Wednesday, February 21, 2007 | by nathan

Lent Lite

I’m not good at Lent. Let’s just get that out of the way now. That whole thing in Christianity where you have to die to yourself blah bitty blah - yeah, I suck at that. So the past several years I haven’t done Lent.

Part of this is that I got really sick of people giving up things that either a) they never used/participated in in the first place, like "Oh, I gave up crack cocaine, trips to Mongolia, and ingesting metal," or b) were just an excuse to diet/exercise or to NOT diet/exercise. It’s irritating.

This year I was thinking it would be the same as always: I’d think briefly about giving something up and then just not. Then, tonight - I’m catching up on two weeks’ worth of grading - it hit me. Television. Television NEEDS.TA.GO.

I have a novel due in May. Finalized. Ready for publication. DONE. How many words have I written? Fewer than the number of years since Lent was invented.

I don’t think television is evil. I really do not. I think most of it is. I think broadcast news is the thing that will bring our society all the way down. I think reality television is one of the things anthropologists of the future will look at and go, "What the mother fuck?" And I think most scripted drama - sitcoms especially - are written by computers, or monkeys. Or monkeys at computers.

Still, there is some gold out there in T.V. Land. Veronica Mars, for instance, is genius, and recently, so is Heroes. The Simpsons is still wonderful after so many years. Saturday Night Live is finally great again. If you’re lucky you can find reruns of Dead Like Me, Buffy, Angel, Firefly. Anything from the Whedon ouvre, really. Not all television is evil; life doesn’t break down quite that easily. So if you’re thinking of congratulating me for giving it up for 40 days, don’t.

Don’t congratulate me because I just don’t want to hear how evil you think T.V. is and how much more wonderful people are who do not partake. I disagree. Also, I’m not giving it up completely. I’m giving it up from Monday to Friday.

Why the weekend exception? Mostly, I NEED TO KNOW WHO KILLED DEAN O’DELL. Hopefully from Monday to Friday I can catch up on writing, and on Saturday I can catch up on TiVo, and on Sunday I can enjoy my usual "have a beer and watch the Simpsons" ritual. Everybody wins. Everybody, of course, being me.