Lydia Davis - Television

Lydia Davis’s story sadly confirmed what I’ve learned to be true: that my parents were right when they always said, “You’ll thank me when you’re older.” I was raised without television or video games and spent a good part of my childhood thinking up strategies to convince my parents to cave. They never did, so I was always disconnected from what was going on in TV shows or inside jokes about cartoons or Disney shows that everyone else grew up with. But now, many of my friends who innocently watched kids shows growing up haven’t grown out of it and default to noise and moving pictures in front of their glazed eyes whenever they have what they would consider a dull moment.

            That being said, I couldn’t personally relate to television aspect of it, but I do often waste time, and related to the absent feeling of depression. “It is not that it is what you want to be doing, it is that you are passing the time. You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep.” I have experienced that meaningless wandering internally and externally. Doing menial things until I can end the day.

            Growing up in the 21^st century, I’ve been around plenty of television, whether I owned one or not; the way that she told the story worked because it felt like I was skipping through channels, never quite entertained or satisfied enough to stick around. The slightly different sentence structures and the switch back and forth from first to second person gave the affect of channel surfing and indecision.