Katy's Canvas: While you were watching TV…

Gronlandic Edit by of Montreal

…I adventured around Old Montreal, the University of Massachusetts, a random party while my bus was delayed for 3 hours in Albany, New York, and I wrote this:

I don’t watch TV or movies, and although people have lived without it for hundreds of years more than society has lived with it, I am constantly having to explain myself. So, here we go-

Whenever I sit down to watch something, I can’t look at it for more than a few minutes before I begin to feel antsy and turn it off. The only movies I’ve ever been able to sit through in my life are children’s movies because sometimes I had little freedom to do much else. I’m also highly incapable of watching anything violent or scary. Next time you think about asking me if I’ve seen this or that, you can just stop yourself because I haven’t.

I don’t enjoy watching people in fake settings and fake plots. Whenever I got snippets of reality television, for example, I believed that if I was actually with the characters I would want to leave, and therefore don’t find it worthwhile to even watch. Getting to know people who don’t exist is the biggest waste of time when you could be meeting real people who are far cooler, who can teach you about a different perspective and interact with you. Following shows, as I did up until I was 15, added stress to my life because not only did I worry about what’s going to happen to me, I felt it a necessity to take time out of my productivity to watch what happens to them. It was terribly regressive and I felt the unproductivity teeming in my stomach and begging me to do something else. Instead I spend my free time skating, writing, wandering, or socializing (not to mention schoolwork). Oh and I have a blog. That is plenty of entertainment.

Fantastic, artistic, or comical short videos, like what are found on youTube and art blogs, are the only bearable forms because it highlights only the best and most exciting things to watch. They’re concise.

What I’ve concluded is that our society needs TV and movies- like a drug- because it let’s their mind escape to a separate reality for however long they are immersed in it. I suppose that could be relaxing, but it’s not my “drug” of choice. I admit that one can acquire a lot of information and knowledge from more non-fiction type shows, like Shark Week or Into the Worm Hole with Morgan Freeman, which I find my brother watching late at night. I suppose I just learn the old-fashioned way, and via the internet. Either way, I recognize that everyone else watches at least some form of TV or movies, but you can’t blame me- I’ve got way too much energy.

(Featured Painter: Damon Soule)

Vieux Montréal

Being obsessed with a place is the best type of obsession you can have, because when everything else leaves, it will still be there. Maybe that’s why our senses are tied so closely with the places we’ve been, because places are the strongest relationships we can have besides with other people.