Television and Me

My parents pressured me to start a blog, and I agreed for one reason only: shrimp bloggers.

Like an alcoholic tries to hide how much he drinks, I try to hide how much TV I watch. This is because I watch a lot of it. I’m sure I’m comfortably within national norms, but that hardly warrants self-congratulation. I’d sooner boast of being less morbidly obese than the average American. And anyway, I was raised better than this.

My mother and father kept tabs on my television viewing throughout my childhood, which I imagine is typical. However it’s since come to my attention that parental monitoring of television generally results in the proscription of certain programming deemed inappropriate for children. This was not the case in my house. My parents weren’t particularly troubled by the presence of vulgarity, sex, and violence on TV or in movies. To this day basic cable has never aired anything lurid and grotesque enough to have been deemed off-limits, even during my infancy.

What I’m trying to say is that the problem wasn’t what was on TV, but that the TV was on at all. As a kid, my viewing was capped at about an hour a day, which my parents erroneously considered lenient. With age came the freedom to watch TV until my eyes bled, and as such my teenage years were shrouded in red, but I could never escape familial judgment. Whenever I began to relax and enjoy reruns of Charles in Charge, a voice in my head (my mother’s voice, in fact) would remind me that I should be doing something, anything, else. I’ve compiled a list of adolescent activities my parents considered more productive and wholesome than television:

Homework
Reading
Exercise
Socializing
Cutting class
Heavy petting
Soft drug use
Shoplifting

Of the above, I engaged only in reading on a regular basis. Sure, I churned out the odd homework assignment and was known to periodically wander off school grounds in the middle of the day, but the remaining activities, parentally-sanctioned as they were, had nothing on that forbidden bitch-goddess, TV.

Oh, TV, TV, TV. I love TV, and 500 miles away from my parents’ prying eyes I enjoy copious amounts of it, which brings me conveniently back around to my original point: shrimp bloggers.

A recent Taco Bell commercial stars and is narrated by a man who identifies himself as a shrimp blogger. I could be cynical and point out that this guy is an actor and that Taco Bell, in presenting shrimp blogging as a viable and existent career, has really done away with any pretense of verisimilitude, and I’d probably be right, but even without all the cynicism this is a pretty insidious way to introduce more botulism into American diets.

Taco Bell is actually attempting to fool the public into thinking it’s OK to eat shrimp at Taco Bell. In fact, not only is it OK, but shrimp experts(!) the world over will be lining up outside Taco Bell franchises like junkies in front of methadone clinics. Never mind the greasy white-trash teenager nudging in your direction slimy, miniscule nuggets of rehydrated shrimp and Krab. Disregard the fact that these nuggets have been dredged out of a can and the animals involved probably died sometime during the Cold War. They’re delicious and more importantly THEY WON’T KILL YOU!

Anyway, if Taco Bell can casually posit the existence of a shrimp blogger and not be met with universal incredulity, there’s surely room in the world for my blog.