Simplifying the Simple Life

Screen-Free Week: Getting through

By Katherine

Next week is annual Screen-Free Week (formerly TV-Turnoff Week). It also marks about the one year anniversary of our family shutting off cable. 

Where do we stand? Overall, are we tuning in less often?  I think so.

Are we watching less crap and better programming? Definitely.

During those interminable, time-has-no-meaning, housebound weeks with a newborn this past fall, I watched nearly every documentary in the Netflix on-demand library. (Nearly every. I finally got up the courage to watch The Cove, but I’m still too frightened for Jesus Camp.)

If it wasn’t for getting rid of cable, I wouldn’t have budgeted for the Netflix subscription, and I probably would have watched a lot more Regis & Kelly and a lot less Ken Burns. (Brain atrophy is a real problem post-partum, but it needn’t be excessive.)

My husband and I now take a few week nights completely off the boob tube and use the extra moments to do much more productive things with our time: like reading blogs about what other people do with their time.

Occasionally we use this extra hour—really, it’s only an hour between (1) bedtime routines and (2) cleaning up the A-bomb explosion in the kitchen from a day’s worth of homemade meals and collapsing into our own beds—to synch our calendars. We hardly ever forget to take out the trash now (miniscule-ish trash that it is now).  

Also, I wisely use this TV-free time to stare at my pile of half-knit objects. One of these nights I just know I’ll be inspired enough to put down the laptop and glass of wine and actually pick up the needles.  

With respect to the four-year-old daughter, however, TV viewing habits aren’t much changed. She still only watches a very limited list of age-appropriate PBS programs and some commercial-free Nick Jr. preschool stuff on Netflix—but she’s not watching any less than before the cable kabbash. Some days she watches none; other days (Friday “movie night” in particular) it’s as much as two-three hours.

I wouldn’t necessarily think this is a huge problem, except that, the other day while I was reading her a book, she told me to “pause it” so she could go potty.

This, I think, is a problem.

With all the Netflix- and TiVo-ing, I guess I’ve allowed my child to believe she can get instant gratification by pushing a few buttons or tapping a screen. 

Also, apparently, she thinks her mom can be “paused.”

So I’m going all in for TV Turnoff week this year. If we survive, maybe we’ll get a few steps closer to tuning out for good. There will be tears I’m sure—from her, without Dinosaur Train; from me, when I can’t get 30 minutes of peace to make dinner while she watches Dinosaur Train.  

Anyone out there planning to scrap the screen this week? Any tips?

 

 

 

 

Super bowl super fail

(There is no photo. For a good reason.)

-By Lisa

The Stealers weren’t the only losers on Sunday, there was a much more spectacular fail in my house: vegan cheese.

I am vegetarian - not vegan - and Husband is an omnivore, but we've both been trying to cut back on dairy. It doesn't tend to agree with him and I am easing into the Clean diet by cutting down on certain categories.

While I am not the football fan that Husband is, I love Super Bowl Sunday because I adore any kind of celebratory event. I enjoy spending most of the day in the kitchen preparing festive foods. (The fact that he watches football while I cook is certainly 1950s housewife cringe-worthy, but we are both happy so I ignore that part.) I like to make foods that are good football fare but with a healthier twist.

We snacked and pre-gamed for most of the day, and it was lovely. The fried tofu sticks (like mozzarella sticks, but made from tofu) went over like gangbusters. Then it was time for the vegan pizza with a "cheese substitute." It all looked so acceptable; I never would have guessed what was to come. Husband took one bite, gagged, and rushed his plate back to the kitchen.

“I…I can’t eat that.”

Now, this, dear readers, is a shocking phrase. I’ve been with this man for a decade. I’ve never heard him utter these words. This guy will not only clean his plate, but everyone else’s at the table. He studied in China and his American classmates always went to him with their “eat this and tell me what it is” requests.

“Please,” he begged, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I really can’t look at it.”

That was the end of the vegan cheese. Turns out that cheese made from tapioca (which I just learned is the starch extracted from the root of a cassava or yucca plant) does not fly around here. Personally, while I was able to lay eyes on the stuff, I did find the texture to be odd. It might be an acquired taste thing, though, likely not for him.

