The Kingdom of Television

In deep contemplation while sitting on the couch, the thoughts that were running through my mind made me wonder what kind of person I am. Not that I sit and think about myself ALL the time (I think if we really admit it, we find that we DO), but at this moment I was supposed to be watching TV with Dear Sir. He is a channel flipper and so I have to take my Friday night and watch a mad dash to avoid commercials while we are watching three (sometimes four) different shows. Here is what I watched (if I even remember some of it):

Snippets of:

EWTN (the Catholic Channel)

24 (with Mr. Sutherland)

Some Spanish Channel where the lady has permanent tears streaming down her face and the guy is completely overacting (the lady is too).

And something else, I can't remember. Oh yeah, The Office.

Let me tell you, the second we got satellite TV I did not watch a single show until maybe last week. I think we have had satellite TV now for three weeks or more. A month. I told Dear Sir this and he stuck out his bottom lip in true sympathy and then said, "You should watch something you want tomorrow." (which means, "when I am not home") Then he proceeded to click away.

What frustrated me most is that I had to sit through a Spanish channel. I really don't like watching a bunch of people over acting---and to add more to it, speaking a different language altogether. I don't know how to speak Spanish. Dear Sir doesn't either but for some ridiculous reason, he likes to watch it and then says, "I can watch something other than English-speaking television, unlike you." or "I am not as narrow-minded in television watching as you are."

Why, dear friend, do I sit while he clicks at the channel changer? Why do I torture myself to watch TV with this guy? When I was young (before there were channel changers or else my family just could not afford one) my Dad used to make me permanently sit next to the television while he sat on the couch and watched it. I remember that he would stick his pointer finger out and twirl it around and around if he wanted me to change a channel. Up or down, I was his Vanna White. He changed channels too when the commercials came on. No, wait. I changed his channels when the commercials came on. That meant that I had to change the channels a lot. Duh.

So Dear Sir has gotten me into soccer. Wait. Let me fix that. Football. I thought it was ridiculous that in France they would separate them and "real" football was called, "le football american". I just wanted to take all the French lips and tie them into a knot. I hated French once I got in there. Maybe it was because my teacher told me that a monkey would make more progress than me? Maybe. So I wince to call soccer football, but the rest of the world does it, and it is too American to sit and call it soccer (and I am not all that proud to be an American) so I will call it football. Makes sense anyway. So what do we do when we watch football? We skip from the English channel to the Spanish channel. Like we would get anything out of the Spanish channel that we couldn't get out of the English channel. The only thing I could understand that the Spanish broadcaster said was, "GOAL, GOAL, GOAL, GOAL, GOAL, GOAL..." He said it a hundred times during the Germany/Argentina game. They had to do the penalty kicks and Germany kept getting goals. Hence his saying all the goals. Ugh.

I am long-suffering though, and I remain as quiet as possible and let Dear Sir rule his kingdom of television. Whenever I watch TV and he comes in on it he says to me, "You watch the commercials! AHHHH!" He tries to respect the fact that I have the channel changer but of course you can feel his frustration in the air; you can cut it with a knife. It's like the lady at the library continually grasping at that library card when I don't produce in time. It is almost like if he had it his way and a channel changer did not exist, he would ask me to go and change the channel for him with his little pointer finger. But I am his wife, and so of course, what do I do? I hand him the thing and torture myself.

Yes, I love torture, I love suffering, and I even just voluntarily let it happen. Someone take me out of my misery.