I am watching the Yankee game. I am watching the new CBS show The Good Wife. I am watching Pee Wee Herman on the new Jay Leno show. I am watching Fox 5 News. I am watching Scarface. This is how it is to watch TV with my husband. Unless House is on. Then, and only then do I have one glorious hour of no channel surfing. Most couples I know watch different shows at night which explains why most houses, according to statistics have 3.5 TV sets. I have 6.
My husband likes to watch 4 minutes of a show, determine it is not view worthy and move on. Sometimes I get to see an entire segment, commercial to commercial before the channel is changed, but that is rare. And actually worse since I would like to know how it ends. The worst however, is when we are watching or should I say, just passing through….a game show, like Deal or No Deal. I just saw this guy say no deal to over $100,000 and he clicks. Can you put that back? By the time he finds the channel I wanted to go back to, the guy has lost the million, a new contestant is in his place and Howie Mandel is washing his hands.
Most nights while he is channel surfing I too am surfing….the web. We sit opposite each other at the kitchen table, me with my laptop and him with the remote. Click, click…… and click. While I clean up emails, update my Facebook status and pay some bills he is mindlessly clicking thru all 800 channels. Every so often there is a pause in the clicking, I hear a few precious moments of a movie or news brief and back on the road again. Sometimes I don’t know that he changed the channel and a story line takes a weird twist. We were watching the Yankee game and by the time I looked up for the score it had gone from a winning 4 -2 to a losing 5- 10. What the hell happened? Who’s pitching this disaster? It wasn’t til I saw the word Classic in the upper right hand corner that I realized he had put on a different channel, he too thinking he went back to the current game.
The one constant is that if the TV remains on one channel for longer than ten minutes it means one of two things….he is asleep or the show is something filmed in the 1940’s and is in black and white. His father was color blind, could that have anything to do with it I often wonder? It is almost eerie how much he enjoys black and white movies. Westerns, Military, even romance….if they are sans color he enjoys them. Now I am not talking about the silent movie black and whites and although he does like those too but doesn’t seem to read fast enough to really enjoy them. When the Wizard of Oz goes from black and white Kansas to Technicolor Oz I lose him every time.
There was a Stephen King book made into a movie called Christine. It was about a 1958 Plymouth that was possessed and aside from all the other hideous things it was capable of doing, it always played 50’s music on the radio even though it was the 80’s. That’s kinda what it feels like to watch TV with my husband. The TV goes on, and although the 2009 Fall Season premiers of Biggest Loser, NCIS, Dancing with the Stars and Top Chef are going on, the TV becomes dark and morphs into a black and white archived movie. Scary!
Thank God for DVR’s. I DVR everything. I can fast forward through the miniscule parts I saw with him and then finish the show. I can find out how something began, how a ball game ended and even why the Kardashians aren‘t speaking. I can find out who got voted off the island, married the bachelor and how the Gosselin kids enjoyed their 5th birthday party. I just cant watch it all at once.
