On our way in to work (yes, we’re sharing a car again… the Cavalier once again bites the dust), I asked Brian what I should write about for the blog entry today.
He told me that I should write about what an awesome husband I have, who picked up and vacuumed the entire downstairs, deep-cleaned the kitchen, and made all the meals for the week. Which is a true story. I have a pretty awesome husband.
And then he told me that I should probably just write about the Olympics instead. So here I (sorta) go:
The Olympics are one of my favorite things. Mostly because there’s weird sports that you never get to see on TV otherwise, like archery, table tennis, and synchronized diving. Brian likes it too, although not as much as I do. We also have a love/hate relationship with TV which makes my love of the Olympics tough to indulge.
13 years ago, Brian and I decided that we wouldn’t get a TV when we moved in with each other. He felt like the constant din of TV was distracting and the ads annoying, and I felt like my mother had limited TV so much for us growing up that living without it wouldn’t be hard. That was in the dark ages before Netflix and online streaming, and it turned out to be awful until we expanded our movie collection enough that there was entertainment in the house. But we did it. And Netflix then felt like the decadent version of having that vast movie collection. There are only 3 shows I HAVE to watch, and they are all available via online streaming: Project Runway, This Old House, and The Great British Bake Off. We have an antenna that used to work well in Claremont but is optimistically sketchy in the new place and really only gets channel 4. But that’s enough for State Of The Union addresses and Rose Parades. We make it work.
Why is this better than just shelling out for cable you ask? Well, it’s cheaper. But mostly it forces us to be deliberate about what we’re watching. There isn’t any more horrible family drama on Judge Judy after Heraldo because that’s what’s on the channel and no one changed it. We consume, yes. But we consume deliberately. And wasn’t that what the message of Walden was all about? Living deliberately? I’m sure that’s what Thoreau meant…
But I digress.
My point is this: the way NBC has the Olympics locked down is insanity. There is almost no way to watch the coverage from my place without shelling out for cable. You can’t even stream it online without a cable account!! Brian and I went on an epic journey on Friday night to buy a Roku, then went back to the store for the HDMI cable we forgot, then set up the thing and realized that even the places that said you could get all public channels in the US for free weren’t offering NBC unless you paid. So we caved.
It was a frustrating night, to say the least. But it ended with the two of us on the living room floor in a blanket nest watching the opening ceremonies, so that was alright. In fact, it was nice.
The thing that tickles me most about this weekend is that I have a wonderful domestic husband who did all the chores while I laid on the couch and watched sports. We have become the traditional American family, in reverse. It will all go back to normal in a few weeks, I’m sure. But in the meantime, I intend to enjoy the irony. And the Gymnastics.
Casey E. Hamilton 