Disconnect your cable

For more than two years, my television set has been untouched by a cable TV line or even so much as a pair of rabbit ears. It plays DVDs and VHS tapes, but I do not allow a TV signal to enter my home.

This isn't bragging. It's not that I consider myself above TV watching -- it's that I know I'm not. I love TV, and that's exactly why I don't watch it.

When I first came to college, I was accustomed to watching several hours of TV every night. I knew all the networks' prime-time lineups by heart. I never missed my favorite shows. My room in McCarty Hall came equipped with a cable jack and free cable service, so I fully planned to continue my viewing habits. I hooked up the clunky Carter-era tube I salvaged from my parents' garage, settled back and prepared to vegetate away the best years of my life.

I didn't last long.

Maybe it was the wave of weed-out-course homework. Maybe it was the nagging of new dorm friends who alleged that TV was a waste of time. Or maybe it was the sudden delirious absence of parental control and the related upturn in my social life. Whatever the reason, the cyclical drama experienced by the cast of Friends seemed less and less important as the months passed, and by sophomore year the TV was relegated to playing DVDs and not much else. Still, I would occasionally switch on the set and spend an entire afternoon passive and slack-jawed on my couch, absorbing the jabbering images on the screen.

When I moved out of the dorms and into my apartment, my roommate and I both recognized that we had an opportunity to cut ties with the vile device once and for all. We both knew very well how an episode of South Park bled into the late-night news, which then became reruns of Saturday Night Live. We knew that inviting even the seemingly benign public broadcasting station into the apartment could spell disaster. We declined the special offers for cable we received in the mail. We kept our DVD player and our VHS system.

The problem with TV as a medium is that it has no end. When you watch a movie, the experience ends when the final credits roll. With TV, you can watch forever. It just goes on and on. The issue isn't the quality of the programming -- it's that the shows are embedded in a medium that, by its very nature, encourages perpetual watching. Probably some people have the willpower to watch a single show without getting sucked in, but I am not one of them.

Believe me, I miss my shows. Whenever I visit my parents' home, I make sure to catch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the other programs I've missed since I stopped watching TV. Few people would argue that everything on TV is a waste of time, but it's also obvious that those few worthwhile gems are buried in a dunghill of trite, brain-killing garbage. And it's hard to find the gems without rooting through a lot of that garbage, gaining nothing and losing hours. That the garbage is instantly gratifying and often entertaining doesn't change the fact that it is garbage and only makes TV a more dangerous trap.

I won't embark on a list of things that are more worthy of your free time than TV, but surely readers can compile one for themselves. The first step toward accomplishing the things on that list is to unscrew the cable jack -- or to at least reduce the amount of time the set is on. Life is too short not to.

Who has time to watch TV, anyway? I don't even have time to sleep.