Column: Not Quite Nietzsche TV junkie comes clean
This week, I found myself explaining my weekly routine to a friend, and it went something like this: “I wake up, shower and spend my day doing all kinds of boring, shankity stuff until I can finally get home and watch TV.”
It sounds empty, I know, but I didn’t used to be like this.
I was an idealist in high school. I didn’t eat meat, I looked forward to the day that I could vote and I didn’t even think about watching TV.
It was the new opiate of the masses.
And though it still may be a tool of oppression, I realize now that I belong to the masses and could use some opiates.
Faux drama is my favorite. Every day I wake up thinking, “Only a few more days until ‘The O.C.'” To sate my addiction pains, I’ll skip class and watch soap operas.
After three years of going to class and work only to come home to mounds of homework, I like to turn on the TV and pretend that somewhere in this world, there is a community whose biggest concerns are new fashions and the street price of cocaine.
I know full well that my life will never be like this. The one time I went to a club, I ended up spilling my drink and dancing the robot right into a serious beating.
That is why I need television. It lampoons, augments and shapes my life into something that’s worth watching.
It’s not easy to catalog my TV fascination, but I do so because I know I’m not alone. Take “The O.C”‘ for instance. Ask your friends about it and every single one of the them will swear up and down that the whole thing is nothing more than pop culture gone wrong and that they wouldn’t be caught dead watching it.
That’s fair enough, but ask them if they want to go out on Thursday night and they’ll all mysteriously have plans between 8 and 9 p.m.
Can you really blame them, though? TV is better than art. The pictures move, it’s more convenient than the movies and easier than actually becoming independently wealthy enough to sit around and tell jokes with my other attractive, independent, funny friends.
And to enjoy this world of whimsy and fun, all I have to do is give up my own hopes of ever finding whimsy and fun in my own life. It’s a small price to pay.
There are some feelings of inadequacy that accompany my television habit. It’s only logical than an evening spent watching successful, good-looking people would make me feel a little bad about myself. But it’s nothing that an hour of “South Park” or daytime television can’t fix.
When all is said and done, television programming falls into two camps: TV that makes you realize how sad your own life is and TV that makes you realize how sad everyone else’s lives are. The key here is balance.
Too much of camp A and you end up with a door-to-door popcorn delivery man who knows you by name and a permanent shell of sweat pants.
And as attractive as life as an urban arthropod is, the other extreme isn’t very attractive either.
A fixation with camp B results in a false feeling of security and fake self-confidence that will be shattered soon enough when your girlfriend invites you onto Maury Povich to tell you that you’ve been left for a selfless transvestite turned inner-city pastor.
And, speaking of balance, it’s almost time for “American Idol.” I’ll catch you next week.
Zach Pendleton is a junior in English, tune in next week for another exciting
episode of Not Quite Nietzsche,
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