Get your 'get out of jail free’ shot
- col-teri-stein
- March 18, 2021
- 759
I’ve always been interested in history, but one thing I learned in the past year is it’s a lot better to read about trying times than to live through them.
By the time you read this, I will have gotten my “get out of jail free” shot, and in a few weeks I will be well on my way to having a more fearless spring and summer. And I hope to actually get together with family and friends who also have had their “get out of jail free” shots.
It will be so nice to leave “house arrest” behind and not have to treat everyone like they have cooties.
With spring here soon, it will be good to get away from our winter lifeline — the television. We have watched a lot of it and in new ways. We are most surely behind the times, though, and just recently subscribed to a few streaming services.
I do not really watch anything that is streamed myself, though, unless Joe is around because — I am not afraid to admit it — he is more technologically advanced than me. Although, I am still the go-to person on how to spell words correctly.
They have now made changing channels on the TV so difficult that I would rather just watch something on cable, which I already know how to work, and not mess up the delicate balance of the multiple separate remotes you need to work the TV and everything that is hooked up to it these days.
I’ll never be able to play a DVD either. So movie watching is out unless Joe wants to watch something. I’ll just watch it along with him.
When we were kids, changing the TV channel was a lot simpler. You did not even need a remote. You just had to coerce another family member, who was getting up to grab a snack or drink, to change the channel for you. Sometimes you just watched the show following the show you wanted to watch because you didn’t want to get up and change the channel. (Guilty! I’ve done it, but not lately because I have the remote.)
It is hard to believe you actually had to walk over to the TV and manually change the channel, but at least you didn’t need an IT degree to do it.
Our first TV, when I was a kid in the 1960s, was a big, boxy black and white set. We watched plenty of great TV shows on that set, like the “Red Skelton Show,” the “Mickey Mouse Club” and “Gilligan’s Island.”
Then in the early 1970s, somehow, some way, I do not exactly remember if it was given to us or not, but we moved on up to a color set. We were living the good life now, but you still had to get up and change the channel yourself.
Cable wasn’t a thing then, at least in our rural area, and a big hill blocked any television signals from the north. We received two TV channels, and that was it, but we were happy — that is until “The Brady Bunch” TV show started and we couldn’t get it. Our friend, Sue, lived about a quarter mile from us, just outside the range of the signal-blocking hill. She got to watch “The Brady Bunch.” We were so envious. “The Brady Bunch” was a big deal to middle school girls.
After that, TV just kept getting more complicated from VCRs to DVRs. It is to the point now you can record more TV than you can possibly watch at a later date. It just keeps getting worse.
I was in the kitchen tonight when I heard Joe speaking. I headed to the living room and poked my head in. “Are you talking to me?”
“No,” Joe looked at me like I had two heads filled with sand.
Confused, I scanned the room; he wasn’t on his phone. Then he picked up the streaming remote and spoke into it very loudly to change the channel. Oh, this is getting to be too much.
Everything is way too complicated these days. I got a new smart phone last year, and it’s still way smarter than me. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get it to “ding” correctly when someone sends me a text. The two people whose texts I don’t want to miss are from Joe and my sister. Yet, when they text me, my phone emits a weak “ding” that could be easily missed unless you are sitting on top of your phone.
If anyone besides my husband and sister texts me, my phone emits an annoyingly loud sound that can be heard from the next county. I wish I could switch this around, but after many hours of staring at the phone, I cannot figure it out.
So my next best course of action is to just get out of the house and do something else — something that doesn’t require any kind of technology, something that might include not being afraid to be around others, eating a meal in an actual restaurant instead of in my car or even sitting cheek to cheek on the high school bleachers around a bunch of people I don’t know and cheering on the athletes. Sigh. We can only dream until everyone who can gets their “get out of jail free” shot.