Ash Wednesday

Calling me a lapsed Catholic would probably be an understatement. In addition, I somehow didn't even know about the whole ashes on the forehead thing until I came to college, despite growing up in a Catholic family. But one tradition I have held onto is giving something up for Lent. I think it's a good spiritual practice, and it helps you decide what is really important to you. I gave up meat a few years ago and didn't really miss it; I gave up chocolate one year and I thought of it every day. I would only give up chocolate again for the sheer pleasure it gives you to eat chocolate after forty days of not having any, but that would be a warped reason, so I'm not doing it.

This year, my partner and I have decided to forsake television. Not that we watch much, and most that is DVDs, but sometimes we'll fire up the set to later find we've lost an entire evening without meaning to. It's that "without meaning to" that I worry about.

Television lost it appeal for me in the summer of 1999. There was no concrete reason, I just realized one day that I hadn't touched the remote in two months. I read a book a few years ago called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television that helped justify my aversion.

The cocktail of the last seven years (the 2000 election debacle, 9/11, the war with Iraq) have only made me withdraw further from the mainstream, to the point that I feel like I live in another country. I've met people who can't seem to relate to me because I don't know the shows they're talking about. One of my cousins told me about a seminar he went to where people chose to introduce themselves by what show they watched.

It's a little isolating, but I don't feel like I'm missing that much. I definitely feel happier than when I was still trying to keep up. I don't find myself wanting as much stuff, to be sure. So it may seem silly for me to give up television for Lent - it was actually my partner's idea - but who knows, maybe I'll find that I'm more attached to the little that I do watch more than I had realized.

One question that has been percolating in my head, but that I haven't yet sat down and confronted, is whether all the time I spend web surfing is any better. It's not the surfing and the information overload so much as it is the physical act of staring at a screen for hours on end.

Funny enough, I just noticed that my friend Christopher also wrote about these things just yesterday. He refers to this article from The Guardian, talking about the physical risks of television watching. I agree with him that the study is more noteworthy for talking about physiological effects rather than psychological, maybe people will pay more attention. Then again, people still smoke, don't they? Still, can we work on getting television banned in bars and restaurants now?

Okay, this is more rambling than I normally like to be in writing.