This one time...

After School Bad Habits

Every day after school, I walked in through the front door. With my backpack still on, I bounced over to the living room, reached down to the coffee table for the remote control and swiftly pressed down on the red power button. During the millisecond the screen took to fire up to life, I took off my backpack and sat down on the couch to properly find a comfortable position I can rest in for the next however many hours until dinner time. Sure, I had every intention of unzipping that backpack and cracking open some tetbooks and notebooks and conquering my resilient homework that never stayed completely gone but how's a sixth grader supposed to concentrate on after school learning knowing tv shows like Arthur and Magic School Bus are airing on TVO Kids back to back starting at 4:30pm? No, I would be much more productive if I watched what I wanted to first and got the temptation out of my system so that I could better concentrate on long division, oh and that pesky paragraph I had to translate for french class. This was always my thought process upon arrival at home.

One afternoon, as on any other day, I walked in through the door, walked over to the living room, reached down to grab the same remote control and pressed the same red power button. As I gingerly removed one backpack strap after the other, the voice of God thundered through the speakers: "VICTORIA, DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE YOU WATCH TV." Strange, it sounded a lot like me dad... He wasn't home but his voice still managed to put the fear of God in me. Everyday for the rest of the week, I was very hesitant to turn the tv on right as soon as I got home, as I had been in the habit of doing. My dad never told me when and how he had set it up but thankfully it never happened again.