Leisure
Somebody Has To Kill The Baby Sitter
And so the line goes in Cable Guy. Here was a character who was watching TV all his life.
I grew up knowing five channels, and the highest was channel 13. Ok, six if you count the local cable company’s channel. There was no UHF. I couldn’t say I was glued to the TV all the time, because I only watched Sesame Street or Saturday Fun Machine, or any cartoon showing between 5PM and 6PM. Then it was the news. There was MacGyver in high school, and other shows I watched on and off, but I couldn’t say I was hooked. I mean, we had to rent MTV on video! Wait, that was even on Betamax.
I went out biking. I played on the street with friends. There was hide and seek, and “Tubigan”, “Patintero”. We went swimming in rivers, even went fishing one time. There was stuff to do outdoors.
And then there was cable, and premium channels. There was HBO and Discovery Channel and ESPN. More and more, I wanted to spend time at home and just watch TV. Couch potato was the term for it.
In the old days, we had Atari game console, and then a few years later, a Nintendo Family Computer. It was ok for laughs and a few hours of play, but I didn’t get hooked either.
There was basketball. We even tried baseball one summer but it was too hard.
But then the video games got better in all aspects – complexity, control, graphics, audio, and there was Play Station and Play Station 2, and even computer games! Why go out in the heat, when you can enjoy these games indoors?
So I guess it’s a good thing. Or is it? I suppose the situation is the same with kids today. TV, game console, and computer – they have to have them all, which leave time for little else. Couch potatoes we have become. There’s even a new term, mouse potato, for those who spend too much time on computers outside of work.
Do we have more friends? Can you count the number of friends in your MySpace or Friendster account that you have actually spoken to on the phone, and actually seen personally?
Worse case would be all that inactivity in front of the screen causes some muscle atrophy. All those chips and sodas would, on the other hand, make you fat. And we wonder why more children are obese these days. They’re even so pale because they rarely get any serious sunshine. I know too much of anything is bad for you, but maybe too little could also be a bad thing.
Now I don’t have cable. It’s been a year and I feel I can live without it. I miss it sometimes. But there’s Netflix, which I can watch at my leisure. No game console either. I fill up my time working and spending time with my daughter. We play. We go out. It’s just the computer, but not much of that either.
I guess Chip Douglas was right. Somebody’s gotta kill the baby sitter.