Television

Television is a most important aspect of American life - or so I have always been told. Partly I can see how that would be caused by the mindboggling number of channels available - wherever I've lived so far, the default answer to "what's on television tonight" was "nothing interesting, don't even bother". But when there is a seemingly infinite supply of channels to pick from, things do change. (I've zapped through everything from 1 to 54 and gave up there. A random check showed there was still life at 102, but that might have been a duplicate.) Of course it is fundamentally a chicken-and-egg question which came first: the addiction to television or the exorbitant number of channels.

The fact is, everyone has a television. In the house I'm sharing, there's one big television in the living room - and four more, one per bedroom. That makes five televisions for four people which, on the positive side, means there is no need to fight over which channel to pick but on the negative side implies a privacy that kills most random human interaction.

Thinking back about the shared houses I've lived in over the past years, there have been two areas of the house most conducive to socialising: the kitchen and the television. Simply put, if the only television is in a common area, then anyone watching it will be open for a chat - if not during the show itself, then at least during the commercial break. Down here, these dynamics are entirely different - between the unlimited broadband internet and the private possession of a TV-set, people lock themselves in their rooms and only make fleeting appearances outside that cave.

It should therefore not be surprising that the longest event of 'sitting-around-and-chatting' we've had so far, was during a two-hour blackout a few weeks ago. Collecting the few candles we had lying around, we just managed to light the living room enough to all sit around without needing to be in the dark. We didn't quite make it to playing cards just yet, but without internet and television, we had an interesting social experiment all the same...

Addiction

Now that all the official administrative stuff is organised and I have a bank account, home and an emerging daily routine, I thought the dust would settle down and I would settle in. Mostly this turned out to be correct, except for a daily uneasiness that starts to itch around 10am and reaches a climax at 11am when I simply cannot sit still anymore. First I thought it was because it was Monday, then I thought I was just getting annoyed by colleagues sending repetitive e-mails. Finally I realised what was wrong. During my last months - maybe even for close to a year - in Swinburne, sometime between 10 and 11am I would get my daily oxygen-fix by taking a little walk to get the Age - the Melbourne newspaper that is. Needless to say, in Morgantown there is no Age - but somehow the force of habit has persisted.

So I do end up going for a little walk, giving in to the cravings in search of a good-quality newspaper or an equally high-standard cup of coffee. So far, these walks haven't resulted in anything but the good old O₂ fix. The problem is not that there is no (good) coffee on campus - there's plenty of places to go - Starbucks or otherwise. The problem is that there are just way too many students - and much too few of them are in class between 10 and 11am. I honestly start to get the impression that studying in the US comes down to queueing (sorry, lining up) for a cup of coffee. However, I haven't seen many people walk around while sipping their cups (not too surprising since the latte-sipping-liberals are all supposedly in New York and Washington) so maybe it's not the student's fault, maybe it's simply that the coffee shops work too slowly. I'll let you know when I find out.

Another side to my quandary is the fact that I have trouble to find a good newspaper around. So far, I've ran all over town to find a copy of the New York Times (I've tried the Wall Street Journal on the plane - which was probably the last time I'll try that one) and I've only succeeded to locate a few vending machines - none of which are on campus. the few shops that do sell newspapers either have national papers hidden or only sell local papers. Now I'm not saying these local papers are bad - in fact the university-ran "Daily Athenaeum" is pretty good - but I'd actually prefer to know what's going on in the World - not just in Morgantown.

Granted: USA Today you can find just about anywhere. I am, however, in search of a good newspaper.