by Danielle Mantia, SUNY Cortland

Posted in on Friday, Dec 10

I mainly watch “Law and Order: SVU”. Olivia does something for me; I can't quite explain it. Plus, everything is so certain. Really bad guys are doing really bad things. All the other “Law and Orders” bore me. Someone shot someone for inheritance. Drug deals gone awry. Crimes of passion. “SVU” is different. Crazed people. Schizophrenia. Projection. Transference. Child abuse. Sadomasochism. The list goes on.

I love when they play it for hours on Friday nights. Just goes on. Sometimes from seven to ten pm I sit entranced on the couch, my eyes bright and alert from the excitement. Then an hour break for some other show and then they start to play the episodes, the repeats, again and again.

I love the mystery, the twists and turns. You never really know what will happen until the end. They rough up perfectly logical suspects, only to discover them to be partial or total victims later on. It's not Hitchcock; it's not really a twist, more of a complete surprise. Hitchcock would not have been proud. His films all have this order to them. If you follow along hard enough, with your eyes open enough; you catch all his cameos and the killer. He had twists and turns and bumpy rides in the night. No, SVU is a sloppy surprise, with no path or even logic, but I guess that is life. No real cameos in life to help point you in the right direction or help you to decipher the red herrings.

Anyways that is what I watch at night. During the day the TV sits on, loud: my obnoxious roommate. But I don't watch it. It has conversations with itself and I sort of listen here and there, like some crazed voyeur. Or worse yet, like a mind reader that can't seem to shut the voices off. Or chooses not to. I sort of invade my television's privacy--when it's convenient I am interested in what it has to say. We don't have that good of a relationship. I'm distant a great deal of the time. I have papers to write and dishes not to wash and piles of clothes that need to be put away, or at the very least, shoved into one of the many baskets I have bought specifically for the purpose of shoving things into them. Mainly I fix my hair, or play with the hangnails on fingers that I cannot seem to stop playing with, or eat soup out of the bowl I cooked it in, my feet up on a coffee table that is heavily decorated with things like glue, index cards, dried up pens, rubber bands, and never used coasters. I have put the art books away on the shelves because I was using them as coasters. But I rarely have company, so a conversation-starting book of Vargas drawings does not need to be predominately displayed.

It's just the television and me. I mean, yeah, I have other appliances that I could hang out with, but frankly, they are less apt to talk and usually require far more input from me. I'm a taker, not a giver.

I don't have a phone. A phone means a two-sided conversation, or a very angry hang up. Although mostly you do have to answer the phone, so really, you always have to give something of yourself.

Despite avoiding phone conversations at all costs, I have two best friends. I never call them on their birthdays or buy them Christmas presents. But we get along just fine. That's how we are. I've known the two of them since junior high. One, I was in love with. The other I talked to a lot about being in love with the former. High school was special, what with house parties where the three of us drank to excess and watched a lot of TV. Three people fit neatly on a couch and you will find that very few people will try to invade the space of three very drunk and sprawling TV viewers. I would in fact say that there were maybe four of us in a group, one of us being the very selfless TV, and three of us being entertainment-sucking leeches.

I had a phone in high school. Or rather my parents did. And then during my brief two years at college, I am pretty sure that I had a phone. Although, since I flunked out due to excessive drinking, it would be hard to say for sure if I ever used it or if it was solely my roommate's pet. I went to some crappy college that was mainly a place for one to get some sort of agricultural degree--something about horses or some such stuff. One of the two friends went with me and we had this saying, "Drink. Work. Do it." We sat in front of the TV a lot and watched “Star Trek”. My other best friend went to some amazing school in a big city and we hardly saw each other. But on breaks, we all came home and went to shows and came home and watched TV late into the night and that was that for those two years. And now I sort of have evolved into a lump of hermit.

Oddly enough, despite my hatred for all things involving me being a giving person, I date a lot. I cannot explain what it is about me that people are willing to forgive my unkempt appearance, penchant for Old English Malt Liquor 40's, and general distaste for people. Mainly, I am an asshole. I won't sugar coat it for you; nice guys are crap and I finish first. Except of course with my best friend. I'm somewhere on the low end of people she would date. Something about me being about as stable as a table with one leg.

Of course, what I choose not to tell her is that it would be different. It's a bullshit line of course, but not really. Who gives a fuck about those other girls? They are just television. Vacant shows they play during daytime TV, Fox News, or a reality show. She's more like “Law and Order”. She's got some depth. Some intrigue. Some twists and turns. She's got daggers up her sleeves and some crazed glint in her eye. And a boyfriend.

She's always got a boyfriend. She's like me, with a penchant for the twist. The surprise. She can go for months without calling me and then all of a sudden she's picking me up at 5 am and not letting me go to work. She's got plans. She tells me to get a new job. I don't complain. I hate my job. I sort of move around and I am always looking for an excuse. She knows this. She gives me an excuse. She loves to take the blame. I blow off a girlfriend, a boss, a roommate, a parent. I say, " Well you see, she just showed up….I had no choice." And then, she's the villain and I'm the dumb ass and maybe I lose my job or my girlfriend or the roommate or the check from my dad, but I just get a new one. I just move onto a new couch or flash a smile at a new girl or interviewer….When I don't want to make a choice, I let her ruin things for me so I can get out of all my responsibility. And then girls try to fight her at shows or give her dirty looks or my friends want to meet the girl who can fuck up my whole life in two seconds for no reason. And she loves it. Attention whore. Complete taker. Can't give much of anything. She's like a phone. Needs an audience; needs to have a two-sided conversation, although she is very good at the one-sided, as long as she gets to do all the talking.

