About a month ago, P and I decided to have a little experiment - we decided to go a full month without watching T.V.

Cold turkey. Not even the news, or educational programs featuring Alan Alda on PBS. Not even NY1, that strangely hypnotic local news station that repeats the same 10 stories in half-hour loops. On most days, at least one story is about some dude in a studio apartment in Manhattan or Queens who has been arrested because he keeps several large and/or ferocious wild animals as pets - a Bengal tiger or a llama, or a crocodile in the bathtub. This story features the inevitable interview with the neighbors who say that - other than the strange smell - they never noticed anything unusual, except for the zebra carcasses in the trash, but ... Meanwhile, the pet owner insists that his civil rights, and the civil rights of his llama, are being violated. (I'd like to note that New Yorkers often say that Southern folk are crazy ...)

Anyway, our hypothesis was that if we weren't watching the Boob Tube, we would instead devote our free time to more worthwhile pursuits. We'd finally finish Ulysses, visit obscure museums, and learn speak at least one Slavic language. Rather than staring mindlessly at a screen as we eat dinner, we would have deep, meaningful conversations, possibly re: Ulysses, while gazing longingly into one another's eyes.

So far, this hasn't happened exactly the way we planned. We haven't caved, or even particularly wanted to, in part because of Cable Internet and Netflix, which we decided were kosher in the context this experiment. Still, the month before a wedding is probably not the best time to go without the social novacaine of Tee Vee.

As P pointed out yesterday in his blog entry about our fight over Decorative Bunny Towels, there are some very real hazards involved in not watching TV. They should put a sticker on the plug, like the one warning against electric shock if you take your television set into the bathtub with you.

When not watching TV, suddenly, you open your eyes to a whole new world of things that are deeply annoying. Instead of reading the collected works of Thucydides, you spend the hours remembering that annoying thing that Susan McAllister said/did to you in the 5th grade, or studying the (annyoing) cracks in the ceiling that you had not heretofore noticed. The squirrel outside the window is f-ing with you, as are the upstairs neighbors - did they take up clogging? Were they always so loud?

I should have known better. Before last year, I hadn't had a TV for the previous 7 years, and the main difference between me and the TV watchers was that I didn't watch TV. Thus, I could never keep up with who was/was not famous on any given week. Non-TV watchers are kind of like the foreign visitor who speaks English really well, but who doesn't get any of your references, so you'd might as well be speaking another language.