Kyle Dreier - Mr. Critical

I’m the kind of guy that has to just stop and unplug most days. In my single days when I was working as Art Director for American Way magazine I lived less than one mile from work and I had no TV. I totally missed the entire OJ Simpson ordeal.

So, what did I do without a TV? I ran a bunch. I Rollerbladded more. I’d hop in the car and dart off to a local park and skate for an hour or two. I was in good shape. That was sixteen years ago.

So what about today? Lately I’ve found myself channel surfing through stupid stuff on TV. We don’t have cable … not that it’d be any better.

“Enough!” I say.

Thanks to my pal and fellow Steve Martin fan, Jeff McMahon, I started the year off reading the Steve Martin autobiography. Good read, especially for anyone who has followed him since his first album or before.

Now, I’m on the self imposed one-book-per-month plan.

January: Steve Martin autobiography
February: Financial Peace - Dave Ramsey
March: My Name is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok
April: Boundaries - Townsend/Cloud

The rest of the year is still up for grabs, but so far, I’ve already read more than I have in the past 5 years.

- Kyle Dreier (less vegetated)

I think there’s a Bible verse to the affect of “why do I always do that which I do not want to do”.

That seems to sum up my fight with going from loving to loathing the TV.

Somehow I find myself defaulting to the TV when I’m tired. Up until a few days ago we had a total of 40″ of TV in our house. A 13″ and a 27″.

We’ve recently moved the 13″ up to the attic from our downstairs living room. That means no more watching TV while eating breakfast and other meals. It also means our kids don’t default to the TV as much. We’re readying books together more. I feel better about our family dynamic with only one TV in the house.

At this point, my goal is to maintain the one TV in the house … but now Amy has put in her desire to have a bigger TV. What man wouldn’t love this woman! That being the case, it looks like sometime in the next 12 months we’ll be upgrading to a 32+ inch flat screen TV. But, I’m going to hold fast to the one TV standard.

I’ll keep you posted.

-Kyle Dreier

Normally Sunday is a day of rest for me - both physically and mentally. Part of my rental rest includes a few hours of mindless channel surfing. Granted, channel surfing isn’t a world class sport in our house since we don’t have cable and all four and a half stations that we get come via circa 1968 rabbit ears.

One event that captures my attention on a Sunday afternoon while holding the cough down is golf. What other sport allows one to watch in a horizontal position and be lulled to sleep. I don’t mean this as an insult to golf. I love to watch golf. I stink at playing so I have a huge appreciation for it. But on a Sunday afternoon when I’m looking for a respite nothing works better than a whispering voice coming from the TV with play by play action from one shot to the next.

While that is the makeup of an ideal day of rest, yesterday was a bit different in the Dreier household. We didn’t get up and get our dose of political news. We didn’t fill idle time with weather reports. We didn’t even put a Veggie Tales video in while dinner was being prepared. All 40 inches of TV (that’s a 27 and a 13 inch) in our house remained off yesterday.

We didn’t start out the day declaring that is would be a TV-free Sunday. We simply found ourselves choosing activities which directed our attention elsewhere. I did a little painting. The kids did their version of painting. I cleaned out a few things from my closet. (That will be an entry at a later date.) I talked with my wife.

At the end of the day I have to say that I actually felt good. It’s not to say I didn’t get some visual stimulation from a multimedia experience. We listened to music. We danced. We even watched a small Grinch clip on YouTube. But, our time was much more intentional.

I did find myself being pulled to the TV after the boys were in bed and I was looking for my8-9 o’clock fix when I remembered that I has unplugged the TV I was headed towards. Our youngest has been intrigued by the on/off button so I nipped that in the bud. What I found interesting is that the idea that the TV was unplugged stopped me in my tracks and I ended up sitting in bed reading instead.

Today I think I’m a better person than I was yesterday all because I actually fed some good stuff into my mind. I used my time for better things. I might get used to this.

Stay tuned.

-Kyle Dreier