Tied to the tube...

About 10 years ago when I was living in Northern Virginia...I owned a tv set that was one of those small 19 inch televisions that was probably already about 10 years old (which in TV years is like 100 years old and everybody knows that television has a life expectancy of about 100 years...so this TV was the grandfather of television sets...)

Anywho...the point is that I lived in a rented condo and the people before me had spliced into the neighbor's cable.  So, when I moved in I automatically enjoyed the benefits of cable...  And to be honest...in those years I really was still very sweet and innocent and gullible and didn't even think twice about just "having cable" instead of wondering why I wasn't paying a bill each month for it and realizing I was stealing it from my neighbors.

Ok...so back to the point...(which is not my gullible innocent nature)...The neighbors that had lived there for nearly 15 years decided to move...and when they left...so did the cable.  Which left me with nothing but a century old television set...

And for 4 years I lived completely without tv....

And loved it...

Fast forward to this morning...  I had a conversation with a new friend about television.  Both of us rarely tv watchers BD...What does BD mean, you ask?  Before Deployment. 

This was interesting to me because what I have discovered is that many a non-television watcher becomes a television watcher DD...What does DD mean, you ask?  During Deployment. 

I think its like an epidemic of "adult conversation needs."  I truly do.  I can go an entire day without speaking to an adult without trying too hard to avoid them.  Its pretty sad.  Now, granted I get out and about and make a point of connecting with people, but the truth is...I miss having an adult around that I get to chit chat with about mundane stuff...without having to purposely go to the grocery store so I can talk to one...or the library...or my neighbor's house...or wherever.

And so now the tv in my house is used kind of as an "adult voice."
No...I do not mean I'm playing "adult tv" alto voce in my house...I can just imagine the "lingo" Bella would pick up....

But, I do now find that I turn on the tv set just because its nice to hear another human being over the age of 10 speaking.  John even commented on it when he was home.  "I can't believe how often the tv is on in this house."

Which I would like to note really isn't THAT much except that he's mostly used to no tv at all...so something more than that seems to him to be a lot of tv.

I'm not even quite sure what the point is anymore to this post...other than it was an interesting observation to me about one way in which things really have changed since John's been gone.  Don't think that this means I'm suddenly going to leave my tv tube friend in the lurch and immediately switch back to lonely nights with just me and my book and the radio...  Especially not Sunday evenings at 8PM...thats when Project Runway comes on and even though we're rerunning Season 7 I'm still totally hooked.

I'm totally counting on Seth Aaron to win the whole thing.  Those other fashion designers are pbtttttttt!