So this is sort of my day. To get up. To eat something in a sort of clean bowl. To flick on the TV, if I had even turned it off the night before. (Sometimes she wants to talk all night.) To wander around. To drink some soda. To pick up a well-worn book that I had first read in high school, because I am too bitter to read anything new. New books are stupid and boring and pale in comparison to the literature that I have already read and already love and have already invested some serious time into learning the nuances of the intricate characters and looking up words and treating the sentences like John Donne paradoxes. This is the basic crap of my day.

Today is Monday. I went to a coffee shop and drank a million cups of cream-rinsed, sugar-coated medium blend. I'm a baby, a girl. And there was this girl there. And she was drinking her coffee black and reading something in a blue binder that seemed to be schoolwork. And that pissed me off. Really. You sit at home and do work. You go to the library and do work. You maybe go sit in your car if your roommate is being annoying. But you don't go to a hole-in-the wall coffee shop on the main street of a crappy town. No, obviously you go to a coffee shop with a pretentious book in hand that is a reflection of the inner you. Nothing cliché or read by angsty sixteen year olds, like The Bell Jar (unless you are sixteen). Something random and odd, like a new piece of Japanese fiction by an author whose name you can barely pronounce, but then again, neither can anyone else, so you will still sound smart if you can just say it with bravado in an unwavering voice.  And of course, you hope that someone will see the title of the book you are reading, with the cover propped up in the most unnatural movie-like product placement way, and come over and smile at you. And then you will fall in love, or at least in lust, and you will have something to do that afternoon.

She was doing homework and biting her lip and drinking black coffee, dark blend. She had three cups before I decided that at this time of the day I could do no better then a girl who had actually come to do homework. She would probably be very dull and giggle at weird times. I would be forced to put on a weird persona that is less of an asshole, and more of a goofy frat boy.

I got up. I walked over. I exude confidence. Some blonde guy with a goatee sits down with her. I slide to the coffee pots and watch what goes on, eyebrow arched. He says hi. He doesn't know her. He is reading some lame trade paperback that looks like it barely got published. He is no match for my wit.

I slide into the chair next to him. The girl looks at me, like a big terrified bunny. You can tell that her mind is going, what the fuck? I am doing this history/psychology/ English/math homework and suddenly I am being ambushed by two psycho guys.

I'm good in these kinds of situations. After all, I watch a lot of TV.

"What do you have there?" I ask the guy, a smirky smile glinting off my face onto his. He says something, unimportant, I assume pertaining to the title of his lame-ass book. I smile, as genuine of a smile as I can muster for such an ass. I nod, and then turn toward the girl.

Trust me. You don't want the next ten minutes. Basically, I make the goatee twitch, the girl really uncomfortable, and then goatee leaves. The girl? A tad terrified, but that's petered out with annoyance. I can deal with that. After all, I am very charming.

My house is dark, the only lights I ever turn on are the glowy lights that emanate from my TV and the computer. This girl's house is bright, airy. She's got windows with white curtains, as a girl like her is apt to have. She doesn't giggle like I thought she would, she bites her lip instead. She shrugs when I ask her if I can turn on the TV. Her TV has a layer of dust on it, and her bookshelves are overflowing with broken-backed tomes. I dare. So I ask:

"Do you ever watch “Law and Order”?"

She walks in from the kitchen. "I hardly watch TV. I mainly watch movies if anything. I don't even have cable." She hands me some water with ice cubes shaped like pine trees.

I stare at them. She notices.

"They came from my mom. They're for Christmas."

I sit down on her couch, which is new and beige and very clean. I decide that I like that she doesn't watch TV, despite my affinity for the thing. I decide that her books are interesting and that maybe it really was worth my time to meet her.

So I put the glass with the pine tree ice cubes on a coaster on the coffee table and kiss her. Her lips are cold from the water, but her mouth is still warm and bitter with coffee. I like the dichotomy and go back for a second kiss.

I liked that we talk about random things on our walk back here from the coffee shop. It was a long walk and she had this long green-and-white-striped scarf loosely wrapped around her neck with a fringe on the ends that she played with, twisting and tugging at like I do with my hangnails. She told me that her dad always votes for Nixon, and I told her that I miss Perot and his charts. We talked Rastafarians and goldfish and the mess that is fat-free, sugar-free ice cream. Really pointless shit, but the way she said it is nice. Made me really want to touch her lips, which she pursed and bit and stretched into a really clean smile.

I said a bunch of asshole things, by accident. She didn't seem to mind. She spent a lot of time looking at my eyebrows. Most people would have just assumed she was looking at their eyes, in a weird way, but she was definitely looking at my eyebrows. So, I looked at hers. They were oddly perfect. Like she spent hours shaping them. I smiled at that. She smiled back, pulling her lips over her teeth like other people pull on wool sweaters. Delicious.

So you can tell I was really glad to be sitting on that couch, in the glow of a TV, kissing her. She even smelled really nice. A weird mixture of smells: perfume, hand lotion, shampoo, and coffee. Coffee. Coffee without cream is a strong, pungent smell. It is a great smell. Like the smell fresh tobacco in a new pack of un-smoked cigarettes. Sticky sweet, hard, and strong.

Sometimes it's overwhelming. Being one-sided.

I'm not some stupid cliché. My eyes do not flicker in a dead way under the blue screen. I don't even think of a TV as being blue. It's so colorful and full of life. A million people waiting for you to listen to them. They talk, laugh, sing, dance. Pure entertainment and you don't even have to thank them for the countless hours they spend catering to you. Better then a girlfriend or best friend or even a dog. If you have beer or pot you don't have to share; she just wants to be near you and entertain you as you try to unwind from whatever you did that day. Even if you did nothing but sit with her.

But it does get overwhelming. Being the center of the universe. Being so self-important.

I might want to invest in a phone.

DESIGNER: Heather Cheetham & Greg Montano, New Media Design, SUNY Cortland, USA

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