Bereft of Cable, I am Now Reentering the World of Reading Before Falling Asleep

Two -- or is it three now? -- days without cable and I don't miss it.

That's not entirely true. I missed it when I had to do laundry and iron. I hate both. I especially hate ironing, but ironing is kind of a self-inflicted pain since I do insist on wearing starched, white, men's shirts. In any case, I turn on the t.v. to distract me from the agony. Fortunately, Netflix exists to fill that role.

For the past year or so, except over the summer when I wasn't staying at my own place, I had fell asleep with the t.v. on. My t.v. has a timer that will automatically switch the t.v. off after 30, or 60, or 90, or 120 minutes. I'd turn on some ole show -- usually "Roseanne," or "Different World," or some other syndicated thing that wasn't too annoying (and, no, everyone does NOT love Raymond) -- turn the volume down to a point where I could still hear the dialogue, but could also let it turn into a hum of white noise that would lull me to sleep.

I used the t.v. as a sleep aid because it was both an external and an internal noise. It was something on which I could focus to distract that part of my brain that wants to keep on talking or -- worse -- obsessing well into the early hours of dawn. I could focus on Roseanne and Dan, or Earl and his idiots, or Carrie and her idiots, and derail whatever unpleasant trip my brain had decided to take that evening.

Netflix, I suppose, could fill that space, too, but not really. You see, I didn't really like going to sleep with the t.v. on. It felt a bit like taking some sort of pill or drinking just to relax enough to get to sleep: the t.v. did the trick, but left me feeling slightly mucky, like I had wasted time. I hate wasting time.

All along, I suppose I could have used a book in this capacity. A book is a different matter. A book takes a few minutes of concentration before I could truly enter it; and after a long day, a few minutes of concentration seemed too much of an effort. That, and I truly enjoy books, more, even than candy or cheap wine, and I have this weird neurosis that, when my life gets very busy and my "to do" list metastasizes over several pages, I deny myself things that I truly enjoy. Silly, I know! But, I feel that I haven't deserved any nice spaces in my day if I haven't CLEANED ALL THE THINGS!!!! (Thank you, Digger, for sending that one along!) Every spare minute must be devoted to CLEANING ALL THE THINGS!!! Hence, my hatred of wasting time.

Yet, there I am, at the end of the day, not devoting minutes to CLEANING ALL THE THINGS and tranquilizing myself with the television. Worse, with television shows I've seen about five gazillion times. If I'm going to waste the time by not CLEANING ALL THE THINGS, then I might as well do something that I truly do love, even if I have to take a minute to concentrate.

I can also rationalize the reading as being productive, even if I'm not really reading anything that contributes to my book or my teaching, which is all of the time if we are talking about bedtime reading. I don't know about you, but after grading a zillion freshmen essays (and, seriously, I have to grade 10 every day for the rest of the semester to stay on top of it), I start to question things that I know about writing, like the proper use of apostrophes, and basic rules of grammar, syntax. I feel my own vocabulary atrophy. I need to clean that out of my head. I need to read things that will expand my vocabulary, bring beauty to language, or, at least, not put me in a position to have to fix everything on the page.

So, I went back to reading. It does take a page or two before I am fully inside of the book; but once I am there, the story is much more encompassing than the t.v. So much so that maybe it keeps me awake longer than it should. I don't mind. I have gone to that same place that I need to go when I write shallow, or write at all, that bubble away from the noise of my own life and away from whatever frazzled knot I've wound myself into. That was something that the television never could do.