People say I watch too much TV, and, to be honest, I wholeheartedly agree with them. I devour TV shows with unprecedented speed, and in fact I recently made a list of all the TV shows still currently running that I’m caught up on and of which I’m waiting for new episodes. That list consists of twenty-two titles, and doesn’t even include the shows that are no longer running, or shows I gave up on at some point.
And lately I’ve been thinking about why that is.
I think it’s because I think too much. I think about things that don’t matter like they do, and things that do matter like they’re life-and-death situations. But I digress; after all, I think most of us can claim the same. The differences lie in our coping mechanisms; the ways we escape our thoughts. Some people run, some people paint, or photograph their surroundings, or drink, or smoke, or try and solve ancient mathematical equations, or clean, or sleep. I watch television like this because I can concentrate on a story. And yes, I can read books, and I love to do that as well, but I can only do that when I have energy, because it requires me still to think about something else. With television everything is already done for me already, and all I have to do is sit there and get sucked in, and it’s sad. It’s sad that being left alone with my own mind is so exhausting to me that I have no energy for anything else except sitting. This thought doesn’t really have a conclusion. I don’t know how to wrap it up nicely and tie a bow on it to bring it all together. The truth is, I’m exhausted, and I don’t want to have to think anymore, so I have a couple of options: I can cry for no other reason than the fact that the thoughts floating around in my mind are causing a literal overflow, or I can watch a story that someone else has thought about and orchestrated for my viewing experience.
