So, like, 9 months ago my boyfriend and I broke up, and it sucked so fucking badly in that “oh, my god, it hurts so much I think I’m actually going to just. stop. living.” kinda way that I’ve just sort of been wandering aimlessly around New York City in shock muttering “where am I going? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life?” like every other privileged white girl with nothing truly substantial to complain about. Anyway, it continues to suck just as badly to this very day, partially fueled by the fact that I guess we’re like, trying to be friends or something. This is difficult when you love the shit out of someone who really is absolutely not willing to kiss and make up because they’d rather hang onto the mutual mistakes of both parties instead of letting them go, moving forward, and being happy. It’s a filthy hot mess and what blows even harder than the loss itself is the realization that I’m back in high school again, completely unable to control my emotions, and actually giving a shit what a dude thinks about me (when I probably should, for all intents and purposes, just tell him to fuck off). We sassy hetero feminists know that it’s super tough to handle the unavoidable fact that sometimes men do get under your skin (especially if you really, really love them), melting any ounce of self-respect or tenacity you once had and rendering you a pathetic, blubbering, spineless idiot willing to put up with wayyyyyyyyy more shit than you should. When this happens, you feel like a complete and total Strong Independent WomynTM failure, and you hate life even more. It’s a vicious cycle.
I seriously thought I had evolved past all of this, but SURPRISE!
I tried to channel my anguish into writing or art or songs or what not, hanging onto the hope that something, anything productive and worthwhile could possibly come out of such a fucktardedly horrific situation, but my creative neurons were so thoroughly numbed by sheer agony that they were rendered completely unusable. Despite the thousands of hours of empowering black lady music I’ve listened to (thank you, Beyonce!) and all other desperate attempts to talk myself out of this funk, I’ve been totally and completely miserable since October of 07.
Until now.
Last week, I was reintroduced to an old acquaintance, who I hadn’t realized I missed as much as I did until they miraculously appeared back into my life, completely sweeping me off my feet and making me believe in romance again. I’m in love…
TELEVISION! I MISSED YOU SOOOOOOO MUCH!
I bit the bullet and got actual television last week (Directv to be exact). I love television so much but have been subsiding on Friends and Reno 911 DVDs for the past year. Watching the same thing over and over again doesn’t bother me because I’m practically braindead anyway and am perfectly happy to shun variety, intellect, and expansion of horizons for something I have an unexplained childish attachment too. It’s kind of like 5 year-olds that want to eat nothing but macaroni and cheese all day.
In all reality, the only reason it’s taken me this long to get television is because I was just too cheap and lazy to do it. Mostly the lazy thing – I’ve never bothered to order cable before if I lived in a place that didn’t have it, so I had no idea what the process was like and figured it would be a giant fucking pain in the ass. This fear was completely substantiated when our Directv guy missed TWO fucking appointments and was late for the third, which consequently resulted in the death of one entire Saturday, two missed workdays and countless hours on the phone yelling at perfectly incompetent service people who thought it was completely acceptable to feed me bullshit all the live long day about how the serviceman was “on his way, just give him one more hour.” I should also note that they never called me to let me know dude was running late (or wasn’t coming at all). I always had to call them to check up on him like I was his fucking mom, and all in all I spent a total of NINETEEN HOURS sitting in my apartment waiting for my fucking television.
When the dude finally arrived, he waddled up the stairs, lurched his sizeable mass over my threshold like giant potato with legs, and proceeded to completely destroy my apartment. Spending the majority of the time on the phone with his idiot friends, he’d shut up only long enough to drill holes in my walls and track dust everywhere, wipe his muddy (I hope it was mud) hands on my white bath towel, and break my boxspring by plunking his fire hydrant-sized legs down all over my bed. It should go without saying that if you can punch a hole in a boxspring through a mattress using just your knee, you probably shouldn’t be allowed on top of things period. He also broke a necklace.
Directtv doesn’t seem to care, telling me I have to have a professional appraiser come to estimate the damages, and I am apparently supposed to pay for this. For fucking serious? I have to pay a professional to come out and tell me the value of a boxspring and a fucking three-dollar Forever 21 necklace? I mean, here’s the thing: I don’t really need any of it replaced. A hole in my boxsping 100% doesn’t matter and I can fix the necklace with tweezers. The point is he broke shit. He took three fucking days to get here and then broke my shit (didn’t tell us, by the way – we just stood around wincing as we heard stuff crack and fall and surveyed the carnage later), and now I have to spend more fucking time on the phone dealing with Directv and filling out cockloads of paperwork and pay for an appraiser who will probably laugh in my face when I show him what needs appraising? What the hell is the matter with you people? Just fucking give me free HBO or something. I’m really not hard to please.
They did give me a “missed appointment credit” of $100 but they actually owe me THREE missed appointment credits since, well, that’s how many appointments they missed. The lady said “sorry, we don’t do that. One credit is all we can give.” I suggest to Directv that, as long as your servicemen are missing multiple appointments, you give multiple missed appointment credits. That one hundred dollars divided by the nineteen hours of my time you wasted (not counting time spent on the phone or the vacation days I had to use) breaks down to $5.26 an hour. McDonald’s would pay me better for my time.
