DVR Slave
Since I’ve gotten back from my trip, I have been wading my way through days and days worth of recorded television. Daily and weekly shows which I normally look forward to, now menacingly stacked 10 days deep and feeling like more of a chore to get through than relaxing entertainment. I think that the general purpose of DVRs is to give one freedom from TV, but now I feel a weird pressure to watch all of this TV that I have recorded. My fiance is so funny because when several shows record in a night he gets all anxious about watching them, like there’s some sort of time limit. I kind of get the same thing from my Google Reader page (where I subscribe to all of the blogs I regularly check and all new posts pop up and wait for me to check them). While on my trip, I would sporadically check Google Reader and get all harried because I had hundreds of unread new posts. And I couldn’t just delete them, I felt like I had to read through all of them as if they were a school assignment.
So many of our recent technological advances make us feel obligated to either be available to everyone we’ve ever known at a moment’s notice (blackberries, email, social networking sites) or to not miss a single minute’s worth of back-logged entertainment. Oh I know, its completely my fault because I willingly use (and love) my DVR and Google Reader. There are certainly worse things in the world than planting myself on the couch and wading through old TV. I just take my books to the gym with me so they don’t feel neglected and so my butt doesn’t grow roots into the couch.
