Life cycle of a couch potato

"Why am I staying up late to watch an inane reality show?" I asked my friend a few months ago.  I was sluggish from lack of sleep and needed massive doses of caffeine to function properly during the day.  From any standpoint, the tv show I was watching had no merit, artistic or otherwise, whatsoever. 

"That's because you are interested in pop culture," he replied. I never asked him if he truly meant what he said or was just being sarcastic.

 I have found myself asking myself the same question again recently.  The past few weeks, I have been seriously following two soap operas.  I put up with the too frequent commercials just to see how the shows' heroes and heroines would fare against the scheming villains and villainesses.

My addiction to tv is rooted in childhood.  I remember refusing to take a nap because I wanted to watch the old Tagalog movies that were shown in the afternoons. By six o'clock, I stopped whatever it was I was doing to watch "Ana Liza" being oppressed by her evil stepmother. 

My taste in tv shows did not improve as I grew older. My friends and I all went home when it was time for "That's Entertainment." I knew who the members of each group were before the show got too big, complicated and circus-like.  Around the same time, I would drink coffee so I could stay awake and catch Inday Badiday's "See True" and the woman who gave birth to a fish, and Joan Collins in "Dynasty". 

In my freshman year in college, I did not let my dormitory's strict rules prevent me from watching "Beverly Hills 90210."  We were supposed to be inside our rooms by ten o'clock on Fridays.  Since the show finished a few minutes later than that, we resorted to watching it from a radio equipped with a small tv that my friend's roommate owned.  We hid in her closet when the person charged with inspecting the residents came in.    I ran all the way to my room on the third floor as soon as the show ended.

In law school, I was among those who got afflicted with the Thalia fever. I stopped studying at the appointed hour to watch "Marimar." A classmate got me into it.   We would discuss what transpired during the show the day after, oblivious to the jokes that our other classmates made about us.

When I feel guilty about watching too much tv, I watch the documentaries in Discovery Channel or National Geographic.  In this manner, I feel that I'm actually learning something.  A few times, I've gotten my son to join me and we've actually learned new things that could be useful should either of us decide to join a trivia show.

The drawback is that I have very little authority to tell my son to watch less tv than he is watching now.  When I told him that he needed to read more books, he asked if he could just listen to or watch whatever he had to learn instead.

I think about how much smarter I would be had I used the time I spent watching tv reading philosophy books.  I also think about how much thinner I would be if I used the time I spent watching tv exercising.  But that is about as far as I've gone in my quest to stop watching tv - I know the advantages of doing so but I'm not ready to give it up.

In the meantime, I will continue letting my brain atrophy and my arteries get clogged until Ysabella gets her dead mother's secret chicken recipe back from the evil Victoria.

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