Picture this: It’s a little after midnight early Wednesday morning, and you have a column and a three-page thesis outline due later that day. So what do you do? Well, if you’re me, you sit down with your too-often shirtless roommate and watch A Walk To Remember, based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks.
Why do I do this? I think it’s because I’ve become a qualified degenerate, capable of little beyond eating Frosted Mini-Wheats and watching television. I am lazy. I’m a bum. I do no work.
Now, I’m not claiming that I’m the only lazy, worthless procrastinator on this campus. For three-and-a-half-years, I’ve been around some of the finest do-nothing students of our time. I remember freshman year I would go up to my friend Joe’s dorm room around one a.m. for a study break. Joe and his roommate Will would be eating Swedish Fish, listening to porn music and playing video games. It was amazing, I thought. How could someone do these things and still get by? I needed to get at least eight hours of sleep and all of my reading done before class the next day.
Today, I only wonder why I had such a stick up my ass. Sitting around, getting fat and watching television is a goal we should all strive for. You can still get by in school, of course, you just have to know how to play the game. You have to know which papers count for what and what passages need reading for the next day. After that, you’re golden. It’s just something that Joe and Will picked up much earlier than I, and they’re better people for it.
With my laziness firmly intact, this year has been a dream. My apartment has two televisions stacked on top of each other. The top one is a big screen, used for watching television only. The bottom one, slightly smaller, is reserved for playing Xbox, usually NBA2K3. So I can sit and watch television, or lie down and watch television, while also being able to match up Dr. J against Keith Van Horn in a streetball battle for the ages. I know, it’s dreamy.
You may say that I need to do schoolwork to learn. But I already know all about the intricacies of post-colonial literary theory and the inner workings of the political economy of sub-Saharan Africa. However, I don’t know anything about the Golden Girls! That is, until yesterday. I can now tell you that Blanche from Golden Girls is played by Rue McLachlane and that Estelle Getty was also the co-star in a little-known Sly Stallone film entitled Stop, Or My Mom Will Shoot. This is valuable life knowledge.
My greatest passion is trashy reality television. I usually start my work-week off with a dose of Fox Monday. With a friend who shares the same passion, I watch Boston Public at eight, which features the hottest teachers this side of Saved by the Bell’s Mr. Tuttle. That’s just the appetizer. At nine, it’s Joe Millionaire time. Perhaps the best conceived dating show of all time, Joe ranks higher on the unintentional comedy scale than Mike “Fading Into Bolivian” Tyson. His cute dimples and masculine exterior cannot mask his utter stupidity and lack of personality. Not that it matters. Ultimately, the show teaches us a life lesson not available in the classrooms of ICC and White Gravenor: Gents, once you reach 25, your personality is irrelevant. Women will only like you for your cash, and all the available women will have bad blonde dye-jobs.
There are other important lessons to be learned from dating shows: Don’t take your date to a strip club on the first date. And don’t talk about your porcelain doll collection at your romantic candlelight dinner. And remember, a body covered in tattoos doesn’t appeal to all women, only a special breed.
While dating shows are chiefly a rough guide to what not to do, they also give us tips on how we should behave on that first date. Don’t be afraid to give your date a high five when you first meet, and remember—it is acceptable to cover your body in whipped cream and have your date lick it off as a precursor to dinner. And most importantly: When deciding on whether or not to wear that tight and sexy denim catsuit to meet your hunk, the answer is always YES! You see, television can provide valuable insights in how we should and should not live our lives. You won’t learn these things in your lame econ class, so don’t bother.
Instead, I recommend you do what I do. Take off your socially acceptable outfit and put on shiny basketball shorts, brown socks and a baggy sweatshirt. Make yourself some hot chocolate, sit on your butt and turn on the TV. On campus, we have 5 HBOs, 4 ESPNs, 3 music channels, 2 C-SPANs and more news channels than you can count. Pick up the remote and find something that piques your interest while providing constructive and indispensible life guidance, like Matlock or G-String Divas. Only then will you realize that success in life banks on lazy television indulgence, video games and junk food.
Just ask me in ten years. You’ll see. I’ll be living in the trailer park down the street, eating peanut butter with my bare hands.
Peter Hamby is a senior in the College and contributing editor of the Georgetown Voice. His friend is so cool and pretty but sick and he feels sad but she has cool corduroy pants so it’s OK.
