Set the Boob Tube on Fiyah!

Oh hi!  Remember me?  Come on, it’s only been…3 months.  Yikes.  As for the meal plans…oh, the meal plans.  For those of you who were concerned, I still continued to cook meals (and also eat them) during my 3 month little break from the blog.  It only took me three times of typing out the whole week’s meal plans to realize a few things.

1.      I love food.  A lot.  I love to make food.  However, I don’t like writing about making food.  Those of you who muster joy from writing about whisking and blending and basting, bravo!  It’s just not for me.  Although if there was ever a food blog that handed free samples to readers, I’d be all over it!

2.      Life is super fun, but it can also be super busy.  My time is too short to spend hours typing up….well, anything, let alone tons of recipes.  I have convinced myself that blog writing should be fun only, not a chore.  But if you ever hear me bragging about how amazing a meal I made last night was, feel free to message me and I will shoot you the recipe! 

3.       I love marriage.  I started this blog to talk about adventures in marriage.  So it gave me a little twinge of panic when people said “Have you read Allison’s food blog?”  I’d rather it be referred to as the “Allison’s crazy random tangents and stories about life and marriage” blog.  Yes, that sounds better.

So, onto the latest random tangent…

I have a love/hate relationship with TV.  Basically I love to watch it, and I hate that I love it so much.  Danny and I have had many a conversation about monitoring the things we put into our brains, but I have always fallen back on the “at the end of a long, hard day I need to fill my mind with mindless junk” excuse.  It sounded so reasonable when I said it, but my brain must have been fried to think that logic was sound.  Looking at it in writing, it just looks ridiculous.  Danny and I don’t even really spend that much time watching television…a random show here, a little episode there, maybe a Real Housewives marathon all day on a Saturday.  What?!?!  Yeah.

So we decided along with our dear friends the Days to give up television for Lent.  I figured spending a little extra time with Jesus instead of the cast of Modern Family couldn’t hurt for a little while, right?  Well…that is until we decided to give up movies too.  Oh, the pain.  Movies are like my boyfriends on the side.  If Danny isn’t home or he is and he’s being lame (aka working on graduate class work), I just get a little movie to spice up my life.  Knowing my weakness and love of my side boyfriends, I had to physically unplug the TV from the wall.  That way I wouldn’t have the excuse to say “What?  The TV’s on?  How did THAT happen?”

The first few days were the worst.  Danny and I would stare longingly into the reflection of our television, willing it to produce a few flickering images for our mindless enjoyment.  Then something strange happened.  We started enjoying life without the TV.  We went on walks, we played board games (lots and lots of them, Danny is a board game FREAK!), we talked about deep and magical things such as the meaning of life and whether or not we would give our children an allowance.  We read our Bibles more, exercised more, and spent more time canoodling (yeah, I said it.).  It seemed as if those few stressful hours we had when we got home from work would stretch into a longer, sweeter, more enjoyable evening.  Do I think this all came from not watching television?  No.  We seriously don’t typically watch more than 2-3 hours of TV per week.  I think it came from a switch in the routine, an intentionality behind what we were going to do with our evenings instead. 

I also had time to read more books.  Remember pleasure reading?  It almost became an extinct notion for me while I was in graduate school, but I always forget how much I LOVE to read until I…like…read.  Very deep, I know.  My one true love Whitney gave me some books to read over Spring Break, and one of these books happened to be Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”.  Somehow I managed to have never read this book before, and I’m convinced it’s because I was supposed to read it when I was on a television fast.  For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a futuristic dystopia novel where Americans are encouraged to live life for cheap thrills and intellectual thought is discouraged, with reading illegal.  I was amazed to find how many parallels the novel shared with our current society.  The book painted a picture of television as being on all 4 walls, where it displayed people talking about nothing, with loud music and colors but no real substance.  They called the people on television “the family”.  It’s funny when you’re in the middle of fasting from television to hear how many people’s conversations center around what they have seen on television.  People, including Danny and I, develop some sort of emotional attachment to our “shows”, treating the characters almost as if they are like family members.

I always have this recurring panic that I’m going to wake up when I’m 50 and have nothing to show for my life besides bellybutton lint and a college degree.  I think this TV fast has helped me get a better grip on how I would like to be spending my time.  Danny and I just bought a house in Nixa (more on that later), and we have discussed not buying cable.  We also talked about setting the TV on fire…but that might be just because we’re pyros.