tired

I am forever complaining about being tired. I wonder if it's shorthand for thinking about something more complex that is bothering me? Usually it's not-very-good code for feeling trapped in my life and finding the monotony tedious but inescapable.
This morning, however, I really am just tired. I did none of the things I had intended to last night, because I was too tired; instead I read things on the Internet, but got too absorbed in them, and wound up staying up later than I'd meant.
Duhhh.
Then I woke up earlier than I'd intended, couldn't get back to sleep, etc. ... So really, "tired" just means "tired", at the moment.

Z has to attend a meeting today; he's been offered a contract job, just helping out on a project for a friend's business. This friend, I think, really wants to hire Z after all, but had been planning on a someday kind of basis for it, and hadn't expected Z to be at ends so soon. So he's tossing him small projects as a contract worker, since he can't just out and out hire him yet.
Z and I tried to think about how this could be bad, and couldn't really; the only thing is, since we don't know how much money it is or how often, and of course we also don't know what kind of deadlines there will be, we're still completely unable to make any kind of travel plans.
Bleah.
But, I mean, so he gets piece work here and there. As long as it's enough to supplement my income so we're at or above subsistence, then that's fine; Z could use some more downtime in his life, and I'd not be unhappy to have him around the house more. (He won't really do housework, but once in a while I can guilt him into doing some dishes. That's all he's done this week, a few dishes, but it's great, because he hadn't done any in a long time, and I didn't do any while I was sick, so things were pretty dire.) Neither of us is really cut out for the 9-5, 40-hour work week. Even if I can't escape it, at least if he can then one of us will be more easygoing and less foul-tempered. Which goes a little way toward making me less desperately bored in my life. ;)

Practice tonight is the dress rehearsal for the bout. I can't remember what it was like to have energy, to be excited about skating. I can't remember what it was like to be able to skate. At least my knees seem much improved by the sudden, enforced, complete rest: I managed to squat down and get back up with no trouble this morning, and I even knelt on the ground with almost no pain the other day. I've got to get back into the physical therapy exercises. I've just had absolutely no exercise for almost two weeks now. No, exactly two weeks; the Wednesday before last I skated, but that Thursday I sat the wall at practice and was all shivery and icky and tight in my chest. I worked out Saturday morning, briefly, but it wasn't much of a workout-- half an hour of lifting milk jugs and doing crunches. Bleh.

Enough whining! One of these days I'll feel better and not be whiny! But then I'll feel better so I won't notice it. I certainly won't sit around LJ to update it. I like to think that explains the bias towards unhappy in the balance of my entries.

ode to tv

Stuff White People Like is one of those things I feel awkward for being so amused by. On the one hand, it's horrible and racist, and if it was called "Stuff [any other category of] People Like" I'd be pretty appalled. But on the other hand, it's actually pretty funny. The thing is, it's such a nebulous racial group that it's funny.
I could get into something deep about deeply prevalent racism goes if the joke here is that "white people" of course only refers to a tiny subset of the people who could be described that way, and the reason it's funny is that everyone realizes that the group "white people" is too large and nebulous a category for anyone to really identify with it, etc-- and yet there are certainly as many or more "black people" in the world but stereotyping a small group of them isn't funny because people will think that's really true of all of them. Etc. I could, but I won't; I haven't got that kind of time.

Anyway, it's also partly funny because, for the most part, the behaviors described don't apply to me. Possibly my friends, but rarely me.

And then I got to Not Having A TV, and was like, Hey. I don't have a TV.
Why don't I have a TV?
Because I don't have one. In college it was always one of the things my roommates brought to the household; when I moved in with Z, he didn't have one. (Well, he had a broken one, but in a rare moment of efficiency I threw it out.) We always figured we'd get one someday, but we've never missed having one.


I don't expect we'll break down anytime soon.
But friends of mine have TVs. And they seem to bring them so much joy. So I am happy for these friends of mine, that they can find so much joy in this thing. It tells them stories; I love that storytelling is so important to so many people, and more, I love how everyone hears the same story but reacts to it so differently. It's great that the TV still fosters such a sense of community in this scattered and far-flung nation. Culture is fragmenting, but a lot of it is still fairly uniform, on the TV.
So hurrah TV.
I'm still not getting one, but I applaud you all for having one, and appreciate how and why it is important.

But I do realize now why people always get so weird and defensive when I'm like, "Eh, I don't have a TV." They must really think that I disapprove of TVs. I'd also observed how many people were like, "That's so great that you don't have a TV," but who make no move to reduce their own television consumption. I had a professor in college who interspersed his lectures about how television is the devil with frequent, perfect Simpsons quotes. I finally called him on this, at one point: "If you hate television and don't watch it, how do you know what those TV characters said?"
"Well," he said, "my point is that you don't really need much of it to blend in seamlessly." When pressed he admitted he'd gone through 2 years with no TV, but had one now.
That's nice for you, but people think you're a hypocrite when you do things like that, and also think you're trying to make yourself seem better than them when you demonstrably are not. Simply having gone without something in the past doesn't mean you're not addicted to it now, if you claim it's an addiction.

Anyhow. This is all just a little reminder to myself, mostly, not to be such a jackass about not having a TV. No, I don't own a TV; that doesn't mean I don't think you should have one. I waste too much time if I have one, so I don't really want to make the room for one in my life, as it would fill up space (physically and mentally) there that isn't empty right now. But I know others have a perfectly nice niche where their TV goes, and that's not something they should be at all ashamed of. I've got to make sure I don't seem to imply that they should.

I squander ridiculous amounts of time on the Internet instead, and we all know there are far worse things on the Internet than on TV.