It makes me wonder about all the things pretending to be other things. Like fake meat products, fake cheese products…is it all a little too manufactured? Might we be better off just eating real things than accepting substitutes for the things we don’t want to eat? Or maybe I just haven’t found the right alternatives?

Any opinions out there? Do you have a favorite fake bacon or do you think textured soy protein is the work of the devil?

For more from Lisa, check out www.justherejustnow.com

The Parking Lot Movie

-By Lisa

The Parking Lot Movie really is a movie about a Charlottesville parking lot.

But because this particular parking lot happens to be in our unique little corner of the world, the parking lot attendants are…well…documentary worthy.

What happens when you have a group of highly educated graduate students, philosophers and professors working at a low level service job? They think about it. A lot. They wax poetic and more than a tad cynical about the plight of the world and all of us suckers on it. They consider it an opportunity to contemplate impermanence, detachment and the concept of fundamental self. All that while taking your ticket and double parking your car – which they quietly judge you for having in the first place.  

They view the parking lot as a microcosm of the western world - with all it's trappings. They analyze the ongoing class struggle, car culture and the making or breaking of nuanced social contracts. They deal with sorority sisters and Suburbans, public puking and people who drive off without paying. They question a consumer culture in which the possession of money gives you the right to get whatever that money can buy. 

And then they play Flip Cone and write obscure phrases on the gate.

The attendants are an elite group; getting a job at the Corner Parking Lot means knowing someone connected. It's not a career for most of these guys, just a temporary stop-over in the humble attendant's booth which they view as "the type of building Jesus would have collected parking fees from." At some point, they move on to a variety of fields, one is a professor of philosophy, one is a law school student and another is the Senior Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

This movie is a fascinating commentary on cultural assumptions and the complicated social dynamics in Charlottesville. It examines humanity and the existential implications of a job - any job. The Senior Librarian in New York is still the same guy who was parking cars on the Corner, but now people look him in the eye when he does his job. So, what do our jobs really say about us as human beings? 

Watch The Parking Lot Movie online, or in the Charlottesville area, watch this Friday, October 22nd at 10PM on Independent Lens on WVPT. Check here for your local listings in other cities or rent it on itunes.

For more from Lisa, check out www.justherejustnow.com 

Somewhere between The Cove and The Real World: The Fabulous Beekman Boys

-By Lisa

There are important films that I know I should watch.

And I do. 

Sometimes.

Film can be amazing vehicle for change. But sometimes it’s hard to handle. I can’t even speak informatively about "The Cove." It sat on top of my DVD player for weeks, daring me to watch it, but I chickened out, sealed it back in the Netflix envelope and sent it away. I'm glad the film exists and I wish I could watch it, but I’m just not strong enough – the trailer had me hyperventilating.

So, I know these things are important but some days I just can’t handle important.  

Then the pendulum of my viewing habits swings and it’s horrifying to look back at my youth and recall how many hours...no, how many seasons (reunions, challenges...) of "The Real World" I watched. I know too much about Puck and I am kind of weirded out that The Miz is actually a professional wrestler now.

But right smack dab in the middle of important and immature, between sullen and silly, providing both education and entertainment – is "The Fabulous Beekman Boys."

It is a reality show is about a gay couple from New York City, Josh and Brent, who buy a farm upstate. Brent is a doctor and former vice president of Martha Stuart Omni Media and Josh is a writer and used to be a night club drag queen. (Come on, you can’t make this stuff up.) This first season chronicles their “Year of Sacrifice” trying to get their goat soap and cheese business up and running, while Brent is on the farm and Josh works during the week in the city. Luckily, these city slickers have John, an experienced and knowlegable farmer, who helps them out with the goats, pigs, chickens and a sassy llama named Polka Spot.

The couple have the prerequisite reality show relationship issues and both have sharp enough wit to keep it interesting. Famer John is a character in himself -- his deep love and devotion to the animals occasionally results in explosive crying jags.

