buy a new TV.

[Gutenberg]

She writes: "I turned the TV off at the mains for a few tense minutes, minutes spent pacing the short length of my flat, sweating from the head. The worst bit was watching it try so hard to stay alive. I pressed the power button and the standby light flickered, like a little red eye struggling to open."

Perhaps this is a case of television withdrawal symptoms?

[TerryS]

A blogger writes about the horrors of living only half a life:

“But I don’t do anything instead, exactly; I just do… stuff. In the past week, I’ve learnt two songs on the violin, done a yoga class, hiked along a bit of Seven Sisters, sewn up the holes in my coat, watched some bearded banjo players and read some of Howl’s Moving Castle. Tonight I have a violin lesson and then a friend’s gig to go to. Should I cancel one or the other, to make time for TV? Instead? Because between work, fun stuff and the necessities of feeding myself and remembering to brush my hair, I’m not sure when I’m meant to find time for that missing half of my life.”

http://commutejoy.wordpress.com/2012/01 ... lf-a-life/

The tragedy is that she has been living only “half-a-life” for her whole life:

“After reading Eva’s article, I phoned my mum and asked her if she could explain why she decided to raise us without TV. She thought, and then said that it was because so much of her childhood was spent in front of one... There was no interaction, and I think that affected my education and my social skills. I felt dumbed down, as if my senses had been dulled. When I had kids, I didn’t want them to feel unwanted, to feel they were living their lives through another medium.”

http://commutejoy.wordpress.com/2012/01 ... lf-a-life/

Thanks to her mother, her “half-a-life” doesn't sound quite so bad.