Withdrawal pains

As I said in my last post, I got very little sleep this week. I slept about 4 hours each night and felt really sick towards the end of this week. I got sick most likely because I haven’t eaten much other than chocolate and coffee and occasionally fast food. These past couple of days have been very hectic with lots of family stuff and work so I didn’t really have time to do much other than school work. By Friday I was shaking really bad (probably because of all the caffeine) and looked absolutely horrible. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal or taken a good shower (I did shower in like 5 min) or taken time to look good in a couple of days. I’m saying all this not because I want to complain about this stuff but because I am now going to talk about my main concern during all this stuff.

Even though I was sleep deprived, food deprived, sick, and looked like crap, all I could think about was that I hadn’t seen the last episode of “Friends” season 8 yet. Sam and I are systematically going through all of the “Friends” seasons and we usually watch a couple of episodes each night. Needless to say, because of our horrible week, we hadn’t really had time to watch an episode in a while and season 8 was already a couple of days late to Blockbuster. As I worked on the Textual Analysis Essay at 3 in the morning Monday night I was really worried that I wouldn’t get to watch “Friends” and when I studied for my chemistry exam late Thursday night I was experiencing these weird withdrawal pains from “Friends.” I don’t know how I got so addicted to TV, I guess its not technically TV because I don’t really like to watch current shows on TV, I only like to watch the seasons of shows when they come out on DVD. With the exception of “Gilmore Girls” which I watched faithfully every Tuesday night ever since the very first episode, I just don’t watch very much TV.

I guess my point in this blog is that I don’t think we realize how addicted we are to TV or music or whatever until we have to do without them. If someone had asked me if I loved to watch TV before this week then I would have told them that I really don’t like to watch TV, I like to read. I honestly did think that this was true until this week when instead of freaking out about not reading my book I got really messed up because I hadn’t seen “Friends.” Maybe TV has such a big impact because it engages more of our senses and we don’t have to work at understanding what is going on. Reading mainly involves your brain but TV and movies occupy our sight and hearing. Neil Postman warns about the dangers of TV in “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” I read this book and found it fascinating but I didn’t really think that it applied to me. I love to read and I read all the time, Postman mainly talks about our disregard for the written word and our replacement of literature with television. I figured that since I like to read way more than I like to watch TV then I was not vulnerable to the effects that Postman describes TV having on people. I realize now that whether we are addicted to television or not, it can have a profound impact on us.