Mostly childhood TV (distracting myself)

[mrissa]

Horrible nightmare last night. It ranks with the one about gaaldine among my worst nightmares ever. It was not a screaming one, thankfully, so it just bothered me and not markgritter and timprov. Still, it combined personal helplessness, great harm to my loved ones, and malicious stupidity from other people. Oh yay. I just can't wait to go back to sleep.

So rather than obsessively wandering from room to room checking whether timprov and markgritter are still breathing (since, y'know, they're here and I could, even if it would be neurotic and obnoxious), I've been writing e-mail and finishing up a thank-you note, and now here I am.

Someone asked what my favorite cartoons/TV shows were when I was a kid. I wasn't allowed to watch much TV, and when I was allowed, I wasn't really all that interested. I was terrified of Scooby Doo, which always confuses people until I mention that I never watched a whole show straight through, so I never got to see that it was always an old guy in a rubber mask. And nobody thought to tell me that it was -- they just kept repeating, "It's not scary, it'll turn out all right," which is not at all the same thing as, "It's really an old guy in a rubber mask; it always is." I suppose they didn't want to ruin it for me.

I liked "Head of the Class," because I was heavily geek-identified even as a little kid: a show about the smart kids was a show about "us." I liked that the smart kids weren't all the same. I mean, the characters were not deep -- they had the Fat Kid and the Tough Guy and so on -- but they were all supposed to be the smart kids, the Pretty Dreamy Girl and all of them. It wasn't that only the Classic Nerd was smart. They all were. The smart kids got to have romances and other normal things. And while they sometimes teased the Classic Nerd for his foibles, the other smart kids were also his friends and stuck by him. I wanted to believe in that.

(When I was in seventh grade, Marylyn heard that one of the other kids in her gifted English class had called me a nerd. She hit the ceiling and screamed her actress-lungs out at us, that if we didn't stand up for each other, she could guarantee that no one else was going to stand up for us. That we had to see how the others in the class were special, because not everyone could see it, where other kinds of being special were a lot more recognized around there. It...made an impression. We weren't "all bestest pals" after that, but I never heard another kid from that class try to make points by putting down someone else's geekiness, not in the whole time I was in junior high and high school with those kids. And honors classes in high school were more or less "safe" zones for me. Again, I wasn't close with all the other honors kids, but being the AcaDec president and founder of science club was not a liability in that crowd. People didn't throw things at you for just sitting there reading silently. Hooo, digression. Anyway.)

I liked "Star Trek: the Next Generation" as long as Tasha Yar was on it. Which wasn't very long, and I'm not very good at staying with TV series anyway -- never have been -- so I didn't watch obsessively even early on. I mean, it's not like it was a book or something. But Tasha Yar didn't have a girlyjob, and that was very important to me as a kid. (Some people try to claim that Dr. Crusher, as a doctor, didn't have a girlyjob, either. I've seen male specialists, but I've never had a male for my primary-care physician. Ever in my entire life. So it never registered that girls might not be doctors, because of course they were; boys might not be, for all I knew at that age.)

I watched the "He Man" and "She Ra" cartoons sometimes when I was little mostly because my little-boy friends liked to play He Man, and I was much fonder of that than the low-to-no-narrative games some of the little girls we knew wanted to play. I also watched "Transformers" and a couple of Transformer-derivative things with robots. They weren't that much more interesting to me than the "girl" cartoons, but the boys were a lot more interesting to me than the girls in general, more willing to play games that involved slaying sea serpents and the like, so if I was going to watch cartoons, I watched "theirs." Not "G.I. Joe," though. No interest whatsoever in "G.I. Joe." No swords, no robots, no thanks.

lydy was talking about "Electric Company" recently, and I dimly recall watching that occasionally, but it was in reruns by the time I was born. The "educational" children's show I really imprinted on was "Square One TV." Mathman! Mathman! I would have gladly signed up to be Sgt. Monday. We still make a fair number of "Square One" jokes around here.

I liked "Dinosaurs," at first, I'm pretty sure. Late-season "Dinosaurs" was not that great.

I don't know. I was always frustrated because my mom wanted me to watch TV (that is, not read) when I was home sick from school, and TV was not at all appealing. In school they showed us TV about books, and that was even worse, patronizing and stupid, and if they wanted us to do something with books, reading them seemed like the obvious choice to me. My folks would sometimes put on "The Cosby Show" or "Cheers" or "M*A*S*H" -- my mom's taste in TV extends much further into the mainstream than mine does, and while I now think "M*A*S*H" did some good stuff, it was not really accessible to me the year I turned 5, which is the year it went off the air. It was something I knew about -- I could have told you who the characters were -- but I didn't pay it much attention.

