Last nite, I had every hope of going to bed early and sleeping through the nite. But for some reason, I woke up at around 4am unable to sleep and ended up turning on the TV. I should have known better, but after counting 100 revolutions of my ceiling fan, and planning what i would wear for the next 3 days there were only so many other options to try.
The first problem with turning on my TV is this…at 4am, almost nothing is on. Unless you enjoy watching infomericials. And okay, I love infomercials, i confess. I even bring UP infomercials in everyday conversations frequently occasionally like… “hey, do you think a knife could REALLY cut through a pineapple that was being chucked through the air at 40mph?” or “if you had to choose, which would you prefer…a magic bullet or an aqua globe?” I wish I could say I was joking.
The second problem is this…TV Land is one of the few channels that DOES have decent programming on that early in the morning, and every hope i had of going back to sleep in a timely manner was lost as soon as I saw that Happy Days was on.
Now I’m not a sucker for all the older programs…Green Acres bores me [except for the theme song], and I’ve never seen an episode of Hogan’s Heroes in my life. And All In The Family? Well, the only thought going through my mind while watching it is…”how in the world do they put up with each other day after day without killing themselves?” But Happy Days…reserves a special spot in my heart…and not just because I once played a drinking game during a Happy Days marathon where we drank every time someone said, “But Fonz….” [I believe it was said 11 times just in the first episode.]
This is why I love Happy Days… It makes me jealous. I want their lives. I want the simplicity they have. I crave simplicity in MY life, but just don’t know how to attain it. Sometimes I joke that I’d like to be Amish, just for a few weeks to experience it…and although I think it would be one of the BIGGEST struggles of my life and i could possibly die without my cellphone, part of me means it. I’ve tried time and time again to strip down the meaningless parts of my life, and only leave the core. I’m especially reminded of this when I’m working with my youth, on retreats. But it never fails, that all my attempts slowly fade away and things become a big complicated mess again. And although I understand that there was still complication in the 50’s, it was different. It seems that…family meant something, school always came first, religion was a way of life and you only had so much on your plate at one time. Sometimes I wonder if technology is what has caused our society to change so much…in just 50 years. I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer to that. But in the meantime, I will continue to occasionally wake up at 4am, turn on Happy Days…and dream of a slower lifestyle. And the occasional drinking game….can’t hurt.
Do you crave simplicity?
