The Seduction of Heather Oman

At first she was basically opposed to the idea. A husband in law school who spends an inordinate number of waking hours reading cases on the mysteries of pendant jurisdiction and laboring over legal citation formats for some law journal has no business wasting time on the internet. Besides, “blog” is a really dumb word, and anyone who admits to “blogging” is, well, unhip.

Of course, from time to time she would read the blogs, and at times she thought they were interesting, even though her husband talked too much about law, and the Metaphysical Elders were rather full of themselves at times. She was even known to leave a comment at Times & Seasons from time to time. At least they had women bloggers.

As the bloggernacle expanded, she began reading other blogs. The couple had no television, and she found that it was easy to slip into blogging as an alternative way of satisfying the need to waste time with electronically transmitted media. Still, she continued to be suspicious of her husband’s time with the blogs. After all, who names their child Kaimi?

Then one night it happened. Her husband was sitting in their room reading, waiting for his wife to come to bed. He waited and waited and waited and waited. He finally fell asleep with some law book sprawled across his chest. Finally, many hours after midnight, she awakened him with the rustle of sheets as she guiltily crawled into bed. “You’ve been blogging, haven’t you?” he said. From deep under the covers came a sheepish, “Yes.”

Now she was out of the closet. No longer need she pretend, blogging in hidden moments when others were not looking. Time in front of the laptop became a standard part of the evening. She evangelized others to her new-found obsession and a new blog was born. She began to report each day on the number of hits her site had received. A post that generated a strong discussion became an occasion for celebration. She began to worry in the night about posts with no comments. Increasingly, marital discussions turned to the dynamics of blogging, and she began to exclaim “Now THAT would make a great blog post!” with increasing frequency in conversations with her friends.

And so she was seduced . . .

26 comments for “The Seduction of Heather Oman

  1. Based on the title I was expecting T&S to join M*’s recent descent into smut. But I was dissapointed.

  2. Well, Davis, we tried. But alas, my comment was deleted.

    I didn’t think it was THAT bad…

  3. May my wife follow in Heather O.’s footsteps. Somehow though, my faith is lacking. Alas …

    Is there still no television in the Oman household? And out of curiosity, do other people in the ‘Nacle choose not to own a television? Just curious.

  4. We actually own a television in the sense that we have a machine. It is not, however, connected to anything, so the only thing that you can do with it is watch DVDs or Videos. Although Heather misses Buffy and I miss March Madness (and the news), we like not having TV.

  5. Nate,

    Buffy is over, and so is Angel. And they’re available on DVD. So there’s really no reason to be missing Buffy.

    March Madness is another thing.

    Heather,

    Welcome to the dark side!

    Now you need to make Nate start writing guest posts for Mommy Wars. Now that would be something to see.

  6. Danithew, our household is about as tv-free as the Omans’, it sounds like. Just videos, no cable or broadcast. I really like the control factor. No beer commercials interspersed with the basketball, no ads for the latest smutty reality show in between carefully selected family shows, no too-scary-for-little-kids news reports surprising me.

    And Mommy Wars is great.

  7. Kaimi, the subject of Nate’s first Mommy Wars post has leaked on the ‘nacle: “Why Reliance on Narratives is unhelpful and counterproductive in telling children’s bedtime stories.”

  8. Our TV is in a closet somewhere. Frees up my time and forces me to make friends in the ward during football season.

  9. I can see you now, Nate, after you’ve sobered up from this long descent into madness, watching out the window of a shabby hotel as Heather, sadly unable to kick the habit, walks down the dark streets of the wrong side of town, pausing to look back once, but then entering into the dark door of an internet cafe.

    And it all started so innocently.

  10. I rememebr reading about this (only the names seem to have been changed)…

    Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second, which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red drapery. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride’s bouquet; it was the other one’s. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma seated in an arm-chair (they were putting her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die.

    During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes. Finally her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out, picked up a second-hand dogcart, which, with new lamps and splashboard in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury.

  11. Has Heather Oman joined the Dark Side?

    You have to admit blogging feels like addictions at times. Hitting the refresh button over and over or checking for comments every 10 minutes (5 minutes? 3 minutes? 2 minutes? 30 seconds?) is not unlike the behavior of the diseased. In its essential form, the behavior is not unlike the routinization and perseveration of people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I am NOT saying Heather is obssessive, but I have been on occasion, and i wonder about the desirability of such behaviors. If were asked to give up technology tomorrow, I suppose I would react poorly. Some days I feel like an addict. Most days, happily, not.

