I Don't Miss T.V.

I love TV and I owe it for all the Three Stooges, Mighty Mouse, Red Skelton, Dave Clark Five, Monkees, Partridge Family, America's Most Wanted (my favorite program for 11 years!), and Beavis and Butt-head it's given me. And Judge Judy. For the last three years hers has been the only show I DVR'd or sat down to watch. I pay only for local channels; no HBO or Comedy Channel, so I never saw Stephen what's his name or the Jon guy who just retired, or binge-watched anything, nor have I ever seen Downton Abbey or Orange is the New Black, or watched anyone beheaded, so have no water-cooler talk whatsoever. Even this little thread-end of satellite service cost me $36 monthly.

Furthermore I heard someone say CNN stood for "Constant Negative News." Called the Dish people and "suspended" my service. That costs $12 a month and after 3 months it goes back on full blast.

In the surprise of the century, fearing withdrawal symptoms, within a day I lived just fine without it. The days have more hours. I wake earlier. When I see TV at the gym -- often tuned to a "house hunting" show -- it looks and sounds absurd. Glimpses of dramas show me lots of dead bodies. Maybe breaking a habit that stretches back at least 55 years -- almost back to the dawn of television itself; I never knew a world without it --was so painless because it's summer. I ordered some books. I'm trying new habits of thought. TV was filler. No one ever died wishing they'd watched more TV.

Wash Your Hair Once a Week

I keep this old home-economics book, from a box of  secondhand books somebody gave us when I was a kid, because it seriously changed my life, telling me for the first time how to sit, dress, look, choose and coordinate colors and clothing styles (what?) and amazingly, said (this was 1957): "The normal scalp may be shampooed every one or two weeks. A weekly shampoo is necessary if the air is heavy with smoke and dust, or if the hair is light in color."

Shampoo every two weeks? I once went four days and my hair smelled like the camel/rhino enclosure at the zoo. What kind of world was it that this book contained? A world of either/ors, I guess:

In the culture of 50 years later, now our hair is clean but typically our posture much more resembles the dreamer/beatnik/free spirit's on the right. In fact we like her better; the controlled one is a "brownie" or "teacher's pet" or "sucking up" and certainly the boys would say she's a "high-maintenance" chick. The girl on the right -- she might let the boys get to second base, or even third.

Maybe when I was 9 and first read through this book I knew the answer to the question just above, but as an adult I understand, completely, the girl on the right.