It makes me think of when I was a kid, sick at home on a schoolday, especially if all I had going on was a fever, since I could be sick yet not be too out of it to sit in my parents' bed and watch TV all day. The highlight would hopefully be to see a Sanford and Son rerun. Channel 5 always showed an hour of I Love Lucy, and Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie always seemed to be paired together, maybe on channel 9.
But nothing defined daytime TV more than commercials for the Apex Technical School. Where else could you learn refrigerator repair, air conditioning maintenance, auto body work, and all in six months! Better still, when you finished the course, the tools were yours to keep! You don't see Columbia giving you anything when you graduate except the side of a sheep and a crapload of debt. At Apex Tech you could learn practical skills, not just be able to look at old bones and argue whether something walked bipedally or not 5 million years ago.
Though when I was a kid, it never occurred to me who those commercials were aimed at. I had no concept of somebody in their 20s just sitting around the house unemployed, wondering what to do with their lives now that Studio 54 was closed. I never thought the day would come when I was lying around the house (not sick, not in my parents' bed, not even in their house) seeing Apex Tech ads and then realizing, "OH! THEY'RE TALKING TO ME!!!!"
Yet I never enrolled. Life took me elsewhere.
Hunger and fatigue are in a fight for my soul. Maybe not quite a fight, maybe they're just playing dice. And maybe it's not my soul, maybe it's just my body. What does it crave more, sleep or food. God. Why can't I be one of those fridge-raiding sleepwakers? Maybe if I went to Apex Tech I'd be able to repair refrigerators in my sleep and really use my time more efficaciously. Or do I mean efficiently. Is efficaciously most efficacious in that sentence?
I think sleep is the frontrunner....
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