Unplugged: The Prequel

Okay, before you go any further, a disclaimer: this is all about first-world problems.  You might be better off reading a book or–better yet–get outside, breathe some fresh air, go kayaking or hiking or something.  I’m serious.

But, just in case, you’re still with me . . .

My kitchen counter, this morning:

The toaster oven’s not going anywhere, but those cable boxes . . .

A while back I wrote about choice and paralysis, using my husband’s reaction to our new SMART TV and a Roku as a classic example of when choice becomes overwhelming. Today, I’ll be talking about choice, but of a different kind: a decision to scale down, not up and the very weird feelings I’ve been having about all this.

In a nutshell, we decided that our cable bill was simply too outrageous. It seemed like a good idea at the time, especially for someone raised on the idea of having a television in the house (more about that in a second), and I noticed that my personal tastes gravitated away from network stuff to movies and—I admit it—sports. I’m a football junkie, period. So having this great sports package was glorious . . . except there was all the other crap that came along for the ride: channels I’ve no interest in, at all. I’ll bet we’re like a lot of people forced to purchase ten trillion channels of which we might watch a handful, and not even on a regular basis. Frankly, I hate the obligation of being at a certain place at a certain time (which is very different than having deadlines; those, I like, because they force me to focus—but that’s a topic for another day). Most of the time, if there were a show I thought might be interesting or liked, I would set the DVR. The problem is that I still wouldn’t necessarily watch the shows because just sitting around on my ass, being passive like that . . . it’s not my style. If I do watch a movie or show, I’m much more likely to be doing needlepoint or something else: cooking, whatever. Sitting and watching like that—in contrast to going on a hike and taking a rest on a nice mountain—is kind of soul-numbing. For me, anyway.

Plus, I honestly don’t watch that much TV on an actual TV or for very long. Really. Typically, I’ll watch a couple episodes of something on my iPod while I’m at the gym—Amazon Prime and Netflix have been godsends, as well as some of the network apps; but, I’m sorry: you get rid of Ziva, you’ve lost me, NCIS—and that’s it. My television watching has been relegated to the gym because it makes the workouts go that much more quickly (or, conversely, impels me to stay an extra ten minutes to finish an episode of something).

Otherwise, on a Friday night, after a long week, the husband likes to watch a single episode of House of Cards. (Yes, it’s taken that long for us to get through them. God knows what will happen after three more episodes.) During football season, we might hang with a college game for an hour or something, or the husband would simply slouch in his lounger and channel-surf. (Me, I go read a book. Or go to bed.)

So, as you can see, our television watching is actually quite sparse (he either watches sports or listens to an audiobook at the gym) and, in my case, always combined with another activity. Cutting the cord seemed the logical step, but we went back and forth for quite a while because there was something inside me (principally) that balked. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what, and I think I’ve nailed it.

Fast forward to two weeks ago: we’re at a friend’s lake house for a very, very rare two-day getaway. (The husband and I are true workaholics; I can’t remember the last time we actually went away on a true vacation, which completely sucks.  I haven’t hiked in forever, and I’m starting to go bat-shit . . . but I always have a book I want to write, and he’s always got more genomes to decipher.)  Anyway, the whole cable thing comes up again. It helps that our friends, Fred and Marlene, go to their lake house specifically to unplug. (Although even they have lapses; they’re involved in a very clever business thing with their daughter–all you bachs out there, if you’re stressing over that bachelorette party and just how to get it all to fly the way it ought, check out this site–and so Fred’s configured his phone as a hotspot so he can keep tabs on how things are going, etc. Very useful when you want to check into your flight, too. Me, whenever I’m up there, I go for coffee to a nearby market that has free wifi so I can check my email and all that, but I really got to cut that out someday. I should treat my email like my cell, which I rarely unmute, or my home phones, that I never answer because a) I’m working and b) this is why God invented voice mail.)

Anyway, my husband and Marlene cook up this idea: we should cut the cable cord, keep the Internet (because I really do need it for what I do) and I should blog about it all, how it feels, what it’s like, what we do, how we “cope.”  (This is so first-world, it’s galling.) The worst that can possibly happen is we just can’t stand, oh, saving money and go back on a plan. Right?

So I’ve spent this past week getting ready for the plunge. Let me tell you: it’s been a little all-consuming because, again, there’s this sense of dread I’ve got about it. Yes, dread . . . but why? I’ve puzzled over this all week, trying to analyze my relationship to television, what it means to me, all that. (Hey, I’m serious.) I think I’ve narrowed it down to two issues: family and isolation–and, in many ways, they’re interrelated. Blame the shrink in me; we navel-gazers never know when to let well enough alone.

First, family: you know how older people have memories of hanging around the radio and listening to FDR? Or Gunsmoke? You see those old pictures of families sprawled in their living rooms: kids watching the radio (such a hoot), dad smoking a pipe and reading a paper, mom hugging her kids?