But none of that shit matters anymore, because I have television. With DVR. Which, is, like, the greatest invention of all time. I know everyone’s had TiVo for a million years and none of this is impressive anymore, but I still pretty much, every day, say something like “holy fucking shit! I can pause the television show while I go get a snack?! WTFFFFFFFF?!” I DVR the shit out of my favorite stories. Thus far, my playlist looks like this:
Law and Order: SVU (or “Lookie! Sex crimes and murdered women! Titillating, no?”)
Home Movies
Ace of Cakes (It’s official! I totally have a thing for that Geoff guy, but for Christ’s sake, why does he spell it like that? I already have a tattoo that says “Jeff.” Work with me here.)
Intervention
True Life (yes, that MTV show)
The Drug Years (badass documentary on VH1 about drug culture in American history)
Sex: The Revolution (another awesome VH1 doc)
Penn & Teller’s Bullshit (which I dislike the more I watch it)
Holy fucking shit. I’m watching Intervention right now and the chick on it is addicted to inhalants. Setting aside the fact that watching her suck chemical vapor straight from the goddamn nozzle is making me gag, I totally can’t believe she huffs over ten cans of computer duster a day. That shit is, like, 10 bucks a pop! That’s a more expensive habit than cocaine! Well…maybe not, but I know nothing about coke. Homegirl is crazy messed up, though. She can barely string a sentence together, she pretty much never blinks, and it looks like she can’t exactly control her lips – they just kind of trot around her face worse than a crackhead’s. I am now more terrified of inhalants than I am of heroin. Jesus. Why the hell would anybody do this?
Goddamn Intervention is the best fucking show. Oh, and have you noticed that literally every person on Intervention who also happens to be gay has crazy homophobic parents? Most of the time the parents are more pissed about the fact that their kids are homos than the fact that they’re addicted to drugs, which makes me hate people and pretty thoroughly explains why their kids are cracked out.
My good friend recently said to me, “Kendall, how can you stand being depressed without having television? You should get an award for that or something.” And you know what? She was right.
On a completely different note, I was scanning my archives recently and noticed that a few generously kind people have been leaving some very sweet and encouraging comments. Some of these people aren’t even real life friends that I force to read my blog, but randoms that find their way here and actually stay and read! Well, thank you. Comments honestly make my day.
Hooray for television!
4 Comments
September 30. 2008 at 2:06 pm
Hey, speaking of random, I just noticed that your Feministing screenname links to a blog!
This post was LOL funny. And being famously humorless, that’s saying something.
I have to admit, though I don’t watch much, there is some really good TV on now. The Shield is in its last seasons: the alpha male “man of action” flails, living in quicksand and only sinking faster, while a middle-aged black woman is the moral center of the show. Not the typical show.
About Intervention: when I’ve watched a few minutes of it, I’m stuck for hours. I can’t tear my eyes off it.
Penn’s fetish for the cheesiest possible objectification-for-its-own-sake and his libertarian nonsense terminally lost my interest years ago. It’s like South Park, but neither funny nor transgressive.
October 4. 2008 at 8:31 pm
Thanks Thomas! It was great meeting you a few weeks back.
Yeah Bullshit has entertained me in the past, but it just started to devolve into adolescent misogyny and petty progressive-bashing.
I mean, they recently did an episode that was all about how stupid people who love dolphins are, as if this is a giant societal problem! I think hippies are as annoying as the next person, but even with everything going on these days, your biggest complaint is marine biologists who think they can talk to dolphins? Really?
October 6. 2008 at 1:44 pm
It was good meeting you, too.
Jillette is a microcosm of libertarianism — and he actually speaks for them, being a Cato fellow. Once, there were left-libertarians in at least the same numbers as right libertarians, and libertarians could be counted on to be, you know, for personal and civil liberty. During the conservative ascendency (which I’ll say is from the time the Democrats nominated Humphrey and Daley had the kids in the park gassed until the House Republican turned on their corporate paymasters and refused to pass the Paulson Plan), they rotted into conservatarians: their primary orientation is to join arm-in-arm with movement conservatives in taking joy in whatever pisses off lefties, and the views that differentiate them form movement conservatives are centered in personal entitlement: their “right” to do drugs, and to purchase women’s bodies. Jillette himself is doesn’t use recreational drugs, and may not even drink — but he’s poly, and I suspect he’s exactly the entitled poly douchenozzle that keeps so many kinksters at arm’s length from some poly communities. Just sayin’.
Also, Vic Mackey is Othello. I wasn’t sure I was right about that, but the new show by one of The Shield’s producers, Sons of Anarchy, has a Hamlet plot set-up, with the conflicted protagonist’s father dead, his mother married to the new leader and his father’s ghost speaking through an old manuscript. Given the history of Othello on the American stage, I figure they can’t say it, because if you say he’s Othello, it’s a slap to have a white actor play the role. But in a racist society, no audience would believe (and rightly so) that Mackey could have survived this long if he were not white.
October 28. 2008 at 12:03 pm
Until I read this, I assumed I was the only person ever who self-medicated the bruised heart with television. Live and learn.
As a sort of “Thank You”, may I suggest “Slings & Arrows”? It’s not on TV anymore, so you’ll have to netflix, sidereel or buy, but it is sooo worth it.
As an aside, I couldn’t agree more with both you and Thomas about P & T. I love their stage show, but Bullshit has devolved, as Thomas aptly noted, into “The Conservatarian Hour”.