Skip to main content

Getting my Money’s Worth Out of my TV


At the end of my day, I retreat into my living room and turn on my TV to relax. I pay for over 400 channels and feel I should get my money’s worth, but I have a hard time finding something I like to watch that keeps me entertained.
I watch local news and avoid the national news. I do it because I need to bring down my blood pressure and not elevate it. Adulting has bombarded me all day long with its heaviness and I need to relax and feed my brain with positive thoughts.
I watch game shows, rerun comedies, and old movie favorites. I find I go through cycles. I’ll watch the same game shows for months and then when I tire of that I switch to reruns. If I am in the mood for a movie, I’ll do a search and choose one that might sound interesting. If none sounds good, I go to my DVR’d list and watch one that I’ve seen multiple times.
I’ll let you into some of my TV watching secrets. I’ll tape Jeopardy and then go back and watch the episode, answering the questions before the participants. I pretend to be this amazing genius.  The best part of Family Feud is the last five minutes, so I time my finger on the remote so I can go back to the show and only watch that part. In my imagination, I’m standing next to Steve Harvey and I have only twenty seconds to win the $20,000. I’ve watched my favorite movies on mute because I know the dialogue so well; I can recite it verbatim. I also watch political debates and sports games on mute. Who needs that aggravation? I can assess what I see without commentary. Remember, I’m trying to relax.
I figure I pay for the TV service, the 400 channels, so I maneuver my way around that matrix however I see fit. It’s no different than how I treat any other media. I own it; it does not own me. Someday I’ll share with you what I do with the daily newspaper. Yes, I am one of the few who still gets a daily paper delivered to my house, and I find ways to get my money’s worth out of that too.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more

Teenagers: Stinky Little Extraterrestrials

Years ago, a skunk sprayed our yard during the night and the next     morning I trekked out to my car to drive to work and unknowingly stepped into the oily residue. I tracked skunk stink into my Jeep and onto the carpet in my office, a room I shared with a kind and forgiving co-worker. It took a week or two and several large cans of Lysol and air freshener to get rid of the smell. Ever since my profound Close Encounter of a Second Kind (I never saw the skunk but it left evidence of its presence), I became a skunk expert. I learned the way of the skunk. My experience imprinted itself into my hippocampus and I acquired a heightened sense of smell.  I can detect a skunk several miles away, outperforming a normal human nose that can only start to do the same at one mile. I have the same uncanny sense about adolescents.  After 30-plus years of teaching teenagers and having raised three of my own, you might say, I have reached the Close Encounter level of a Fifth Kind: I have actually
Post a Comment
Read more

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more