We didn't have cable until August 10, 1994, when my parents broke down and got cable to watch baseball. Those of you who follow baseball are now laughing, because August 12, 1994, is when MLB went on strike. We followed Twins baseball on the radio. WNAX Yankton was my mom's lifeline to home. I'm not kidding when I say that the second-most commonly heard prayer of my childhood, after the standard Lutheran ComlorJesus at the table, was my mom praying for Puckett to pull the Twinks out of the 9th before the signal strength ramped down at 10:00. They were big on late-game heroics in that era, and we missed some of it because WNAX turned its power down, and the Omaha World-Herald didn't even run good baseball news the next morning. There were times in late-season '87 and '91 when Mom would call my grands at 10:00 to hear the rest of the game. (My grands still lived up here then.)

I think mostly the TV was not on all that much. I remember getting excited about what new cartoons there would be in the fall, and I remember being disappointed in what they actually turned out to be. So I gave up. Watching TV was not enjoyable enough in itself to be worth spending the time to find the good shows. Frankly, it's still not: I only end up watching TV shows if someone else in the house is interested or if there's a critical mass of recommendations, and sometimes not even then. DVDs are a good way for me to watch TV, not because of the lack of commercials (although that's nice) but because there's a whole season or sometimes a whole series right there, and I can watch a story arc without having to put any additional effort in, and I can watch that story arc on my time, not someone else's.

Some people have suggested a TiVo, but eh: I'd have to program it to save what I wanted, and if nobody showed the episode in the middle of the plot arc when I wanted to see it, it wouldn't get TiVo'ed, and then I'd have to actually watch stuff, or else delete it from the TiVo, and it just sounds like a great deal more work for...more television? What a fabulous reward. Hold me back.

TV is mostly not visually interesting to me. I can watch a TV show socially because the other people in the room are visually interesting. I'm not one of the "TV is poison! Down with TV!" people. I think it's a valid art form. It's just one with more misses than hits for me.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I was AcaDec, too. :D

TV was never really a primary thing for me, perhaps stemming back from a childhood in Africa, when we didn't have any such thing. But I liked staying home sick from school and watching TV because our local PBS ran these interesting educational programs during the day.

My parents grounding me from TV wasn't a big deal except for one time, back when I was cherising an ambition to be an animator at about the age of 14 or so, and I did something-or-other and was grounded from TV for a week. Which happened to be the only week that HBO was playing a Ralph Bakshi movie that I really wanted to see, and this was before obscure movies were really available on video (at least in College Station). I think it was American Pop. I asked for a dispensation for this movie, on the ground that I'd never get another chance to see it, and it was not granted, so I fumed for a week. Still haven't seen it, but no longer have the desire to.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My parents never even considered grounding me from TV. It would not have registered as a punishment.

They only grounded me once. They saw that playing at home with my own toys and books did not register as a punishment, either.

Of course, my mom still regularly grounds me until I'm 37. I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get un-grounded in another nine and a half years, but it should probably be good.

[steve-dash-o.livejournal.com]

RE: contemporary TV:

Did you ever watch "Firefly"? I perhaps don't know you well enough to predict what might or might not appeal to you, but, I would GUESS that you might enjoy it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm not a Joss Whedon fan. Tried "Buffy," tried "Serenity" fairly recently, just not into it. When I wrote, "I only end up watching TV shows if someone else in the house is interested or if there's a critical mass of recommendations, and sometimes not even then," the "and sometimes not even then" is not always done by Joss Whedon, but often: very rarely has someone's work been so universally recommended in my circle of friends and hit me so wrong as his.

[laurel]

Ah, Head of the Class, hadn't thought of that show in a while.

Tivo is actually super incredibly easy to use. You push a button or two and it will record an entire season of a show for you (and only record the new episodes if you want it too, so you don't get confused when suddenly you're seeing reruns partway through the season). And it keeps track of them in order, etc. It has the best user interface of anything I've ever seen and the best remote control ever. Not trying to sell you one it, but it really is All That and ridiculously easy (parents and grandparents can use it with no problem adn little to no instruction. That kindof easy). (If you ever want to see ours in action, that can be arranged of course).

I grew up with a lot of TV. I watched TV after school almost every day, watched TV in primetime almost every day. I did also read a lot-- my Mom usually was trying to get me to go outside and play or to go out with friends (later when I was older). It wasn't that I didn't like the outdoors-- I really did, but I preferred to read or watch TV.

