In the Ghetto

I have made several friends over the years who are spoiled. One friend owns several pairs of shoes worth over $500 each. One friend's family used to own a jet. Many of my friends have high definition television sets. Now, I can admit that I've also been spoiled in several arenas, but there's one thing that always makes me laugh.

When you grew up, if you didn't have cable, did you ever have trouble getting a certain television station to show up properly? You'd mess with the antenna, and when that was insufficient you had to bust out with the aluminum foil. Some of my friends can relate to this - others can't remember a time without cable. Well, I lived in a trailer for a few years, and so I fall into the former category.

Right now, I don't have cable. Nobody in my house watches TV enough to warrant it. We don't even have a good TV - there's two old TVs in our living room, probably thirty years old each, and one of them has broken speakers. The other one works okay, but when I rushed home to watch Grey's Anatomy earlier tonight, I found out that our antenna is broken. It's one of those old antennas with the two little metal hooks that you would attach to screws on an old TV, only this TV isn't quite that old, so there's an adapter. Well, one of the two little hooks wouldn't fit into the adapter.

After several desperate minutes of tinkering with things, the best I got was taping the broken end to the wall and holding the antenna on top of the TV. This gave shoddy reception at best, and the audio was understandable. That is, the audio was understandable for the first ten minutes. Until I started to get interference. From a radio station. Yes, the fine doctors at Seattle Grace were competing for my attention against a smooth jazz station in New England. WTF??? Maybe the broken part of the antenna was messed up enough to pick up weird frequencies? Who knows?

Regardless, I sat in front of my TV for an entire hour, holding the antenna in one hand and trying to contort my body as best as I could to drain out the radio interference. I found that the best position was my hand holding the antenna on top of the TV and me kneeling on the ground, trying to keep my torso as low to the ground as possible. It was basically worth it, although I gave up on the scenes from next week because I was just so damn sore. ::sigh:: Maybe someday when I have a real job, I'll get cable.

- Induced Homomorphism