I don’t watch TV on TV. I watch TV on DVD. Watching TV on TV leads to channel surfing. And whenever I do that, I’m reminded why I don’t watch TV.

This morning, I didn’t have time to watch a whole episode of Battlestar Galactica (my current TV-on-DVD addiction), so I turned on TV-on-TV for a bit, and got a movie excerpt where two guys were talking. Roughly paraphrased:

- You don’t wanna be friends with a girl.
- Really?
- Yeah, once you’re friends, you’re in the friend zone. And there’s no getting out.
- So?
- Well, no potential for dating. It’s like you’re not a guy. You’re more like… a lamp.
- Ugh. I don’t wanna be a lamp.

Then it cut to Katie Couric talking to sociologists about whether men and women can be friends. That’s when I snapped it off, thinking “God, are they really still debating this???”

To me, the answer is yes, as long as the ambiguity is resolved. Until that question of “Will we or won’t we?’ is resolved, I’m not sure there really is a way for a single guy to be friends with a single woman.

What I mean by “resolving the ambiguity”:
- One of the two is or becomes involved with another.
- One of the two comes out of the closet.
- The Talk is had where it’s clearly stated there is to be no contact between any of the parts of one’s body with any of the parts of the other’s.
- The two have had sex and stopped.

And that’s pretty much it, a few anecdotal exceptions aside. I think they could have had that as a nice set of bullet points displayed on the screen of the Today show, but I guess that would mean moving on to something else, like actual content.

Not that the ambiguity is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, when the stakes aren’t too high, the ambiguity is actually enjoyable and I’ve sometimes been a little bummed to see it resolved, one way or another.

As for getting out of the friend zone, seeing as that’s only happened to me once, I think it’s fair to say once you’re there, you really are pretty much a lamp. Right?