Static (or Why I Don't Miss the Television)

I used to be a hardcore couch potato.  Depending on the show playing, I can tell you the day of the week and the time of the day.  I can even tell you the ordered listing of shows to at least ten different cable channels at any given day.

But then, one day, our cable got busted and I was left with local channels on bad reception.  Each hour, each day, I spent watching the local channels, I felt my brain cells shriveling up and dying one by one due to the inanities forced upon me in the guise of entertainment.  I looked like I was having seizures as I couldn't stop my eyes from rolling with each improbable scenario presented as facets of everyday life.  It got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore and the only choice left was to go cold turkey and pass on the tv.

Four years after and I'm not regretting my decision.  We do have cable again, but the urge to watch had passed.  There may be relapses from time to time, when I seat in front of the tv and just channel surf till the wee hours of the morning, but those instances are rare.

And every now and then, I am given reasons to assert my decision to give up on television.  

I was at work when the hostage situation was reported by persons I follow on twitter.  Powering up my browsers, I reached for the first web article I could find that showcased gist of what was going on.  I read the article and left it at that.  I went home that night (after a few hours overtime) and didn't even bother catching up on the news.  Thus I was spared seeing the series of embarrassing decisions that led to that fatal and tragic aftermath.  And I choose not to see how the police and the media are trying to pass on the blame to one another on national TV.  

Right now, it is enough that I get to read the least bit of news about that terrible fiasco that I get from my timeline or as headers on my various mail accounts.  I feel it a blessing that I do not have to deal with newsbreak after newsbreak of every little detail, some of it only remotely connected to the incident.

I do feel bad about the victims of this needless violence.  Had there been people in complete control of the situation at the very start, so much of what happened might have been avoided.  But what's done is done, all this talk of should-have-been's will not help our cause, it can only worsen the situation.  What we need now is to pick up the pieces, move on, and maybe just this once, learn from our mistakes.

Clean Room

I used to be overly critical about my room.  Not two weeks will go by that I will not have the urge to pick up broom and mop and clean my room from walls to floor.  I became so obsessed with my room that I would not let anyone else even attempt to clean it; even when it seems disorganized, I know where everything was, and a different pair of hands touching my stuff would mean loosing track of where my things are.


Then my workload suddenly multiplied exponentially and I was left with little time under my domain.  It didn't help as well that I kept changing rooms, or rather, Matriarch kept moving me from room to room.  There even came a point that I transfered rooms thrice in the same year.  I lost track of some of my stuff because of that, and my drive to clean wavered.  After all, why should I exert too much effort in cleaning room when I am not even assured of my permanence in that place.


Over time the zealous urge to clean was lost, and my room became a seeming jungle of books and knick-knacks piled to one place or another with no logic or organization.  The old twice a week purging was lost until it became a chore to be done only on the bluest of moons.


And today was one of those rare celestial occurrences. 


The day started out lazily, but thankfully, I was able to pick up enough steam and start my erstwhile favorite activity.  More than just moving dirt around, cleaning my room also involves moving the furnitures around.  The purging isn't complete when I am not able to move stuff about.  And therein lies the heart of my problem:  my stuff are too bulky, or too large to move around.  For a long time, I've been trying out in my head different permutations of how to rearrange the furnitures, but I was stuck with the old one I used to have.  It did serve its purpose, but it left me with too little floor space to move about that you have no other choice but lie in the bed once inside the room.  For month after month, I have been lethargic while within my domain because its arrangement left nothing else to do inside.


Finally, after months of merely thinking about it, I decided to clean, and to move my things about.  And there were some...things... that gave me quite a stir.  I do love our pets; they even sleep with me on the bed sometimes, but those rascals have turned the space under my bed into their personal cesspool, taking care to do their business on the farthest side, out of reach and out of sight of my previous cursory cleanings.  No wonder my room smells like dog!  Further cleaning also revealed a bunch of papers remnants from my old job.  I confess, it gave me a certain amount of vindictive glee throwing those papers out.


Finally, I have a clean room, or at least clean enough to be comfortable with.  I still have some more things to do, which will be done over the next weekends to come, but at least I have made considerable headstart today.


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