::A Geek in Korea::

Both my wife and I have downtime in the evening at the same time. I get back from classes later than she does, but her dramas are on television during the evening. This means that she uses the television most nights to watch her two television shows. This is the only television she watches. They are intolerably boring Korean dramas that I do not enjoy. One is a historical drama, while the other is a Korean family drama about people who eat, talk, and whine every episode.

I come back home from work and turn on the computer. This is because my “blog time” is an hour of time I dedicate to writing in the evening. My wife knows that I like to just write about my day, and gives me free reign to do this. Blogging in the evening lets me pound some keyboard and get my stress out so that I can unwind before I go to bed. It is also the time when my friends in the United States are occasionally online to chat with. She started watching television dramas around the same time I do my blog posting to keep out of my hair. She’s got something going on, and I’ve got something going on.

She can’t time compress her television viewing, but I can write as little or as much as I want. Very often, I’ll finish off my blog post in 30 minutes or less, and then have nothing of purpose to do on the computer. This would be when I would play Wii. However, since she’s using the television, I’m back to the computer to kill some time. She doesn’t bother me for blogging, and I don’t bother her during her Korean dramas. It’s a pact we’ve worked out over two years of marriage.

If this was the United States, I’d pick up a book and read for a bit, but since books are harder to come by, and I’m to lazy to do anything productive after work, I’m stuck. It’s not a huge deal to not have a second television. I’ve got other hobbies, and it reminds me I could do something productive and study, but I never do.

Our mornings suffer no conflicts of television usage. I get up late, sync my podcasts walk the dog, and then check the news on the Internet. She gets up, talks with friends, maybe watches the news, and helps cook lunch. She heads to work after we eat lunch together. She doesn’t watch much television in the mornings, so I could play video games if I was in the mood. If she needs to use the computer, this is when she does it. If we had a second television I’d never use it for actual television watching. I do all of that on the computer.

We’ve got our little system worked out, and it’s pretty good. However, I wish her dramas were on an hour early so I could get the occasional game of Wii in before I went to bed without staying up super later.