Well, for me, a television has been the equivalent of a radio: something around which my family has gathered. I’m not talking about when I was a kid; while we had a television, my parents rarely let us watch because there were always chores to do and schoolwork. I didn’t particularly like it because I was always the odd kid out at school, the one who didn’t know what had happened on Lost in Space, for example. We could watch educational stuff—Jacques Cousteau, National Geographic—and I remember my parents waking me up to watch Armstrong step onto the moon. We occasionally hung with Walter Cronkite, but never during dinner because dinner was time for family to talk. I even remember my very first glimpse of Star Trek: at a friend of my mother’s house. They had a color TV, which I’d never seen, so that was amazing enough and probably why this sticks in my memory—and they were watching “Arena.” You know, the one where Kirk fights the Gorn and makes gunpowder and sets off a cannon?

Now, the Mythbusters guys have shown that can’t happen because, even if he succeeded, Kirk would’ve been killed in the blowback, skewered by shrapnel–but, hey, don’t bother me with facts: this is why it’s called fiction.

Now, back then at that moment, I didn’t know the whole story behind the episode–like who that hunky guy was or the monster or anything–until much later, when I saw the show on reruns.  We were there in my mother’s friend’s house for only a few minutes–but long enough for me to catch that glimpse that’s stuck with me ever since and propelled me down this path. Really. Star Trek is what got me started with writing in the first place—so television and that particular show hold some very special meaning for me. When I got older, I’d babysit and got to see the show on reruns, and I’d daydream about Trek and drool over Kirk as I did my chores, which was a form of writing but in my head.

Now, fast forward to me having my own family: remember that thing about radio? Well, that happened for us with the telly but around specific times and shows. Again, our big family night was Friday: nice big meal, challah, the whole nine yards and capped off with Star Trek: TNG marathons that Spike TV used to show. It was how I introduced our girls to my particular obsessions, and these were fun times with my family (and I still did needlepoint, but I did it with my children around). We watched Babylon 5 on TNT (wow, that third season was just so wonderful) and, later, when the SCIFI (not that silly SyFy) channel started up, Stargate SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis (again, Friday night adventures). Later, when Lost came out on DVDs, we’d binge-watch that show, and principally on Fridays. I remember how upset I was when Atlantis was cancelled; it happened to coincide with when my first kid was going away to college, and I just knew that it was an end of an era. So there’s that for me, this connection to my children with which TV’s associated, and I can understand the nostalgia, I can.

But dread? Because I’ve really dreaded pulling the plug, cutting the cord. Why?

I think it has something to do with two things: being cut off and isolated and lonely, and losing control. I must secretly dread returning to my being that geeky, awkward, socially-inept kid–the one who didn’t know what was going on with Lost in Space and Dark Shadows and so had nothing to add to any conversation. (Hey, sometimes–many times–I still believe that. Point me to a corner and leave me alone; we’ll both be better off.)

The first time I practiced cutting the cord this week—in anticipation of actually cancelling yesterday (yes, yesterday)—the sight of a screen filled with snow kind of freaked me out. It was a little too close to The Outer Limits, I guess (a show I watched during my years of babysitting and that always scared the bejesus out of me because it always came on really late, like after 11, and usually after The Twilight Zone . . . so, yeah. Freaked.).

The idea of being able to connect with the outside world is strong; I find myself actually craving streaming news or something equally silly because I never watch the news to begin with: I listen to NPR.  Come to think of it, I have always listened to radio, and that’s not going anywhere.  (For God’s sake, I’ve got two combo weather/AM/FM radios . . . no, four: two plug-ins, one battery-powered, one solar and crank.)  I’m no more disconnected now than I was in the beginning.

Yet it’s there, this sense of being alone and, worse, of losing control, the way Outer Limits always warned might happen . . .

and that’s just a touch bizarre that I should feel this way about a technology I rarely use.

I’ll bet it’s this same dread of disconnection that drives people to freak out if the Internet or, heaven forbid, Facebook goes down.  Think about it.  If people went unplugged like that, en masse, for long?  Chaos.  I’m serious.  But, people . . . if you turn on the tap and no water runs out . . . that’s something to worry about because if you don’t have water, you going to die.  Climate change is a crisis.  No honeybees is a crisis.  Algal blooms on Lake Erie, you name it.  But no Facebook?  Get real.  In fact, I’ll bet that is much more acute for the current generation of kids whose relationship to media is very different.  My kids will likely never own a television or, if they do, they’ll use one for gaming or streaming content.  The chances that they will purchase a television solely for the purpose of watching live TV is virtually nil.

I could go on and on about what I’ve learned this week—my chat with the cable people (VERY interesting); setting up Roku; various apps and channels; the various legal and illegal things one can do; how will I ever deal with pro and college football (or the lack of it); is it possible to live-stream from your computer to the TV and with what kinds of gadgets; will this actually make me leave my house in search of live TV and will I then have to interact with <gasp!> living human beings—but I’m going to stop now because this, like cutting the cord, is a work in progress.

Stay tuned . . .

or not.