Repost

This seems as good a time as any to alienate my reading audience, since it's getting so large and the email volume is just exhausting. Oh, wait. That's right. My audience consists of my husband (because he lives here so I have him trapped), my mother (probably the only one reading without prompting), and my three sisters (who may or may not be tuning in periodically). So, hey, where are all the emails? Where's the love? Heeeelllllooooo. Is anybody out there? But I digress. I will try not to wax self-righteous, not to mention self-congratulatory. But it is so hard not to let the general reaction go straight to your head. When I tell people I don't have a tv, I couldn't get a more awed response if I told them that I'd served in a Washington think tank, gone over Niagara in a barrel, or cared for thousands of starving prostitutes in Nepal. My IQ immediately goes up 40 points in the respondent's estimation, along with my eccentricity quotient.

Anyway, here's the story. Some years ago, my husband and I moved to the East Coast to live by the ocean. For God only knows what reason, my husband insisted that we sell everything we owned, including our three tvs. We ended up getting an apartment a half block off the ocean with a friend, who did not sell all her stuff before moving. Now, we didn't really watch much tv before we sold our household, and we watched even less after moving to the ocean. When the lease was up and our roommate moved out taking her tv with her, we decided that instead of facing our new couch (since she also took her couch with her - drat the woman - I loved that couch) toward the now blank white wall, maybe we should turn it toward the big sliding glass doors looking out into the courtyard full of flowers and citrus trees.

This seemingly arbitrary decision has had numerous consequences. For one thing, we learned that if you don't have a tv, you should really have a view. Our next place, a townhouse near the beach, looked out on ... weeds and scrubby undergrowth. I don't recommend it - though frankly, it was still better than tv. But from our next (and hopefully last) place we could see the intracoastal. Our stress level went way down, which was really good since, unbeknownst to us, we were about to have two babies back to back to jack it up again. Our need to buy things (other than dinner), fix ourselves shopping, etc., basically just went away. The amount of memory cells wasted on completely useless information - who was sleeping with whom on "Friends" (the last sitcom we were hooked on) - was greatly reduced, another terrific benefit as we need those cells now to try to remember each other's names now that the children have arrived. Our interior decorating got much better, briefly (see above re arrival of children). And we got more time to play, blog, read, write, walk, hang out, and tune in to each other. At least, I assume we must have. Still, there never is enough time, is there?