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Golden Inspirations |
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"Aim above morality ... be not simply good; be good for something."
- Henry David Thoreau
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Home  Featured Columnists Leigh Anne Jasheway-Bryant The Accidental Comic Bigger Than Life
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Bigger Than Life
No matter what women say, to men size does matter. When it comes to TVs, that is. I have yet to meet a man who didn’t lust after a bigger television set. In fact, I’m pretty certain that if it were for sale, my husband would somehow come up with the money to buy the Jumbotron they use at the Super Bowl. It wouldn’t matter that it’s four times the size of our house. He’d jerry-rig a tent to keep out the elements, run four or five extension cords (all duct-taped together to make sure there wasn’t a loss of power), and drag his lounge chair out to the back yard.
No wait, make that the front yard, because if you’re a guy there’s no point in having the biggest TV on the block if you can’t show it off. Whenever he gets in the mood to go “shopping,” I shudder. Because to my hubby, “shopping” doesn’t involve the thoughtful purchase of necessary items such as a pair of strappy sandals with a matching handbag. It means standing in a home electronics store for four or five hours drooling over the big-screen plasma and LCD TVs.
I’m surprised the people who run those stores don’t hand every guy who comes in a mop to clean up after themselves. Or at least install drains in the floors. Last time we went “shopping,” we almost came home with a wall-mounted 52” screen TV with picture in picture, surround sound, and a bonus cosmetic bag. Okay, there wasn’t a bonus cosmetic bag full of goodies, which is another thing I don’t understand about guy shopping – you almost never get anything free.
There was only one thing that saved us from getting that television set. And no, it wasn’t the fact that it cost more than a year’s mortgage payments. And it wasn’t that we don’t have a wall big enough in the entire house on which to hang it. The only argument that worked when it came to talking my husband out of the purchase was the fact that our car wasn’t big enough to haul it home in. He may be willing to declare bankruptcy to afford the thing, but he’s not going to pay $35 to have it delivered. So we made a beeline out of the store and right into a car dealership to discuss buying a truck.
I don’t get the attraction men have to large TV sets. Personally, I think most things were not meant to be seen larger than life-size. Like guys scratching during baseball games. The grimaces on football players faces when they’ve been tackled. Naked people on Survivor. Barney the Dinosaur and the Teletubbies. And I know that if we had one of those giant TVs, I’d have to stop watching the news because every time we’re in a store, I find myself transfixed by the size of the news anchor’s pores. Let’s face it, nobody looks under a magnifying glass.
Then there’s the whole dust issue. The TV is notoriously dusty around our house. It could be that we have more static electricity than other parts of the country (which is my story and I’m sticking with it.) Or it could be that I’m a slovenly housekeeper who only wipes things clean when it becomes impossible to tell what they are. “Is that the treadmill or my mother-in-law?” is a question I’ve asked more than once.
Just imagine the dust a giant television would attract. You’d have to convince all your neighbors to buy big TVs too, because if they didn’t, the sheer size of yours would pull in all the dirt and dust from a two-mile radius, much like a black hole sucks in everything around it. I haven’t seen studies to prove this, but I have enough experience with dust to know it’s true.Not only that, but the gravitational pull from the TV hubby wants would be so strong, it would also suck in every man for miles. It may be that giant TVs emit a high-pitched sound only men can hear. Or maybe guys always keep an eye out for humungous boxes in their neighbors’ recycling bins. But once the jig is up, we wouldn’t have the living room (or the front lawn) to ourselves for the next ten years.
Thus far, I’ve been able to convince my husband to stick to the medium-sized TVs we already own. But I can’t hold out long. So just to be on the safe side, I’ve installed a drain in the living room floor.
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