Thursday, February 12, 2004 You can't melt it down in the rain
This is Cara again. I'm so pathetically grateful to have internet access again that I don't even mind creeping around my friends' apartment to get it. I just got out of my study this morning, and showed up on their doorstep. They are either awake or not home, but I haven't peeked at their room. That seems a little
too weird...much weirder than just quietly letting myself in and flinging myself at the PC.
I'm loopy from this unstructured lifestyle. I can't make it on the outside.
In the study, I was issued clean pants whenever I requested a pair. Do you know how long that has been my dream?
Thanks to Helen for guest blogging. She's right, of course. I cracked like a robin's egg under the moral pressure of any kind of wrongdoing when I was a kid. I'm not sure where all the excessive guilt came from, since my parents weren't then and are not now religious. (Although wouldn't that be a hoot? If all of a sudden, say, my dad started going to revival meetings, rather than espousing conspiracy theories and quiet misanthropy?)
It really would be the missing piece to (or one of many, but a big one) to the puzzle of the folks if they were secretly with some kind of fundamentalist sect. Their policies of keeping my sister and I out of school and extreme television censorship might make more sense. Helen wasn't fooling. They forbid much of anything but PBS and syndicated sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie and Green Acres.
I remember one night we'd been watching Hogan's Heroes or something on the crappy local channel that showed all that stuff, and they'd been promoting a Special Feature Presentation: Yentl. For some reason, we begged to watch it. My mother said no. Later, when she was gone, we got bored with spinning around in circles 'til we fell down, or cutting the hair off of our meager Barbie collection, or any of the other creative and life-affirming tasks kids are naturally drawn to when they aren't ground down by traditional models of education, and switched on Murphy Brown.
Our TV was located in the basement: this was in order to de-emphasize it as the center of the house, so we wouldn't become one of those families who spent every night sitting slackjawed around the cathode ray tube in the living room.
So instead we sat shivering on the worset furniture, out of reach of the light, staring at the cathode ray tube.
And it was ten times easier to sneak forbidden shows that way. Anyway, we were happily watching Candace Bergen square her jaw in outrage or what have you, when we hear the dreaded pattern of footsteps upstairs that meant that our mother was on her way down.
Quickly, we switched off the TV. I was probably right on the verge of dissolving into a puddle of goo and confessing everything, but our mother was in a good mood. "Oh, girls, I know you're watching that movie," she said. "If you
really want to, I guess it's OK." And she switched the TV back on.
And there was Murphy, giving Miles a piece of her mind. My mother turned bright red and began screaming, "Networks! you're watching networks!" Later, we were punished.
Weirdly enough, I think that that was the beginning of the end for the TV restriction game. Even if that particular incident didn't happen exactly when I think it did, it was part of a pattern of TV-related rebellion that gradually wore my parents down, until not even cable TV, with its lure of scantily clad bodies and anglo-saxon words caused them to fly into a credible frenzy anymore.
In the study, we got this bizarro-cable with any of the potentially offensive channels (MTV, VH1, the History Channel) neatly excised away, and since nobody got sick, all there was to do was watch TV and work on bizarre crafts projects of our own invention (more on this later). More than anything, we ended up watching a show about a preacher with a large family. Each family member lies to one another constantly, and every child from the age of six on up is in a turbulent romantic relationship.
There is no way in hell I would have been allowed to watch that when I was a kid.
Coming up later: my knitting is the talk of the research unit! posted by Frenz | 2/12/2004 11:02:00 AM
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