cable

Boldly we press onward, into the brave new world of the nineteenth century!

It's not that we're Luddites exactly. We drive cars, check our e-mail daily, carry cell phones, the usual stuff. We use power tools to saw lumber and drill holes, but only if the equivalent hand tool would take ridiculous amounts of time. I cut logs with a chainsaw and split them by hand with a maul. I still use a reel-type push mower to cut the tiny patch of lawn, and I'll use a leaf blower when they pry my cold, dead hands off my rake.

Okay, so there's a little resistance to doing everything with the newest gadgets. At least on my part.

Jessi and Zelda have been downloading music since the dawn of Napster, and Gven has had an iPod for a couple of years. I haven't gotten into it, so I listen to CDs. On the other hand, Jessi has taken to listening to vinyl records on a turntable once in a while, so the pendulum occasionally swings back.

When the kids were in middle school, the joke was that their friends thought we were Amish because we didn't have cable. We watched our share of TV and fought over which shows were acceptable, encouraged, and actually good, as any healthy Amerikan family would. In fact, we were probably more permissive than most, although the choices were limited to broadcast: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox.

Our viewing habits ranged from X-Men to Soul Train to Bob Ross painting, and of course Sesame Street. Lots of Nature and Wild America on Sunday nights, lots of Mantis and X-Files on Friday nights. Family Ties, Thirty-something, ER, Seinfeld, and yes, even Friends. The horror. On our budget, we occasionally debated between buying a new TV or installing cable, which we resolved by doing neither.

There was one year, my first year out of graduate school with my first "real" job, when we did subscribe to basic cable. We lived in a subdivision in a small town halfway across the continent, and we decided to indulge. Long story short, the job didn't last very long and neither did our infatuation with cable.

Needless to say, a major part of Jessi's and Zelda's technological education has come outside our four walls. Gven and I aren't tech geeks by even the loosest definition, and the kids have been resourceful in navigating their own paths, each in their own way, through the electronic landscape.

Part of the story is simply my frugality, reinforced with a large dose of anticonsumer culturism. How many times did the three of them suffer through my tirade against the commercial conspiracy to brainwash us into buying more stuff we don't want or need? But that cuts both ways, so when the handwriting on the wall says we can bundle our Internet service with cable TV and actually save money, my resistance begins to wear down. And I can watch Big Ten basketball on Saturday. There's that too.

So the WOW guy came last week and installed the magic box in the living room, and suddenly we have like 200 channels, a remote that looks like the cockpit of a 747, and still there's nothing worth watching.

I sat there for two hours on Saturday afternoon - when I should have been outside making a yurt out of macrame - surfing through bad movie after bad movie, diet infomercial after evangelical jewelry shopping after NASCAR Disney sitcom after historical documentary cooking show before I figured out that there are four or five channels, instead of the usual two, that interest me. But all 200 come in sharp and clear!

Botton line, I'm succombing to the lure of the dominant culture's ability to suck me in by providing what I, just like other hungry consumers, like to watch. There was actually a track meet - the U.S. indoor national championships - on the tube yesterday. I haven't seen a track meet in years. The downside, of course, is that I only watched one race - the women's 800-meter finals, which was awesome - before I foolishly got up from the couch momentarily and someone else came in and changed the channel to a sappy chick flick. This could get ugly.