minus TV plus LIFE

About six months back, Mary and I decided to make a major change in our lives. We were noticing that the small amount of time that we had with each other was being soaked up by dozens of television shows we had managed to get hooked on. Worse, when Mary was by herself and I was at the theatre, she would spend most of her spare time watching DVR'd shows. We decided to rip TV out of our lives and no longer let them revolve around the television.

The hardest part was convincing ourselves that we didn't need all of those shows in our lives. By luck, or perhaps divine intervention, four or five of the shows that we were really devoted to started to drop in quality all at the same time. We were able to say "That was awful. Why did we just watch that?" and then mentally cross it off the list of shows to watch. The next step was an addicts worst nightmare... we had to call and turn off the cable. Yikes! Visions of shows we would miss began to race through our minds... we doubted our decision. Could we really do this? Could we off our television?

We moved our entertainment system over to the other side of the room and circled our seating arrangement so that our focus was on each other and the fire place. We softened the lighting and added a few lamps, fine tuned our Pandora stations on the computer/stereo and picked a ton of books from paperbackswap.com.

Now, six months later, we can't imagine it any other way. The amount of time we spend actually talking to each other has grown tremendously and it is no longer bound in by commercial breaks (or worse, not possible because of Netflix TV or DVR fast forward capabilities.)

Last night I was able to follow up on student leads while Mary worked on recipes for the upcoming week. We had an open dialogue about food, music, books, cats, movies, the theatre, exercise and more. It was really a great night and I felt like I truly lived it with Mary instead of co-existed it while watching a trillion hours of television.

Don't worry... we still watch LOST on Tuesday nights. Once a week we turn the couch around, revive the television and pull out the rabbit ear antennae to see the final season of our favorite show.