Am I totally losing intellectual points by admitting that for the last week and a half I've totally been absorbed with watching All My Children?
I say this knowing fully I hate it when forms of entertainment consumed predominantly by women are automatically deemed as inferior (my feminist slip is showing). But soaps are so overwrought and bad. And yet so often they're touted, like romance novels, as mindless entertainment for home-bound housewives. Not like there isn't mindless entertainment for men that's just as banal... Regardless, I usually abhor daytime tv--it's "my baby's daddy" talk shows, it's insipid gameshows, and don't even get me started on Oprah. I'm not even particularly fond of television in general--though I do have a fondness for HGTV. I'll watch The Daily Show sometimes, and South Park (which little sis has on if she's around), can occasionally get sucked into a Law & Order episode. but other than that, the t.v's on but it's just background noise. Really, since I work nights a good part of the year, I'm not home for much of it. There's no recording anything since I lost the VCR remote either. (Nor could I probably find a blank tape.) I used to watch Buffy religiously when it was on, and I would watch Lost, if I were home, but luckily I have the DVD's.
Every summer when I was a teenager, I'd spend a good part of the afternoon, after sleeping until noon or so, watching soaps, the ones on NBC that my mother had been addicted to until she went back to work when I was 13--first Day of Our Lives, then Another World, then the even trashier eighties incarnation, Santa Barbara, which was always smuttier than the others. All afternoon, lounging in front of the tv, and then heading out to the pool for the rest of the day, until dark, then coming in, staying up reading trashy novels until 2 am when I'd finally go to bed...(damn I wish I was fourteen again) But I'd be riveted the entire summer, but then stop watching in September when school started and be easily able to pick back up the next June. I think they're designed that way. I'd never watched All My Children until the last couple of years. I use my tv alarm to wake me up around 10 or so when I'm going into work at 2 and I usually have the ABC news at 11 on while I'm getting ready. AMC is on at noon right afterwards. I usually just leave the tv on until I'm walking out the door. At first I'd be showering, getting dressed, in the other room checking my e-mail, and occasionally found myself pausing in the bedroom, sitting down on the bed and watching--poor acting, terrible writing, and yet I was drawn in. It usually might last only a couple of days, a certain plot point. I'd forget about it the months in the summer when I work earlier hours. But then watch it again only to get sucked back in as I'd never left. There's this whole Mardi Gras Ball explosion thing going on now, so it's extra engrossing, people being pulled from the wreckage all all sorts of related drama. I'm hooked for the next week or so anyway..even if it means I'm leaving at the last possible minute in order not to be late for work.
