Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Chaotic Recovery From Television Addiction

For roughly two weeks now, I've fallen prey to the addiction known as television.

Well, not exactly television.  Rather, Netflix.  I've been watching episode after episode of shows like Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Luther, throwing myself headfirst into gripping series that don't seem to let go.

The good news is that I recognized this sooner, rather than later.

Of course, I recognized this because writing was taking longer than usual.  When you're addicted to television, you have a habit of cutting down on reading.  Reading is a necessity for writers.

Without it, writing becomes very...

Piece of un-rolled parchment that reads: "I ran. It was to the store. It felt good. I was real happy."


Lame.

There was only one thing to do:  I had to stop watching.

That meant that I had to find other things to occupy my time.  I had most of my books on my Nook, which also had a Netflix app, so that couldn't be used.  I grabbed a few good print books, and placed them within easy reach.

I looked around for something else to do.  The books were great, but I couldn't just sit around reading all day... no matter how enjoyable that would be.

As luck would have it, the climate had warmed enough to make snow start to melt.

But!

It started raining.  Then the rain turned into ice showers, then the ground froze.  Some people would be upset about this.  Not me, though.

My driveway, which is very nicely slanted, became one long sheet of black ice.  Even the potholes were smoothed out.

Perfect for sliding!!!

I put on my boots and threw myself forward, carefully balancing... and managed to slide down the entire drive!

Stick figure in green boots sliding down a steep driveway, yelling, "Go, go Gadget Ice Boots! Wahoo!!!"


It was quite fun, and totally took my mind off of television for about twenty-five minutes.

Why only twenty-five minutes?

Well, at that point, the weather warmed up a few degrees, again... and the driveway lost its spectacular ability to glimmer like a nice, smooth sheet of glass.  That would have been ok, but there was one slight problem.  The ice had lost this glimmering sheen because it began to turn into slush.

Slush isn't particularly good material to slide on... especially at high speeds.  Indeed, you run,
     then slide a couple of inches,
          and then...

Stick figure in green boots, fallen flat on her face, arms and legs twisted.  Thought bubble reads, "Oof."


 ...plop.  

One quick stop and a crash.  It's not pretty.

Of course, the lack of ice meant that I was no longer worried about bringing my daughter outside with me.  Since she's four, my daughter isn't exactly the most dexterous person on the planet.  I feared broken bones and difficulties in picking her up off the ice if she fell... kind of like I did... but with the slush, I was confident everything would be fine.

So I took her outside and we spent time chasing each other while trying to tag one another with lightweight balls of various sizes.

Once we were properly dirty, we went back inside and put puzzles together.

But that got kind of boring.

So we threw beach balls at each other until I missed my daughter and knocked a glass off of the table instead, which caused my husband to pronounce the game over.

Mom and daughter holding hands. Mom holds a beach ball, thinking, "Oops." Daughter looks at her and says, "Mommy, I think we're in trouble..."


By the time bedtime arrived, the house looked overwhelmingly chaotic, a few knickknacks were broken, and my daughter and I were both thoroughly exhausted.

As I viewed the chaos, I realized that I had managed to have more fun during a day away from the television than I had in the last two weeks combined.

Television, shmelevision.

Who needs other people's made up lives, when we can create chaos have fun on our own?

Now to figure out a way to make cleaning up that mess into a game.  Hmmm...

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