Generally speaking, I’m a fan of routines. Regular, predictable events and actions that string days together easily and seamlessly. They empower the imagination in an inverse sort of way: I can easily imagine, for example, what my next Monday will look like.
Perhaps that thought is a little disturbing: the looming specter of the Monday next. But really, it’s only a negative if your days are negative. Do your days routinely suck? Then maybe you should make some changes. Most of my days are good, or at the least, they definitely aren’t bad. So I’ve few complaints.
That imagined visage of a comfortable, routine day is seldom as warm as when displaced. I get this when I go on long vacations. At a certain point I get homesick and long to return. And I’ve felt a little bit of that in a strange way lately. Moving, house shopping, packing, unpacking, and constantly working on the house have me so displaced from my usual self that I’ve been longing for some normality. I can’t stand living out of boxes. The other night, as I was crashing, I felt an aching desire to thumb through one of my books before I fell asleep, but the book was buried in any one of a dozen boxes. What is the point of owning books if you don’t return to them on occasion to remember their treasures?
Still, though, I’ve managed to weird myself out a little. One habit that I never wanted to become a habit is television. If there’s one form of background noise that I positively can’t stand it’s television. Whenever I’m at a parent’s house, the television is incessantly blaring. At my father’s it’s always on in the background. At my mother’s, she and her husband are interminably glued to it. Either way, I hate it. I never wanted to be a “tv person.”
But one of the most annoying things about my move was that I got behind on my shows. “My shows” see there I said it. I’m deliberate about what I watch, and I always DVR it so that I can skip the commercials. But still. I feel that I’ve become a shade of my parents in this way.
Now this isn’t a new concern of mine, but what surprised me about the temporary interruption was the realization of how important these shows are to my relaxation. I mean, they’ve really become my decompression routine. When I get home from an eleven hour day at the office (or even a nine hour day), I queue up one of my shows and chill out.
Partly this is good. I’m glad I’ve found an outlet. But at the same time, I don’t like the feeling that television is necessary. I’d like to think that I could cancel my cable subscription at any time and with few regrets.
So this is a goal for me to work on this summer. I want some new routines. Routines that feel a little more active. It’s going to be tough. Trueblood just started back up, as did Top Chef, and Louis CK’s new show starts soon. Oh, and did we mention Entourage? Oh and MadMen will be here before you know it.
You see what I mean? You see! It’s an endless spiral.
I’m hoping to get some major unpacking done this week, and once those things are settled, we need to focus on some new routines. Even if they’re old ones revived.
Oh, but I am still planning a fitting Treme wrap-up post here. Both Treme and the Tudors just wrapped up. All I really have to say about the Tudors is “Henry VIII with a conscience” sounds more like a thought experiment than basis for a tv show, but the writers made it work. Recommended.
Treme, now. I’ve been thinking about Treme. And you should be watching it. I feel guilty even calling what David Simon does “tv” anymore. It’s just so damned good.
But more on that later.
