All of the Super, None of the Bowl

As I sit down to write for the first time in several days, I think of the great things that have transpired since my last posting. A great friend spent the week visiting, we spent a day on the town with another friend of ours, and the now legendary Snowpocalypse (a.k.a, Snowmaggedon, a.k.a Keyser Snowze) dumped almost 3 feet of snow in my yard.

I also managed to mark an important anniversary: 10 years since I have sat down and watched an entire football game.

Granted, I have attended a handful of social events that have been football-centric, to include three Superbowl parties in which I left at halftime. However, the last game I watched from start to finish involved the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beating the Oakland Raiders in Superbowl Something or Other.

My revelation: I don't miss it one bit.

Really though, it's not just football. I haven't had a TV that gets channels since July 2000.

Revelation #2: I miss that even less.

I have watched TV several times in the last decade. Everytime my wife and I stay in a hotel, she checks the guide for her beloved HGTV. If not that, then my daughter will turn on Animal Planet or Discovery Channel. On the rare occasion when I have a voice, it's the History Channel (last summer I saw a great show about the history of cheese!) And don't get me started on movies, because I love to watch a good movie. However, TV that involves 500 channels, sucks $100 a months out of my pocket and stuffs commercials into my retina for 8 hours a day, well lets just say that is not a lifestyle choice in my house.

And I have been all the happier for it.

Jump back to that last Superbowl that I watched in January 2000. At that time, and for a number of reasons that I will not go into, I was at a point where my life made me want to cry. In hindsight, it seems pretty sad for a healthy 24 year old man with a brand new degree from the University of Wisconsin who had all of his limbs and wasn't entirely unattractive to feel that way, but it was true.

I am not blaming the TV. I had a number of reasons for feeling that way, and I spent the better part of the next 4 years trying to fix them. But TV was a pretty easy escape at the time, and for a man whose life felt devoid and fruitless, it only made matters worse when a day off was spent doing nothing but staring at a glowing screen and wishing my life was as easy as it was for the characters on "Friends".

Giving up TV was not a conscious choice 10 years ago, it just wasn't feasible. I made an effort to run from my problems only to learn an important lesson: no matter where I go, I always find myself there. So, I tackled the root of my problems (i.e., me) and joined the Army. Call it "group therapy." Needless to say, Army life wasn't conducive to TV.

Sometime in 2004 I got back home from a 16 month trip to the desert. I was married by then, and my wife and I embarked on a month long trip across country. And every night, we would check in our hotel, turn on the TV, and it would hit me: TV is awful. The programming is so absurd and removed from anything that I have ever experienced it's almost insulting. And the commercials somehow managed to be even worse. What's more, those all too familiar feelings of wasting away that lost me sometime after my enlistment, managed to seep back in a bit. I told my wife then that I didn't want to have cable in our house when we got one and, miraculously, she was quite amenable to that.

Don't get the wrong idea about me. I have a TV. I even have a DVD player, and I visit Redbox for one or two movies a week, in addition to the ones already owned. I love movies as both an artform and a great source of entertainment. They also have a distinct advantage over TV: 1) No commercials, and 2) when it's over, I don't channel surf looking for something else to watch. As a result, I can say that I spend about 4 to 10 hours a week in front of the television. No commercials. No surfing.

I entered the last decade as an emotional basketcase. No direction, no ideas, and no hope for bettering myself. Somehow, I've emerged from it confident, capable, and most importantly, happy. Is this because I ditched TV? No, I have alot of things to thank for that. However, I can't help but think of the things I do since I gave it up. I find that I tend to spend my time in ways that, to me, are much more fruitful. I play my guitar more. I write more. More importantly, the time I spend with my family just feels better. We talk, eat our meals together, play games. Yeah, sometimes we even watch movies together. I wish I could say that American Idol has nothing on any of that, but to be honest, I have never watched it, so I really don't know.

I can't stress enough how much I look forward to not watching the Superbowl next year too.