television

Now I know why I don't watch much television. It's because I obviously can't be trusted with it. Last night, I went to read on the couch and turned it on for noise, and then I accidentally started watching "My Skin Could Kill Me" on TLC about these kids with a rare skin disease. Then! I got totally sucked into Extraordinary Pregnancies, because how can you NOT watch a show where a woman was pregnant for FORTY-SIX years? The baby had implanted and grown in her stomach cavity instead of her uterus and she couldn't deliver it naturally, and she also believed in a local legend about sleeping babies who.. well, apparently they go to sleep in the womb and reawaken when they're ready to be born, and so she continued on with her life and adopted three kids and then started having especially severe stomach pains that prompted her son to take her to the hospital, and what do you know? And then, after they hook you into the story of this woman and the longest pregnancy ever, they start with another story that had me even more hooked than the first one--the woman who was pregnant with twins, and experienced lots of pain and bleeding around ten weeks, and then they found out that she was having triplets, and then during a routine scan she got sent to a specialist because the triplet was growing outside the womb. The chances of everything working out happily for the baby was 1 in 60,000,000! And they DID. They totally did! Everyone lived and the babies were just fine and normal! And, then it was past my bedtime and so I started cursing the evils of television and how I need to not stay up late watching shows like that.

I know a lot of people who feel superior because they don't watch television, but mainly, I just feel embarrassed. It's really inconvenient because I just have to sit with a blank look on my face when they start talking about American Idol (I accidentally wrote American Idle, which made me laugh a lot more) or Lost (which I've never seen, but was thinking about giving a try until I started reading blogs where people talk about it because now it just sounds dumb) or whatever else. It's not like I have philosophical objections to television--I do watch it (FoodTV comes to mind, and the one show that I really like to keep up with is in a certain serial format and has been on daytime television for forty years, so you can guess that it's not exactly high-quality fancy-schmancy.) It's much more about not liking to sit down and do nothing while I have other, more fun things to do. You know, I really don't know what it is that I do that takes up so much time but it is apparently very important to me because I am constantly feeling resentful of not having enough time in which to do it.