Dear Diary: Quiet
The day was, necessarily, a quiet one. Staying up last night and sitting outside during the storm — rather more wine than usual was consumed. This morning, I couldn’t face the prospect of paying bills in the afternoon. But I knew how much worse I’d feel if I went with Plan B, which was to watch Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) in the blue room, while usefully engaged in the folding of (two) T-shirts. I saved the video for after the bills.
Watching movies in the blue room is a new possibility — well, a recently restored one. When we moved into this apartment in 1983, the television was in the blue room, along with the dining table and the pull-out couch. the blue room was our dining-room/guest-room combo. And our first VCR. Yikes. I don’t remember when the small TV was removed from the breakfront bookshelf behind my desk. We went without cable reception for a few years in the late Nineties, but had it hooked back up in 2000, in order to watch the debates. I still want to cry, just thinking about those debates.
But in 2000, we watched television in the living room, on a TET LCD unit that could double as a computer monitor. It was always my plan to upgrade the living room, someday, to an orthodox flat screen, and to use the TET in the blue room, in both of its capacities. Watching movies in the blue room would be good if I wanted to watch something late at night, or if Kathleen were home sick, because the speakers in the living room are right on the other side of a thin wall from the bed’s headboard, and even moderate volumes of sound carry through.
The “upgrade someday” occurred in February, but it took until this past weekend to connect the TET to a DVD player and to reconnect the Tannoy speakers to the amplifier. Time was when not a year went by without my engaging in a major stereo rewiring project, or at least adding some vital new piece of equipment, such as the Sony Minidisc player that I had such hopes for (until flash memory pulled a pfffft! on that). In the past year, I’ve given a great deal of this equipment away, and there is still a tower of it in the living room, only three components of which are actually in use. I put off hooking up the blue room DVD player in part because I wasn’t sure that I’d remember how to do it.
And you would have thought that I’d never hooked up sound equipment before, given the huffing, puffing, and cursing that filled the blue room with blue streaks in the latter part of Saturday afternoon. I had stopped in at Radio Shack a few days earlier to buy cables and wires and stuff that I already had, squirreled away somewhere in the apartment, but was too lazy to look for. In the event, I used none of it; everything that I ended up needing came out of a drawer in a closet.
The DVD player that I was hooking up was the first one that I bought, way back when; made by Toshiba, it had a single tray but could hold two DVDs. Now, why, you ask, would anyone want a two-disc capability? Because I got more for my money, obviously. I didn’t care that it was unnecessary. I didn’t really know that it was unnecessary. More was always better.
Everthing was hooked up and working — wow! — when I ran into a slight snag. It didn’t surprise me that I hadn’t held onto the Toshiba’s remote-control, but it was deeply vexing to discover that, without it, there was no way to advance the disc beyond the Play/Scene Selection/Setup menu. Such frills did not exist when DVDs were introduced. The first ones played just like CDs: you dropped one onto the tray and closed it, and the feature started up without ado. But that was then, ha ha.
Astonishingly, I Gave Up. Quietly and without even the suggestion of a tirade, I Let Go.
I moved the furniture back into place, gathered up unneeded cables and debris, such as twisties and cellophane wrapping, and even ran the vacuum over the carpet. It seemed clear that I would have to buy a new DVD player, but it could be hooked up painlessly, without moving anything. I did not need to watch DVDs in the blue room — not right now. I could let it go. Like a recovered paralytic, I marveled at my ability to get on with my life even though every attempt to move hotel Rwanda beyond a head shot of Don Cheadle failed. At the same time, I suffered phantom-limb syndrome: where was my tantrum? Why wasn’t I tearing down 86th Street to buy a new player right now, instead of waiting to clean up and cool off?
It was while I was calmly drying off after a shower that I was rewarded. Abandoning the struggle to make something happen liberated my brain, which remembered something: at a time when I had a number of Sony components, I was frequently irritated when clicking the remote for one unit would set them all playing at once. This recollection came at the end of several thoughts. The second was that I would not run down the street to P C Richard or to Best Buy to by a new DVD player after all, but would wait for an all-region player to be delivered by Amazon (I have a lot of French movies that haven’t been released in North America). The Toshiba all-region player in the bedroom, after wall, was/is a dandy machine … and this is where my Sony memory kicked in.
Sure enough, the “Enter” button on the all-region’s remote control, which I bought about three years ago, got Hotel Rwanda to play on our prehistoric machine. I turned it right off, and felt extraordinarily pleased with myself.
Ne le dis à personne played without a hitch.