I realize now that watching TV was also one way that I managed to relate to schoolmates. Often the topic of conversations in the lunch line or wherever were about the previous night's shows. It's kinda weird that most of my social circle are fans and most of them don't watch TV or didn't immerse themselves in pop culture the way I did. I'm used to pop culture (esp. TV) as a touchstone and basis for most conversation-- it's the opposite of that in Minn-StF really, with only a couple of exceptions. So somewhere along the line I stopped making the various references and in-jokes. Though Kevin gets a lot of my sports and pop culture references, which is kindof cool.

My Grandma & Grandpa Olson listened to the Twins on WNAX a lot, but they were in Mitchell, South Dakota so the signal was pretty strong all the time. They actually got cable fairly early as these things go to get the Twins games on TV and then they'd watch whenever they could and only listen to the radio when they weren't on TV. I grew up listening to the Twins on WCCO, watching them on TV when I could, and going to games fairly regularly (especially from 1984 or 85 on, my parents have had partial season tickets ever since then-- save for in 1987, something I never let my Dad forget).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not that I think TiVo would be too hard for me. It's that any degree of effort at all just looks like too much to be worth it from here. I would press a button and have TV shows? Meh.

markgritter has a lot different pop culture references than I do, and somewhat fewer of them: his parents do not listen to modern music. His mom is in her early 50s and had no idea what Bob Dylan sounded like. So all the music references he has, he has from me. On the other hand, his parents watched a lot more PBS/BBC mystery stuff I'd never heard of. timprov comes a lot closer to having similar reference points, but again with some gaps on both sides.

[dancingwriter.livejournal.com]

(Some people try to claim that Dr. Crusher, as a doctor, didn't have a girlyjob, either. I've seen male specialists, but I've never had a male for my primary-care physician. Ever in my entire life. So it never registered that girls might not be doctors, because of course they were; boys might not be, for all I knew at that age.)

That really hit me; wow. I am sixteen years older than you, and it sure does make a difference. I never met a woman doctor during my whole childhood (and having a congenital heart defect, I met a *lot* of doctors). In fact, I remember the newspaper running a big feature--I must have been about eight at the time--when one of the local hospitals decided to let its nurses start wearing pantsuits. So to people of my age (and up), it was really something having the ship's doctor on STNG be a woman.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Let...the nurses...wear pantsuits.

*brain explodes*

Nurses in skirts are something from old movies and TV programs. I have never actually seen a nurse in a skirt.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

Ummm . . . have I heard about this nightmare regarding me before? I remember my laughter while you were trying to fall asleep once frightend you, but . . .

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The basic form of many of my nightmares is that there is something deeply unpleasant (for any readers not fluent in Minnesotan, read: #@%&# terrible) happening to someone I love, and I can't stop them from being hurt. One of the very worst ones ever featured you as the loved one in question, and I don't think I want to tell you the details of the awfulness. I don't think it would help anything, and frankly it is a level of horrible that I probably wouldn't put in fiction, much less relate to an actual person on purpose. The dream itself was in our senior year, and I still get a little shaky thinking about it in more than the basic outline. It was a horrible thing for my brain to do to me.

It was not long after your breakup with Brian, and I was feeling both protective of you and helpless in many areas of my life. So.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

My first thought upon reading this was, "Who was Brian?" Not that I don't know who that creature was supposed to be, just that I don't think of that creature in those terms. The designation "Brian" just seemed to accord too much respect (even "creature" does).

I am amused by how much I've separated my life into "then" and "now," where "then" seems almost to belong to someone else entirely.

I am sorry to have been a contributing factor to your nightmares, however. Particularly for such a one.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, "creature" doesn't work for me, as my default "the creature" is Frankenstein's monster, with whom I have a great deal more sympathy.

I'm very glad "then" seems almost to belong to someone else entirely.

You may have come up in my nightmares at some point anyway, because people I care about who are smaller than myself are not in great supply yet and also seem more statistically likely to show up in that type of dream. My Onie, for example.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

I'm teaching _Frankenstein_ this coming semester, which pleases me greatly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Me, too.

That is, it pleases me greatly, too; I'm not teaching it to anyone, to the best of my knowledge. Not even the semester after that.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Mmm, Mathnet:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5... Eureka!

The sound of that parrot is ingrained firmly in my brain, and I've been fascinated by the Fibonacci Sequence ever since. :)