But there is actual content here, too. Thanks to the Beekman boys, I know the difference between a Nubian goat and an Alpine goat, and that llamas might look gravely ill, splayed in the dirt like road kill, but they are actually just sunning themselves.

It's Simplicity & Sustainability Lite and it's fun with a glass of wine. 

Season one is currently in reruns, but they will be back for season two in 2011. The show airs Wednesdays at 9pm on Planet Green, or you can see clips and full episodes at planetgreen.com.

For more from Lisa, check out www.justherejustnow.com

Cutting the cord part III: O.K., fine, we'll get Netflix

By Katherine

Becoming minimalist had a good post last week on How to Limit Your Child's Screen Time. It reminded me that I should close the loop on my own battle to cut my family's ties to the boob tube.

In our last episode, Husband and I had hooked up our TV antenna and digital converter and discontinued our cable but discovered we could still use our TiVo to record our now limited selection of over-the-air, free broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, the CW, some local access stuff, CNN, MSNBC and a few channels up there in that morass of cable news affiliates with all the talking heads programs--I never go up that far unless someone interesting is on Larry King).

Plus with our continued TiVo subscription, we could continue to download movies instantly to the TV via Amazon Video On Demand.

So far, our cable-cutting experiment has been working out well. We are watching even less TV now that we have a fraction of the channels to surf.

Daughter still gets her daily dose of "Curious George." And we're all spending much less time being couch potatoes.

Still, we're kind of missing out on some quality programming, which sometimes, like when you're nine months pregnant, it's 98 degrees outside, you just had a root canal, your three-year-old has a sinus infection and your husband has the flu (no joke, that perfect storm actually happened), you just want to collapse in front of good Discovery Channel special or, O.K., the season premiere of "Mad Men."

But our original plan to connect my MacBrook Pro to our increasingly archaic HD-ready TV to occasionally stream the smorgasbord of free and relatively cheap cable content from the computer to the TV via sites such as Hulu and iTunes just didn't pan out.

We spent hours going down the rabbit hole of blogs and review sites telling us which cables upon cables we would need to make this set-up work with our old clunker and discovered that even if we could get the Mac connected to the TV, the sound and/or images feed could be really bad, so we gave up.

And now we are hours, days, seconds (please!) from having another baby and staring down weeks of being housebound, so we bit the bullet, reregistered for Netflix and ordered a Roku device so we can take advantage of Netflix on demand for movies and some shows we're missing.

We'd had a Netflix subscription years ago, but found we never quite kept up with the queue of movies. We'd have all these great intentions of watching indie and foreign films and Really Important Documentaries, but when the Really Important films would arrive, we often couldn't muster the energy or desire to watch them, and so the DVDs would sit for weeks while we continued to pay our monthly subscription. (I think we sat on Grizzly Man for four months, too creeped out to watch it and too guilty to return it.)

Being able to watch Netflix instantly makes it a whole new game. Unless you have one of those internet-ready TVs; however, you need a device to stream the stuff to your tube (I'm just not one of those people who can watch movies or shows hovering over my laptop unless I'm stuck in an airport).

There are many devices that are Netflix on-demand compatible, including the TiVo unit, but only if you have an HD version. Our ten-year-old TiVO wouldn't cut it, but instead of spending a couple of hundred dollars to  upgrade to a newer TiVo unit and continuing to pay a TiVo membership, we decided to quit TiVo altogether and buy a $99 Roku HD Player.

The Roku streams Neflix movies and shows instantly and wirelessly plus gives us access to Amazon Video On Demand, Pandora and a bunch of other entertainment channels that we probably won't use.

We no longer can record the broadcast channels, and there probably are much more technically sophisticated ways of achieving our goal--a lot less TV, but more quality and less commercial viewing when we do tune in--but we're happy with the new arrangement.  Frankly, I don't even care to clutter my brain with what Blu-ray is.

And really, the most sophisticated thing we could do would be to chuck the whole TV out the window for good and start using the extra time to write a novel.

But alas, the first on-demand program we watched after the Roku arrived was NOVA documentary, "Ghosts of Machu Piccu," which we'd missed the first time it aired on PBS. That's about as sophisticated as we get for the time being.

