THE WALL OF SOUND
What is it about men and large televisions? It seems as if nowadays unless there is a six-foot TV across your living room wall, anything else is not good enough. In this case for men, bigger is not only better, it is mandatory. [I’m sure Freud would have a field day with this one.] It is also, aside from owning a sports car, the most boast-worthy possession a man can have. “Dude, you have to see my TV, it’s soooo BIG. I mean seriously big. I’m pretty positive it’s bigger than yours.”
Currently there is a small battle in our house over a TV – as far as problems go, it’s a pretty innocuous one to have I suppose. Yesterday my partner arrived home with a giant television set. Sorry, I’m so antiquated; I meant, flat screen TV. And I mean giant, like the size of a kitchen table on steroids. Apparently he got it through his work and, so he proudly tells me, it is used, but in amazing condition. And it's a freebie ("babe"); he likes to accentuate this part as he knows what happens to my insides when I hear the word free. So of course he thought, why not bring it home to our humble flat and surprise me [or in male terms: I'll pretend it's a surprise for her, but really it's a big old gift for him].
The problem is, anyone that knows me knows that I’m very particular when it comes to how things look in our house; everything pretty much has its place, and to be honest, I’m not really the kitchen table/TV set kind of girl. So a 'surprise' like this for me is more unsettling than exciting. I am resistant to change; I can admit it, especially when it is more than four feet wide, dwarfs everything else in the room, and aesthetically screams overkill!
Furthermore, I had bought my partner a flat screen for his birthday last year that seemed perfectly large enough to me and it was very happily perched on a chest of drawers in our living room. Well, that was then. Now, my partner has ousted its predecessor and put this monstrosity in our living room so that he can watch programs on an eight foot wide screen (yes I realize it is getting bigger with each paragraph; I swear, it is big). He claims it will enhance his Formula One watching and give us the ‘cinema experience’ (I want that experience, I just want to go to actual the cinema to have it); he also claims that he physically can’t see the other one (trust me, he can see perfectly fine).
He claims a lot of things.
He claims a lot of things.
I suppose my question is aside from us being blown through the back wall when we turn this airplane engine on, why on earth does one need to have a movie theater in their living room? Are we as a society going to get so out of hand with our gadgets that entire walls will be television screens? (Every man reading this just nodded their heads). I have to be honest, I kind of miss the days when a TV was just a TV – a nice 18-inch (okay fine, it was also four foot deep) blob that sat on a stand and had five channels and a Betamax hooked up to it.
You see, change, it’s not always an easy transition, especially when it's big and ugly. Then again, if my partner brought home a sports car, I may be able to deal with that.