Hurray for TV

I love the fall. For so many reasons, do I love the fall. So very much.

I love the clothes, the whole back to school thing (as you’ll recall from a previous blog which you’ve printed out and pinned to your cubicle wall, no doubt), comfort food, fireplaces, crunching leaves.

But mostly because with fall comes the return of TV.

Of course, in our household, TV never went away over the summer. We watch shows we hoarded year round, like entertainment squirrels, hidden away until times of TV scarcity. Or we watch whole series marathon style on DVD, without the inconvenience of having to fast forward through commercials. 

But still, nothing fills me with as much anticipation and tingly OHMYGOD-ness as the season  premiers of our favourite network and cable TV stories.

It’s a veritable cornucopia of programs.

There is the resumption of old faves, cliff hanger resolutions and “we might as well watch this season as we’ve invested so much time in watching the last five seasons of this show but it clearly has run it’s course, so we’re kind of committed, in a way”  -  in other words, Dexter.

Here is our TV list:

There was a time, the time before Brian, when I did not watch TV. I owned a TV but did not have cable and only used it to watch the occasional movie. 

Those days were dark times, full of reading books, socializing with friends, getting university degrees. But I guess I had to go through all of that to get to the point where I am at now, where I spend every evening watching different versions of the same detective programs and placing bets on which cable network will show the most nipples. 

TV has brought so much into my life. Not only is it the time of day I look forward to the most, the time after dinner when the dogs are (for the most part) starting to mellow out a bit, Brian is home from work, we’ve had dinner and we have our tea and I have my needlepoint by the fireplace (Known as “Family Time”). 

But TV has given Brian and I a private and exclusive way of communicating with each other, understandable only to us and perhaps anyone else within earshot who may have watched the previous evening’s episode of The Mentalist. Occasionally, Brian and I speak only in TV language. For example:

Brian: Hi diddly ho, neighbour.

Ellen: Oh, that makes me cry in my angry place.

Brian: That sounds like a recipe .... for murder!

Ellen: Oy. What are you eating?

Brian: Some sort of delicious biscuit.

Ellen: It’s a coaster.

Brian: Are there any more?

(please do not tell anyone about that conversation. It’s our sexy talk).

TV has given us more catch phrases, one liners and reasons to shop at Cafepress.com than any time in book reading, art gallery hopping or movie attending purgatory ever could. 

For example. I have this T-shirt. Do you know what it refers to?

See, it puts me in a secret club to which only persons privy to the source of these symbols can belong.  The club of TV Drones. 

You know when people who go out and do things say that joke thing about how we shouldn’t watch to much tv because no one wants their gravestone to read “Should have watched more TV”.

Ha ha ha. Well, mine is going to read “Here lies Ellen. She was totally pissed that Zen didn’t get renewed. Stupid BBC”.

Or maybe it will read this:

Or this:

With the return of regular TV,  however, comes the return of Hockey and Football. I’ve endured an entire summer of baseball, which is so nauseatingly boring that I’ve found myself numbed into silence by the utter banality. The commentary, especially, is particularly dull.

Picture me with my mouth agape at how utterly uninteresting is baseball. This is why when you see people sitting in the seats behind home plate, they are always texting. And those are the good seats, people.

Thankfully, in the fall, baseball winds down. Football takes it’s place which is only marginally more interesting because of the intense frenzy it causes. I simply cannot be in the room when Brian watches football. The combination of screaming fans, marching bands and drunken college kids with their faces painted orange or blue or what-have-you, well, it diminishes my hope that mankind will make it to the next century without obsoleting itself doing keg stands, doing drunken donuts in the Safeway parking lot and eating bad street meat. These are the kids who will have to care for us when we’re infirm. God help us all.

Anyhooooo,

So I am currently in our Man Cave with sleeping dogs, snuggled cat and husband watching hockey while reading paper and surfing the net (yes, there are issues here). Soon we’ll watch a couple episodes of Castle (my new favourite). And tomorrow the premiers begin. I’m happy where I am, yet tomorrow is a golden dream that will soon be realized. Life is good. I’ll see you all in May.

Just kidding. I don’t watch TV during the day so I still have lots of time to write about my poops, my cereal addiction and things that bug me. I’ll see you in a couple days.