Sunday, February 21, 2021
Saturday Evening Post
I am going to say something that I never imagined was possible: I have grown tired of watching television. It's taken three seasons of Treme, four of Friday Night Lights, and more of Below Deck than I ever previously even knew existed to get me to this point, but I'm here. Last night Ian and I could not think of a single thing that we actually felt like watching. Not a Hallmark movie filmed in like 72 hours in Vancouver with the most inoffensively bland actors available for scale. Not an SVU of either the pre- or post-Stabler era. Not even the Youtube clip of the time Katie Holmes was on So You Think You Can Dance. We were just done.
So if you can believe it, we actually turned off the television and read for a while. (Not out of the same book; we'd never be able to agree on who got to turn the pages.) I got through two New Yorkers (minus Talk of the Town, which remains unbearably cloying to me), and now know a lot about the depressing post-pandemic future of the workplace. I even read a few John Cheever short stories, and now know a lot about the depressing pre-war state of suburbia. And yeah, I intermittently played MarioKart on my phone. Even great thinkers have to develop their eye hand coordination, don't you know.
To be clear, I'm not going to become one of those people who says they don't really watch television. But I am going to take breaks when the mood strikes me. I'm sure it will make my return to Rizzoli & Isles all the more rewarding.
