The TV and me

I'm having a serious personal crisis, and there's nothing to be done about it. My television and my watching habits seem to be a macrocosmic reflection of my entire life, and it's starting to scare me a little. \nI haven't seen television in months -- literally, it's been months. The only thing I can manage to catch is the 11:00 p.m. rerun of "Dharma and Greg" and, maybe, just maybe, the 11:30 p.m. rerun of "Will and Grace." That's not bad, really, because I love "Dharma and Greg" and "Will and Grace," but anymore when I get home from work I just want to curl up with a decent book or a copy of Real Simple magazine. What's happening to me? Existential crisis here! If "I Heart Huckabees" had been better, that could've helped me. Alas, it sucked, and I'm still left wondering if I'm getting old prematurely. I'm only 21.\nGrowing up, my family could only get a few channels, and I was usually outside rolling in the grass and eating bugs instead of watching "Sesame Street." So you could say that I've always had a tempestuous relationship with television. My family lives in the country, so we couldn't get cable. We got satellite television the summer I was 17, and I discovered my new favorite drug. I could watch "Golden Girls" at any hour of the day. I could watch 6-hour long documentaries on the French Revolution and there wasn't a damn thing that would pull me away. I could even watch old reruns of the shows I missed when I was a kid: "Pee-wee's Playhouse," "The Care Bears" and "Fraggle Rock." It was, in a word, heaven. The summer between high school and my freshman year in college, I rediscovered "My So-Called Life" and I was able to relive my adolescence. It was masochistically wonderful. So I came to associate television with being deeply, weirdly happy. \nBut these days, the most I can manage is a listless flip through the channels or a quick glace at the guide channel. Is it a macrocosmic reflection of my life? Is my relationship with my television indicative of my relationship with my life? Am I bored with my life? Maybe I am. Should I watch more television in order to fix this problem? Would my professors understand if I had to stop coming to class in order to watch more television in order to straighten out my life?\nI should probably also factor in that I'm on my second television of the year. Unwatched as it is, I managed to destroy one already, and my second is getting scratchy. The first one died during a booze-fueled election night rampage party, but don't blame me. Celebratory drinking turned into drowning our sorrows as the maps turned red, and before we knew it, it was showing pictures, but had no sound. The second one, a 13-inch, is simply old. It's so small, in fact, that even if I did up my television consumption in order to self-help, I wouldn't be able to see it that well and in turn, probably wouldn't get much out of it. I'd have to watch that much more television to make up for the poor intake I'd be getting. \nMaybe the answer is simple. I equate no television with young childhood -- a time when things were simple, Mom and Dad were usually right and I knew that no matter what, my sandbox would be there in the morning. I equate having television with the angst-ridden years during late high school and the summer before I left for college. Now, I'm in a state of "no television," but I'm still figuring out that life isn't that simple. No wonder my poor head hurts. \nThe next logical question is simple, though. Does IU's Counseling and Psychological Services offer television therapy?