The kid and I have a new TV. First I would like to say that I was raised with the idea that things last, and you make sure you take care of them so they last even longer. I also know the marketing world laughs at me every single minute of every single day. I have learned to accept it, and by that I mean, shake my fist and curse the world every time I am forced to replace something that no longer works. Sometimes I get to give the marketing world a big F-U- middle finger and forego the replacement; my childhood was filled with making do and my McGyver skills are formidable.
I have been contentedly watching my TV since 2005. I’m not a huge TV watcher so maybe that’s why it’s lasted so long. However, the kid decided we needed an upgrade. He usually watches everything on his computer. But he was trying to prevent himself from getting distracted with other things, so he started watching his anime show on the TV. I applaud the problem-solving and kind of laughed that going old school was a solution. I did not anticipate that the kid would not enjoy the 20-year-old resolution. While I loosely understand there are ways to watch super sharp images, I have no desire to see every drop of sweat on a character‘s face or the minute detail of the city backdrop. I’m here for the plot, character, or in the case of a romcom, the tropes. Our conversations about the TV’s lack of resolution fell on my deaf ears, and so around the time of Thanksgiving sales he proposed to buy a new TV.
Our first negotiation was no giant TVs, but we know big is in the eye of the watcher. The old TV was 34 inches. I didn’t want it much bigger than that because our apartment is small, and I have never been a fan of being dwarfed by sound and vision. We settled on a 44 inch, but then it was like when you tell the agent your housing price range and they only show you places slightly higher than that. So we ended up with a 48-inch flatscreen with 4K resolution, which I’m sure is still laughably small for some. It just fits on our TV stand, and so that was the ultimate limiting factor.
When it arrived, he was so excited, and I really had to work at not exclaiming loudly how big it was. Plus, it came in a huge box with unwieldy Styrofoam packing. We’re constantly getting yelled at about the waste and how we’re killing mother earth, and now I had to deal with the Styrofoam filling multiple trash cans. There’s also the issue of what to do with the old, yet still working TV. I am grateful that Boston will pick it up and recycle it, but if/when the kid moves and takes the TV with him, it will kill my New England thrift roots to have to buy another one when I had a perfectly good one. (This is sure to be a refrain as he tries to upgrade my stuff over time). But saving it long-term also isn’t the answer. Every year the TV gets more obsolete and unused in the basement.
But I put my big girl pants on and realize plenty of other people get new things all the time and aren’t losing sleep. As a person who kept her TV out of the trash/recycling stream for 20+ years, I’m giving myself a pass.
The kid gleefully hooked it up and configured it while I eyed the whole business warily aware of that I was on deck to be a curmudgeon about it. It was tempting, but I also realized I need to start practicing sucking it up. Fifteen to 20 years from now he’s going to be giving me all sorts of technology to “help” my aging ass cope with life and make it “easier”, and all I can say is I now get my parents’ resistance to our similar efforts to “help.” And I also remember their resistance to the upgrades did make it harder on us, too, so, I need to pick my battles. This time I suck it up, buttercup.
Rather than bitch about how big it was (again), I complimented him on setting it up, but when he turned it on I nearly fell off the couch. Do I need a blast of stereo surround sound? I really do not, and even stranger, the loudness only applies to when you turn it on and when the movie and show cards burst to life with previews if you don’t navigate to your show fast enough. Is this some kind of anti-dementia training? Wield the remote and click through the levels fast enough? Once you get to your show, the sound then becomes normal. So if I turn down the sound while getting to my show, I have to turn it back up when I get there. Of course, this is a privileged problem, and also my previous TV was perfectly good.
I was trying my hardest not to complain to the kid about it and just focus on getting my swift button pressing skills up to snuff, when he announced our DVD player wouldn’t work with it. Everything came to a screeching halt. It was the holidays and the DVD player was essential. When we cut the cable cord many years ago, the only thing I truly missed was the Christmas specials, so I bought all the Christmas Rankin/Bass shows, plus a couple of Christmas movies for good measure. He could blast my ears, but the DVD player was non-negotiable. He fiddled around some more and then realized the DVD was not too old to connect. He lived to see another day.
We tested out one of our favorites, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and while he was yammering on about how it would look different on the 4K screen because of pixels blah, blah, blah, I felt a surge of joy and delight. The picture filled the entire screen! No letterboxing or odd sizing. Charlie Brown and the gang skating on the pond in the opening scene filled the screen right to its 48-inch edges. I stopped the kid’s monologue on the lack of clarity to point that out.
“Oh, yeah, I didn’t notice that.” (Cue motherly eyeroll). I told him I have been watching the show in this fuzzy and human hand-drawn way since I was a kid and that is how it is meant to be watched. And because I couldn’t stop the slippery slope of “I walked 8 miles in the snow uphill both ways,” I added that I grew up watching it in black and white, just seeing it in color even after all these years delighted me.
Do I want to get startled by the loud eruption of sound every time I turn on the TV? No, but the Christmas shows were awesome, and I believe I passed this first test of balancing the fun of being a parental curmudgeon with not driving the kid crazy.
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