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Today we find out exactly when members of the Writers Guild of America, the union of tv and feature writers, go on strike. It could be as early as today (Friday), or maybe Monday. (ETA: it officially begins Monday, 11/5/07, at 12:01 am.)
The entire city of Los Angeles has been bracing for this for months now.
my mother makes a roasted chicken to die for, and…well, let’s just leave it at that.
i’m actually a decent cook, with the ability to put different flavors and textures together appealingly (for the most part), but i dislike cooking. i find the prep and cleanup drudgery.
i love to get everyone in the kitchen for thanksgiving and have several hands chopping and cutting and stirring…everyone involved in making a pumpkin pie, soup, and turkey plus dressing all at once. but. if i have to determine the menu for the whole week, then cook it, then do it again week after week after week…my interest just shrivels up. see what i mean? it’s too tempting to set the iFood on repeat. drudgery, i tell you.
[in a whisper]
confession: ok, i live in los angeles, home to much of the world’s creation and dissemination of prime, high-grade, uncut television. and yes, i think it’s appropriate to talk about it as if it were cocaine.
now, here’s how freakish we are: we don’t have cable tv. that’s right, we have the 3 or 4 channels you get when you stick your antenna into the sky and pull down whatever’s zooming around in the airwaves for free. on a 26″ 2002 sony tv, no less. and we only really watch in the event of a major fire in our neighborhood, which is to say, rarely.
(HB complains that he’s losing out in the Great American Race for Acquisition of Technologically Augmented Manhood As Expressed Through Expensive Consumer Toys because he is short one flat-panel television. i say, wait til after xmas, babe–the coming recession and post-xmas ungrateful gift recipient’s letdown will put all flat panels on vast discount. yours will be not only the biggest, but the best bargain. and you can tell anyone who cares to compare to Grind on This One.)
i didn’t always live tv-free. right after taking grueling oral exams for grad school (in which we were asked to chitchat for two hours knowledgeably about the highlights of 19th and 20th century american fiction, in addition to a list we ourselves submitted of some several tens more books in our area of specialization), i collapsed on our sofa and watched cable tv for probably 8 straight weeks. i guess i needed that amount of narcotization for my brain. a lethal amount of information and literary critical cleverness had built up in there and needed to be rinsed away by the inanity of E!’s Talk Soup.
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