Simply Stupid Award: Target’s back-to-school advertising

By Katherine

I had a root canal last week.

That’s apropos of nothing related to this post or Simplifying the Simple Life, really.

I could make a tortured connection.  At first when I woke up with unbelievable pain and a gray tooth, I thought, this must be from the overnight grinding and clenching I’ve suffered since I was a stressed-out law student and then a stressed out-lawyer. But no. The dentist tells me my dead tooth likely was due to a decades-old traumatic tooth injury—a school bus accident when I was a six.

Oh, I definitely have dental work to blame on my old lifestyle: prematurely receding gums from all that stress-induced grinding that will require me to have grafts done in the next year.

But the root canal just put me in a cranky mood. I feel capable only of complaining, which is why I’m giving out STSL’s second Simply Stupid Award. This time it’s to mega discount department store chain Target for shameless coopting of a really great song children’s song for a really obnoxious back-to-school marketing blitz.

The TV commercial to which I’m referring shows three androgynous kids, first drab in parochial-school-like uniforms and then transformed into jubilant, excited students as they slowly don more colorful, new clothes and accessories presumably purchased at Target. All the while, the song “Free to Be You and Me” is playing in the background.

Particularly if you grew up in the 1970s or 1980s (and especially if you’re a former theater camp kid, like me), you know this song and Marlo Thomas’ cultish show and album of the same name. It features famous folks such as Mel Brooks and Harry Belafonte writing and performing various songs, skits and comedy sketches with the purpose of empowering children to reject socially-constructed gender stereotypes and achieve self-esteem and self-determination.

Free to Be You and Me recently celebrated its 35th anniversary with a newly illustrated storybook and songbook. It makes a great gift for the children (and 30-something former theater camp kids) in your life.

But boo on whomever owns the rights to this stuff and sold out Thomas' original message of tolerance and individuality to a corporate behemoth not only bent on selling us and our kids a bunch of ubiquitous, branded clothing made in China, but also having us believe it’s somehow liberating.

Not since Nike exploited The Beatles’ peaceful, countercultural anthem “Revolution” in 1987 to sell Air Jordans has corporate misappropriation of artful, meaningful music for a marketing campaign seemed so, well, inappropriate.  (Incidentally, Michael Jackson, who owned the rights to "Revolution" and much of The Beatles songbook at the time and made the deal with Nike, performed as a young man on the original "Free to Be You and Me" album.)

I know this stuff is par for the course these days. Every time I turn around, there’s some great rock song from the 1970s helping to hawk new gas-guzzling SUVs on TV. The irony of this music having been composed during the decade of the last major oil crisis—a time when the United States should have started nipping its unsustainable consumption of oil in the bud—can not be lost on everyone.

But this blatantly hypocritical marketing to kids is really hard to swallow, root canal or not.

Shame on you Target.

 

Downsizing lowdown

-By Lisa

I talk the talk. 

Non-consumerism, getting rid of clutter, requiring less. 

I’m the “simplify, simplify, simplify” girl. 

Now I have to walk the walk. 

Husband and I are moving. We are downsizing. We are moving to a place that is about half the size of our current house. 

Our new place is less impressive looking, it has less storage, less bedrooms and less yard space. 

Our new place also has less mortgage, less lawn to mow, less floor to clean, less driveway to shovel, less utilities, less taxes, less carbon output. 

Less is indeed more. 

We don’t have to move. We didn’t get laid-off, or foreclosed on or any of the other, unfortunate and increasingly common reasons people are forced to downsize. This is our choice. It’s just a matter of priorities. 

We are a family of 2; Husband and I. Our two dogs recently passed away and we are childfree. We have undergone some pretty major changes lately, which have caused us to reassess what we want from life. Moving to this smaller place will allow us to “turn our dreams into our goals” as Husband The Poet phrased it. 

Those goals are: 

• To be entirely debt free 

• To travel to every corner of the planet 

• To be able to give (both time and money) to causes that are important. 

• To work at a job that has real value and meaning, even if it pays peanuts. 

Those things are more important than having this so-called dream house that drains our time, energy and bank account. I’m excited for this shift. 

