"i will resist such entertainment" the tempest: i, ii

I try not to be too high and mighty about this, but I've given up television. We don't have one at our house, and I rarely watch it anywhere else. Yes, I will watch it if it's on at someone else's house or if I'm housesitting or something. But my life no longer revolves around shows. At first it was a little strange, but I've gotten to the point now where I rarely miss it. Once in a while I'm bummed if I'm missing a Pats game, but I have class all day Sundays anyway now, so at this point I really don't miss it. All in all, getting rid of tv has freed me up not just in the sense that I'm not sitting in front of the tube, tied to a schedule there, but also in the sense that I have a lot more brainpower to devote to other things now (such, in my case, as they are).

I found this article disconcerting: TV for the Time-Pressed. Basically it's "if you only watch one show per night, these are the ones to hit." Again, I don't want to come off like I'm on a high horse, even though I know it probably will, but it just seems sad to me, the idea that even if you're time-pressed, one might feel as though at least a show must be watched. I mean, if you're short on time, wouldn't watching tv be a good thing to discard from the schedule? You could instead take a little "me-time," to think, or read, or just be, without stuff being fed into your brain. Maybe my attitude about this is similar to a phenomenon some former smokers have mentioned to me, where, after they quit smoking and were out of the first couple weeks, they got to a point where watching anyone else smoking made them mad. Anyway, I'm not trying to convert anyone, not really ... but I will say that I feel my mind working much more clearly now than it did when I was at my peak of tv-watching hours.

On another note, here's a little interchange I witnessed yesterday. I was boarding a bus from my school's campus that was heading downtown. There was a large group of undergrads all around me, waiting for their buses as well. As I was boarding, a young woman leaned up the stairs behind me and addressed the crotchety old angry bus driver:

Woman: (somewhat confrontationally) Does this go down to the Hospitality Campus?
Driver: (short-temperedly) What does the sign up there say? Huh?
Woman: (scornfully) Pssh! I don't know, I guess I can't read.
Driver: (with equal contempt) You're real smart, guess that's why you got to college.
Woman: (back turned, leaving) Pssshh!

and ... scene