Sunday, January 20, 2008

Day nineteen...The elephant in the middle of the room.







I have a new TV.

Not just a TV. I have a new piece of furniture. I think it was specially made for Shrek. I don't mean for me to watch the movie on, I mean for Shrek himself to watch. Maybe it was given to him when it came out on DVD, or Blu-Ray, or IMAX. Yes, it's huge. And it would be hard to move even if you were a jolly green giant.

It was given to me by my good friends Karen and Dancin' Carl of the Hilltowns. It was very generous of them. They recently bought a new flat screen and finally gave in to the pressures of the twentieth century and got cable just when mine got shut off. It was a pretty funny set of circumstances, but that's what happened.

They brought it over to my house last night and it was an adventure just getting it out of the truck. It felt like we were trying to tame a wild elephant. The dangling cord added excitement, amusement, and danger as we kept almost tripping on its tail. It took a lot of grunts and a whole lot of muscle but we finally dragged the clumsy beast from the trailer it came in up the stairs and corralled it into my apartment. Upon arrival, it immediately adopted my titmouse of a television that I had been using in my living room. They make a cute couple.

I'm sure I'll get used to my new beast. But the more immediate problem is that I have to find a new spot for my clock. Beast is so big it covers up the part of my wall I have it hanging on. That'll take some getting used to. The last time I moved my clock it took weeks to train myself to not check the calendar for the time. I was late for a lot of appointments, but at least I was absolutely sure which day they were on.

I also have to get my cable back. I really think I can hold out until baseball season. I'll need NESN in April. For now I'll settle for a few fuzzy network channels.

But change is oh so hard to get used to.

Take a simple rearrangement like where you keep your cereal.

I keep my cereal on top of my fridge. A while back I used to keep it in my cabinet directly across the room. Each morning for about a month I would wake up, roll out of bed, put on some tea water, and open the cabinet. Then as if it were a choreographed move, I'd slam the cabinet shut and spin around in my slippers and grab the Corn Flakes from the top of the fridge. Depending on my mood I sometimes even added a point with finger snap for effect. It went on like that for so long that It was almost impossible to determine the moment when I had broken myself of the habit.

These days I've forced myself to change a lot of my habits. But oddly, and thankfully, they have been easier to get used to. Instead of stopping at the package store on my way home from work, I stop at the market. I might buy a few apples, a muffin, maybe some juice. I'll bring it home and save it until the morning. And it tastes much better when I eat it at a reasonable time rather than at midnight after a 20 dollar delivery order. Yes, after pene alfredo and a piece of cheesecake, a blueberry muffin is...how you say...overkill.

Anything that does not adapt or change will become extinct. This is an irrefutable law and I must comply. So far I'm enjoying the surprises which I continually encounter. Like my new TV. The screen is not unlike my perspective. Wider, brighter, and more highly defined. And while I have to wait until spring to get all the channels, for now I'll enjoy what's coming in through the rabbit ears. And rabbit ears on an elephant is an amusing prospect indeed.

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