there's something in the water

When I open my cell phone, the shiny sanyo display whispers to me: “breathe.” I added that bit of text some time in the midst of dissertating hell, at a moment when I was liable to forget. One time in the beginning of our relationship, J opened my phone, saw this corny command, and burst out laughing. I was totally embarrassed. I was so high-strung that I needed my phone to tell me to relax. About this same time I started practicing yoga at the insistence of my roommate and her girlfriend. I also started taking anti-anxiety meds and going to cognitive-behavior therapy. All of these things helped in their own way and some of them continue to now. My phone still tells me to breathe and I still practice yoga a few times a week. And while I intend to write more fully about anxiety at some point, I want to admit something big, right now, right here:

I watch t.v. I don’t own a television, but I watch t.v. I watch about one show a night, some times I go a few days without watching anything and sometimes I watch two shows in a night, but I watch t.v. I am a t.v. watcher. In the circles in which I often find myself, admitting this might as well be as bad as admitting that you eat fast food or shop at Wal-Mart. So I don’t talk about it very often, and save for J, few people know of my proclivities. I’m always delighted when I find myself talking to another closeted t.v. watcher at a party, our conversations about “Friday Night Lights” or “Mad Men” are as good and as liberating as gossiping about your best friend’s boyfriend. So what does my t.v. watching have to do with my need to remind myself to breathe?

Television seems to cure—or at least radically improve—my anxiety. I guess that this is the most obvious thing in the world. Why else would millions of Americans flip on the tube every night? Things suck at work, watch television. Can’t stand your spouse, turn on “House.” You know the drill. The problem is that this surefire solution, the one that leaves me perfectly zoned out for 48 minutes, has been causing me some problems of late. You see, I’ve become totally peeved by the trope of the teenage pregnancy and it's beginning to diminish my ardor for the small screen. It’s everywhere this season and last: “Friday Night Lights,” “Big Love,” “Glee,” “Private Practice,” and these are just the shows I watch. There’s no question that it’s a kind of “Juno” effect, the movie that made getting knocked up in high school look like a not-half-bad idea, especially if your parents still love you and you get to befriend Jason Bateman in the process. This inundation comes on the heels of my asking my doctor—just for information’s sake—how difficult it is to get pregnant at my age. Her response: “well, let’s just say, you’re not 16.”

You see, the problem of teenage preggos on t.v. is, for me, a purely solipsistic one. All these little ladies find themselves with children at a moment when the people I love—friends who chose to wait until careers were settled or are still waiting to find someone right—struggle to conceive. Maybe the problem is that I’m not watching age-appropriate television. But these aren’t afterschool specials either. Maybe these shows are trying interrogate the destruction of the American family and its effects on the second generation (Friday Night Lights – child of single mother knocked up; Big Love – child of polygamous family knocked up; Private Practice – black child of divorced family knocked up; and Glee – the real spoiler – white cheerleading child of intact marriage knocked up), but all I see is outrageous fertility. So what gives?