On Watching TV

Suddenly, and for no discernible reason, I feel like writing this, and writing it here.

I moved to a new apartment on the 23rd of March. Set up the TV stand that had been in storage and put the TV on it. Filled the living room with boxes of Stuff to go through and deploy rather than just squirrel away. These boxes prevent access to the TV so I can do something with it like, you know, plug it in, but I'll get to them when it's their time.

A week ago I bought a Roku so I could do Netflix and MLB.com without requiring a computer. It's still in its box.

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There are contending pieces to my personality. One side is all ADD and disorganized and thrives on change and cares little for routine and will let a project languish forever if its importance just never floats into view while leaping enthusiastically to something new. The other side dislikes clutter and craves the zen-like calm that flows through a neat and tidy space and wants things in their place so they can easily be found. This shows in my apartment, where t-shirts are still stacked up outside the closet while hanging shirts are in a last-worn last-out order, where the living room is unnavigable while the kitchen is cleaned almost daily, where the towels had a home the first day while my medicine cabinet still consists of a banker's box on the floor.

Back when I had a homestead with a large yard, I thought of the neatly placed tool shed, the flowing retaining wall with stairs built in, the pergola with its carefully designed angular relationship to the house; and then the pile of broken weed-wackers, the stacked boxes with weeds growing through them, the wood rotting under peeled paint in the window sills, all were evidence of the internal war between my ancestral Germans and my ancestral Irishmen.

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Some night recently it occurred to me it would be kind of nice to sit on the couch and watch a little TV. But I looked at the intervening clutter and the dusty DVD player still cantered towards the wall and remembered some other project or other that had a wee bit of urgency and that was that.