That’s the ideological stuff. But then there’s the other stuff. 

Like our stuff. 

In preparation for the move, we are getting rid of about half of our possessions. This is where the rubber hits the road for this whole simplification thing. And to be honest, I’ve shed many a tear about letting go of some piece of furniture because we will no longer have the square footage for it. 

I’ve been trying to practice the Buddhist concept of detachment. I recently watched a great show on PBS, The Buddha. One of the Buddha’s teachings really struck me. He said that people get sad when the glass breaks. But if we knew all along that the glass was already shattered, we could step back and simply appreciate it for its beauty and usefulness while we had it. (Buddha, forgive me for paraphrasing.)

We never really own anything. Not our possessions, our relationships nor our situations. We just hang out with them for a while until the inevitable change comes. So, I am trying to understand the essential impermanence of all things, because that allows for such freedom for gratitude. 

It’s not a coldness or lack of caring, it’s actually the space to love something more fully. Clinging to things in an attempt to make them last forever is not only futile; it causes more fear and pain. 

It’s not about being scared that I will lose something, it is the acceptance that I absolutely will lose it -- so I can fully throw myself into loving it right now. Knowing that my dogs could only be with me a short time, allowed me to love them even more deeply. They were already shattered. We all are.   

This aspect of simplification is not nearly as fun as mixing up a batch of homemade deodorant. But it is incredibly meaningful to me and gets to the heart of this whole "simple" thing - finding your peace. 

This downsizing will continue to be a process that is both rewarding and difficult. I’ll keep you posted as we find our way through it. I continue to work on developing this skill of detachment, and meanwhile, I get the wonderful satisfaction of knowing that local charities are making out like bandits as they get all our things. Here is a list of the charities that I like here in Charlottesville. 

SCPA Rummage Store – can arrange for pick up of large pieces. 

Focus Flea Market – only accepting women’s clothes at this time. 

Jefferson Madison Regional Library – currently accepting books for the Friend’s of the Library Booksale at all branches.

Goodwill – 2 locations in Cville, on Pantops Mountian and 29N. 

Salvation Army – can arrange for pick up online. 

For more from Lisa, check out www.justherejustnow.com

 

 

Cutting the cord: Yes, I’m getting rid of cable TV.

-By Katherine 

 

After I quit my financially-lucrative but less than soul-satisfying corporate job for a financially unrewarding but more personally-fulfilling lifestyle and career, I’ve been obsessed with sticking it to The Man. Whatever I do next, I don’t want to work for THE MAN, I would tell myself during those dark days after giving up the only career that gave me any hope of paying off the bill for the higher education that landed me the career in the first place. 

Having devoured a dozen self-help books now, I’ve realized that job-wise, anyway, The Man was not some evil, supernatural, corporate goon, but merely my own inner demon and confusion about the meaning of success. I’m past that now. (Not the debt, just the inner turmoil.) 

But still I picture a conniving corporate puppet master in the sky somewhere, conspiring to make us all spend too much money on 60” plasmas, disposable clothes at Old Navy and texting votes to American Idol, all the while laughing all the way to the bank he shares with those Wall Street yahoos at Goldman Sachs. I know The Man’s out there, which is why I’m going to stick it to him and cut my cable. 

After some initial hardware outlays to make our ancient 32”, conventional analog tube TV receive free digital broadcast signals from the major broadcast stations plus PBS over the airwaves, and a few more techy toys to connect our computer to the TV so we can watch downloaded shows from Hulu.com, we’re going to save almost $100 a month.

But this really isn’t about the money. This mostly is tie to my own hands. Even relying on TiVo, which I use to record a few commercial-free PBSKids shows for my daughter and some quality programming on Discovery and the History Channel, (O.K., plus Damages), I already waste too much time on mindless crap and one too many reality shows. It’s really easy to turn off How I Met Your Mother when that’s the only thing on, but, if I’m really tired, it’s really hard to turn off a repeat episode of Project Runway, even when I’ve already seen it twice. My willpower is lacking, but the desire for less tube time is there. And I’m inspired by the guy at www.cancelcable.com.