I am currently staying at my parent's house up North this weekend for a small vacation. We actually have been active on this trip that we usually are (it's amazing how many free things you find to do when you are in a personal and global recession!), so I am not complaining. However, inevitably, the T.V. always gets turned on every night, usually in three different rooms by their three typical occupants. This, of course, leaves me, a non-permanent resident of this home with no T.V. of my own, alone to sit at the table and thumb through a Sunset magazine (or go up in my room and write a blog entry). This, as you can imagine, frustrates me for two reasons: 1.) I just traveled 400 miles and spent quite a bit of money to spend time with my family, and 2.) I don't watch T.V. I will watch an occasional show on-line now and then, or watch a season of a T.V. show in succession once in awhile, but rarely ever do I just sit down and watch what's on. Mainly because I am too busy to devote a half hour to doing respectively nothing, and when I do have free time, I'd rather spend it with people. So my initial response to my family's recreational T.V. habits is that we should be doing something else. Anything else, because sitting in a room simultaneously being occupied by the same thing is not spending time together. (Can I get an Amen?)
But here's when my scenario takes a what I think is disturbing turn: immediately after haughtily thinking "we should not be watching T.V. right now", my next thought was...nothing . Sheer blankness and absence of thought. I could not conceive an alternative activity, at least one that did not involve media or technology. I was not capable of brainstorming a quiet family activity that did not include being entertained by some external electronic inanimate object. What did people do together before there were 7 T.V.s in one household? Seriously! Embroider? Talk about the farm? I am not being facetious here; I am posing a serious question. How can modern families, with all of the technology available at their fingertips, after spending 8 hours apart from each other all day working in isolated, unrelated jobs, spend time together without tuning out and being held captive by the T.V., or some other technological activity (including computers, an act of which I am entirely guilty as charged)?
Suggestions? Ideas? Theoretical Propositions? What do you think? Your ideas may save us all!
