Punked! (TV Edition)

Dear big-ass TV owners,

Mama told me there was a surprise for me when I came home last week. One of my guesses was that she spent a bunch of time packing all my boxes for me to bring up to Dallas. That would have been awesome. Another guess was that she was going to have another kid. That would have sucked. But it was neither of those things. Vegas would have given odds of 1:150,000,000 for the former, and 1:100 for the latter. Thankfully it wasn’t the latter. It’s not that it wouldn’t be cool to have a younger brother or sister; it's just that I wouldn’t wish another human being to have to live under Dad’s roof.

Vegas would have given 1:1 odds for the actual surprise: a big-ass TV. When I opened the familiar faux-redwood door to the place I still considered home, I was greeted by a piano-black monstrosity floating delicately above those tacky metal and glass stands (tacky because they try too hard to be modern). The plastic film protecting the glass-like frame around the screen was still attached, and my antenna from the TV in my old room had miraculously migrated to the TV stand underneath the new member of our family. Traitor.

Mama hadn’t come home from work yet, and I couldn’t find the remote, which as it turns out, was a problem (as troublesome as the current Great Recession) as new TVs are so cool that they don’t have buttons (on/off, volume, channel) on the actual thing itself.

So after I ripped apart the house trying to find the key to nirvana, I trudged sulkingly up the stairs to my room with its infinitesimally nano-scopic 24” screen. But then I remembered that the antenna had Benedict Arnold’ed itself downstairs for wider pastures. Great. Then I remembered that I had just completed a 4.5 hour trek across a desperately boring part of Americana, and I remembered that sleep is good.

A couple hours later, I was greeted with Mama’s tinny voice, ‘Hello! You home!?!?’ Then she proceeded to rub my nose in the TV I had bought a few months prior on Black Friday.

‘Oh, what size you say your TV. Forty-six? Oh, this one bigger. It LED. You say your LCD? So this one better, right?’*

‘Yes, Mama. You win.’
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*In the Vietnamese language, is/are are not necessary sometimes, and so when older Viet people learn English, they also neglect to use is/are.