Waiting with HGTV

by Julian Spivey

Here I am again — in a waiting room. It doesn’t matter if I’m at my general practitioner or dentist or, in this case, waiting for my sister-in-law to deliver her baby girl and make me an uncle for the first time. 

There’s one thing all of these places have in common, whether I’m in my home state or visiting family multiple states away. 

​HGTV will be on the waiting room television - probably at a higher than necessary volume. That way, it can drown out the screams of the dentist drilling through your enamel or the women in the throes of labor pain. 

It’s the most harmless of all entertainment options. No cable news to remind those waiting on their procedure or their loved ones to pop a watermelon-sized baby out of their body that the world is a crazy and dangerous place. There are no politics potentially leading to fisticuffs in the room between lefties and righties bickering over the fall of America, which they can both agree is happening but can’t agree on the reasonings why.

And there’s never sports because you don’t want fans loudly cheering or jeering on a game while medical procedures go down behind the doors and walls. If there is screaming, it will be because there’s a watermelon passing through one’s birth canal and not because your team’s right fielder dropped a ball he’d lost in the sun. 

Have you ever noticed that despite the fact that these shows on HGTV feature differing faces and different names, they’re all essentially the same? Someone is helping a couple, almost always white and straight, find the right dream home, usually deemed a fixer-upper, within a certain budget, and then they start remodeling, knocking all sorts of walls down, and making it the perfect little home. 

I don’t even spend that much time in waiting rooms. But I’ve seen enough HGTV for life. Dammit, Julia, is that kid here yet?!