My professor, Dr. Mark Lau Branson, specializes in navigating intercultural church conflict. One key method he encourages is to have congregants write autobiographies about contentious issues. For instance, if a church is fighting over budget or money issues, he has different congregants write autobiographies about their personal history with money and then has them all share. He describes this process as bringing various implicit background assumptions to the forefront.
I have never tried this technique specifically—usually my autobiographical writing has an epic, philosophical, existential flavor. However, I think his suggestion is interesting and I am going to try it out in this post as it relates to my own TV watching and then tomorrow use the same technique as it relates to having people tell me I should not watch TV.
So, here is a brief history of my relationship with TV (for this post I have limited myself to the TV I watched up through high school both for reasons of space and for reasons that will become clear in later posts).
Some of my very first memories of anything are watching Sesame Street. I don’t really remember what I liked about it or what I felt watching but my parents often remind me of how much I loved watching it when I was two and three years old.
As a pre-school and kindergarten aged child I remember watching Dino-riders and The Legend of Zelda. These cartoons would not even have been legal before the 1980’s because they would have been deemed half an hour-long infomercials. Dino-riders was based on a collection of toys and The Legend of Zelda was based on a video game series. And yes, I owned an army of Dino-riders and The Legend of Zelda video game series. I remember that I loved coming home from school to watch both of these shows. Interestingly, the story of young warrior Link and his chivalrous relationship with princess Zelda, would profoundly influence my romantic life (it’s too complicated to get into here—but it’s a very important theme in War For My Soul).
When I hit grade school my parents let my brother and I watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before school (my favorite turtle was Leonardo, the blue one). My brother and I would eat breakfast in front of the TV and also always be late for school. Upon getting home from school I would be exhausted (I had a reading disability and am an INFJ—can you really blame me?). Usually, for the next two hours I would watch cartoons. I didn’t really even like them and even upon sitting here and trying to remember their names I can’t, but I do remember that I loved watching TV. About the time the cartoons ended I would usually punch my little brother Justin (I lucked out that somehow later in life he was able to forgive me). He would burst into tears and my mother would threaten to never let us watch TV again. She was a psychologist and was sure that violent cartoons were teaching me violence.
When I was 11 I was fully initiated into the Los Angeles Lakers. That year I watched most of an 82 game seasons with my Dad and sometimes his friends from church. That year I was cheering for Nick van Axel, Eddie Jones, Cedrick Cebalos, Elden Campbell, and Vlade Divac. I remember seeing the Lakers before that but not really caring. However, I do remember my father and grown men from the church caring—I still remember my mother trying to explain to me in 91, when the Lakers lost to the Bulls in the finals, why everyone was so upset.
Here, a side note will be helpful. By the time I was 11 I weighed 184 lbs. To give comparison, I am a foot taller now and weigh 155 lbs. I was obese as a child and the TV certainly was not helping anything.
When I hit middle school I started watching The Simpsons, the History Channel (I'm a closet nerd), and I wanted to watch South Park but my mom wouldn’t let me.
In high school my TV watching coincided directly with a knee injury. When I could play basketball I would never watch TV, when I couldn’t I would. So, when I hurt it for the first time during the spring of my sophomore year (my life would fall apart following that), I started watching the Lakers very seriously. That was during the 2000 Championship run and when the Lakers won I really thought God had facilitated them winning to console me. (Upon more thoroughly remembering the circumstances of the 2000 Western Conference Finals against the Portland Trail Blazers, that game 7 might actually still be my all time favorite TV moment.)
My senior year I couldn’t play basketball at all, and not only would I watch the Lakers, but also the first season of 24 on Tuesday nights. That show was really addictive.
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