Re-hashed shows promote quality time
On any given day, my roommates and I sit around and watch reruns of reality TV shows and bitch about our lives.
We encourage each other to skip classes so that we can watch the same episode of “The Hills” for the eighth time. We literally plead with each other, “Don’t go to class. Please, stay and watch ‘Run’s House’ with me, you love this episode.” Sometimes we plead with ourselves, “Don’t go to class, it’s just one little quiz. Should I go? I really don’t want to go.”
But it isn’t the episode of “The Hills” that we really care about. It’s the quality time. It’s the time spent together with our best friends. The mid-afternoon, sober, lazy, hang-around time.
After all, it is this block of time that is home to some of the best memories. The greatest moments are the ones where all 10 of us end up in the living room at the same time, before someone has to go to work, and someone else to class.
It’s no surprise that we are trying to cram in the quality time. We are seniors. We are sentimental. And we are scared out of our minds to move away from the Boulder bubble and leave each other.
Early in my college career I couldn’t wait to be an upperclassmen, and especially to be 21. But now that I am a senior, all I can think about is how much I would love to be a freshman again.
Now everything represents the last of something. The last football game. The last time we register for classes. And most importantly, the last time we get to live with our ten best friends in a house with no rules, no responsibilities and no true sense of real life … no real world problems.
Our biggest problems come in the form of break-ups, bad test grades and not being able to find a parking spot. And trust me, we give these problems more than enough attention.
We throw temper tantrums as we storm through the front door, waving our blue books in the air. We angrily call our landlord and tell him to “put a boot on the son of a bitch who is blocking my car in!” We pace back and forth in tears as we shout out curses and clutch our cell phones, waiting for a call from a boyfriend with whom we are fighting.
And then there are the more serious problems. Parents who are sick. The loss of a pet. The loss of a friend.
But no matter the problem, we have an unspoken routine, and we all know how it works. We allow the temper tantrum to take its course, and we wait in our respective rooms. However, when the yelling subsides and the territory looks safe, we migrate towards the living room. We resume our spots on the couches and flip the channel to MTV: a rerun of the “Real World.”
We take solace in this rerun and sit, often in silence for a little while, in the living room. Sometimes we talk about the problem, sometimes we don’t. But we take comfort in the rerun. And mostly, we take comfort in the fact that we are watching it with our best friends.
So maybe encouraging each other to miss a class here and there isn’t such a horrible thing. And maybe watching reruns isn’t as lame as it sounds. Because when it comes down to it, quality time is what bonds us together. The countless hours in the living room are what I will miss most when I’m out in the real world. I just wish I had figured that out as a freshman.
Kate Mishara is a guest columnist for The Campus Press and can be reached at kate.mishara@colorado.edu.
