I’m not much of a consumer of video media.
When I was a kid, I watched TV (shout out to Saturday morning cartoons and 80s sitcoms!). Many of the movies I wanted to see, I wasn’t allowed to see (parents: giving exposure and having conversations is better than sheltering).
By junior high, I was involved in a ton of extracurricular activities (band, basketball, softball, art lessons, flute choir, theatre), and when that turned to high school, with both more options and the options being more time-consuming, I was booked solid. Between those things and homework, I didn’t have time for TV.
(I have no recollection of movies during high school at all. If any of my high school friends read this—did we go to the movies??)
When I went to college, I was not in the habit of watching TV at all, so I didn’t buy one to take. My roommates didn’t have one. And, honestly, my schedule didn’t get any lighter. (Music major course loads are no joke.)
And so life went on without a TV. (I’ve married into a TV twice. But if The Climbing Daddy decided he didn’t want a TV any more, he’d get no resistance from me.) At this point, there are so many things that I want to do and so many chores that I need to do, there’s not really time for TV anyway.
My second long-term boyfriend in college was very much into movies, and I watched quite a few with him. My first and last movie-watching era.
I don’t know if it was teaching 30- or 40-minute periods for years on end or getting more active and thereby sitting less or something entirely unrelated, but I have trouble sitting through a movie. Even if it’s a good movie, I get antsy before the end. (If it’s not a good movie, forget about it!)
I hear Avengers is three hours long. You will definitely not find me in a theater watching that. (Unless I’m offered a sizable bribe to do so.) (Also, the people talking about needing the bathroom in that time are clearly not teachers.)
Hm. I just thought: the gym I belong to now has a movie room with cardio equipment in it. Maybe, if they’re playing a movie I’d like to see on a day when I have time to do it, I’ll see if the problem is sitting or attention span.
And also—I very much don’t like watching violence and I don’t like seeing bloody or mangled bodies (even if I didn’t see them get that way), which eliminates quite a bit of both TV and movies. (It makes cardio machines at the gym in the evening problematic sometimes because of what they choose to show on their TVs.)
So in the last 20 years, I haven’t seen a ton of movies. I’ve watched very little TV. Fast forward to the last week or two, and that makes me very much out of the loop for both Avengers and Game of Thrones.
I don’t care that I haven’t seen these things, that I’m not going to see these things, that I don’t really know what they’re about. But sometimes, I’m a little sad that I lose another point of connection with people.
In authenticity, I’m not going to watch it just to try to be like “everyone” else. And really, the way things seem to roll, if I watched it then tried to make conversation using it, I’d find all the other people who haven’t watched it which isn’t really helpful because you can’t build community on something that’s missing.
All that said, I’m glad the volume of GoT has decreased in my social media threads, partially because I don’t care about it and it’s annoying after a while, and partially because it bumps into my “you don’t fit in” button.
