the boob tube

last night my husband wasn't feeling well so we did something unusual & lay in bed & watched the roku. we don't watch much tv, tho i think james used to watch more & i've gone thru periods of indulging in the boob tube. when you don't watch much tv & then you do, it can be pretty fun, like going to an amusement park. well, maybe not that fun, but kinda fun, even sometimes pretty fun, you know??
 the problem is,  i often quickly realize that no matter how many channels, there is NOTHING TO WATCH, or what options there are are brain- or soul-rotting. forget it!!!
our folks purchased a roku 3 & have been really happy w/it. roku 3 gives them endless nerd educational tv viewing options. my roku 1, the cheapest model, too, of course, has less such programming possibilities, but i'm happy enough w/it cause if i had more viewing options, i'd just sit on my butt & watch more tv instead of being active in my own life.
in my family, when we were kids, we were restricted to 1 hour a day of tv, & before that, it was 2 hrs a week, seems to me; i remember our parents having my sister & i go through the tv listings in the newspaper to plan what we'd watch, then we'd show it to them & they'd circle "our shows" & put them on the fridge. unimaginable today, maybe! - at the least, highly unusual, tho maybe it was back then, too!… i recall when i was a teacher that the few children who watched little tv were the more imaginative, even unusually imaginative students.
that's kind of a big "duh," now that i think about it: of course, they were!
so maybe mom & dad were right to keep us off the dummy box. i know there are mutants like james, who probably could have spent 24 hrs a day in front of the tv & still turned out unusually imaginative, but for average kids like me, we didn't need that stupefying influence… yes, i think what saved me was reading: i know our main family activity was going to the library, which of course was free! we were poor, so thank goodness mom & dad were bibliophiles: instead of lamenting about how poor we were, they'd just take us to the library twice a week!
anyways, that's sure a sign of getting older, isn't it?, endlessly reminiscing about one's childhood...
james & i, laying there on his sickbed, tried to find, with not much luck, the charlie brown holiday shows from our early '70s youth, then watched some videos about ultra runners such as dean karnazes & the tarahumara of mexico's sierra madres, then a piece about the grueling badwater ultra in death valley. lunacy! then we struck gold, stumbling upon the orson welles' paris interview. wow! the show lost audio about half through, which can be a problem when running a roku in a household filled with other internet-dependent devices, so i found a near-three hour show about welles & we started on that one.
tried to make it as far as "touch of evil," my favorite welles movie, but fell asleep when they'd barely gotten to "lady from shanghai." then i had a stupid nightmare in which james jumped from a 4-story platform as i watched! then i couldn't find him & one of our friends was telling me, "you know james: he probably faked it to get attention!!" i woke up still trying to find him & there he was in the bed, snoring calmly. i was mad for a minute, realizing the dream had come from something i'd seen in the welles biography, the penultimate scene in "the stranger" (SPOILER ALERT) where welles's nazi villain is impaled upon the clock tower soldier's sword & falls to his death.
damn dreams!!!
the upswing is, i got to cuddle up with my husband for a while, that is until middle-aged aches & pains & desire for coffee forced me to leave that warm bed.