    As for TV, we don’t own one. We don’t miss it. The two arguments I often hear for TV are sports watching and General Conference. In our experience these are paper tigers. When there is a game to see (say, the World Series or March Madness), we go to a friend’s house, turning a private event into a public event, the way spectator sports were meant to be. The same with conference. We like watching conference in a church meeting house where the formal setting helps us concentrate on the message and sitting with others in dressy attire puts us in a worshipful mood. We like a setting where the social stigma against multi-tasking channels our powers of concentration into the words and images instead of finding our energies weak and scattered across many activities.

  12. I’m surprised at the number of people on the blog who don’t have TV access. That explains a lot.

    So, people who have come from two-blog homes: How do you keep your marriage intact without constantly asking, “Do you think this situation would make a good post?”

  13. There are no blogs in heaven.
    No, heaven is not there.
    Our comments aren’t a leaven
    To URL’S in the air.

    For all the time were sating
    And all intentions meant
    No one there’s a waiting
    For something we have sent.

    Harold B. Curtis

  14. There are no blogs in heaven.
    No, heaven is not there.
    Our comments aren’t a leaven
    To URL’S in the air.

    For all the time were sating
    And all intentions meant
    No one there’s a waiting
    For something we have sent.

    Harold B. Curtis

  15. oops,

    Sorry for the double dip
    it was a slip of the lip
    Not meant to give a second sip
    to my little tip.

    Harold B. Curtis

  16. Heather – I’m in the same predicament, my husband has read blogs while we unwind watching the news at the end of the day forever and read some comments to me on Feminist Mormon Housewives and I’m hooked. It’s been…educational…and very entertaining. It has saved me at work too when my boss is out of town and I have nothing to do – ahhh…the new inventions we create to waste time. It’s wonderful isn’t it?

    On the TV thing – I highly recommend Netflix – we joined a month or so ago and love “renting” old sitcoms to watch uninterrupted! yay!

  17. RE: TV

    I have no problem with those who decide not to have/use a TV, except for what seems to be implicit in the talk about their forebearance, namely that literacy, cultivation, etc. are the result. I am sure they are literate; I’m sure they are cultivated. They are probably also et cetera. I’m dubious about the cause-effect relation they imply between that and the state of their TV. We had TV when our children were young and we still have it. All of them turned out to be thoughtful, literate people. Why? because we exercised considerable control over their TV viewing and helped them find things to do. (Of course, they sometimes didn’t think of what we did as help.)

    If your way of exercising control and finding good things to do is either not owning or not plugging in the TV, fine. But it isn’t the only way to do so, so in itself it is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.

  18. Personally, TiVo has been the best techno-gift I have ever been given. It knows what we like to watch and we choose when to watch it. We also never watch commercials anymore. TiVo is a miracle! As my husband likes to say, there are only two types of people in the world, those who love TiVo, and those who don’t have it.

    My husband started blogging, and I have slowly followed. I usually only check out T&S and M*. I think I looked at MommyWars once, and meant to go back, but as way leads onto way… I’m to the point now where I have to give myself a time limit on my forays into the Bloggernacle (typically coinciding with nap time). Otherwise, while I’m writing about the wonderful mother I am striving to become, in reality I am starting to ignore my son.

  19. Audrey Stone (#23): There is a third type, those who have RealTV, Tivo’s competitor.

  20. I am a bit worried about the popularity of not having TV, either cable, dish etc. TV isnt inherently bad, y’all. Well you folks seem to be doing well, and you probably compensate by reading newspapers, magazines etc. But, this no-TV ideology can be dangerous for those folks who dont have a reading habit. I.E they miss out on a lot of things, and I dont mean the NBA Championships or the SuperBowl. As a convert, I find it remarkable how clueless many of the folks in my EQ are. And I mean like the guy who did not know what the significance of Pearl Harbor was/is, and was kinda surprised that the USA and its allies had fought a war on the Korean Peninsula. (BTW – this brother has a PhD in Engineering from a Top-10 Univ). My point being, that if done properly, one can indeed learn a lot from watching appropriate channels/programs on TV. Tv isnt necessarily a bad thing.

  21. Okay, I know this thread is long gone, but I just had to ask, now that I’m addicted to the boggernacle (thank you Julie and Ben–it really has been a great place for me to start thinking through some of my church issues in a more interactive way, and to “talk” to others who don’t think I’m a lost cause for asking quesitons in the first place), how do I get my husband to join in? We don’t have cable either, so tv isn’t taking his time. He actually stays pretty busy at work, but does find time for his own internet surfing, just not for blogging (yet). (Is this like saying someone isn’t Mormon “yet”?) But I love to pick his brain and hear his arguments in these types of discussions, and would love for him to share some of that with the cyberworld (ya’ll) too. Besides that it’s getting old explaining to him the discussions I’m involved in before I can elicit his opinions, too. I’d rather he just read them and comment himself online. So Nate, how did you first get her interested? How did you get her to read blogs “from time to time”? How did you convert her? Did you just keep dangling carrots?

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