I admit it – I am a television junkie. Even as I write this, I’ve got the rerun of this season’s finale of The Closer on my 32″ flat screen. So what if I watched most of it on Monday – I missed the first half hour or so because I was busy watching season 9 of Smallville on DVD in preparation for next Friday’s season 10 premiere. (On a side note, I’d have to say that the Smallville writer’s have to be among the best in the business at crafting cliffhanger season finales – if I had watched the final episode of season 9 when it aired originally in May, I might have blown a fuse faced with the prospect of waiting four months to find out what happens next!)
My bedtime ritual involves me saying good night to the internet, then moving over to my flattened futon to watch television for half an hour or more before going to sleep. During the week, when I have to get up the next morning, I don’t watch much usually, just whatever rerun happens to be on TNT or USA at 11:00 PM. But on Friday and Saturday nights, I find all sorts of strange things to become mesmerized by. Saturdays nights are fun because I usually end up watch Iron Chef America on the Food Network. There’s just something exhiliarting about listening to Alton Brown and Kevin Brauch banter back and forth while giving play-by-play descriptions of the chefs in action – I wouldn’t know a ganache from a gnocchi without their guidance, but somehow they make cooking look almost like an Olympic sport.
Last night, I caught a couple of episodes of one of my true guilty pleasures, Say Yes to the Dress. Of course, I was a bit confused that the episodes were not taking place at Kleinfeld’s but apparently the show was so successful that there is now an Atlanta edition. So as I was getting used to the southern twangs of the bridal consultants and listening to their resident gay fashion maestro Monte, I got to thinking about how much fun it would be to go to one of these massive bridal salons and try on dresses for a couple of hours. Because I did my own (very weird) thing at my wedding, I missed out on a lot of this traditional stuff. My wedding dress came off the clearance rack at The Fashion Bug and was a dark blue lacy mess – I was a big fan of the goth thing at the time, so no white for me 
But as I gave it a little more thought, I realized that the lovely bridal team would probably not enjoy wasting their time with a shopper who was neither planning a wedding nor able to pay for a tenth of one of their cheapest dresses. So I’ll have to continue to get my vicarious wedding shopping jollies from the television, further cementing my unnatural attachment to what my grandfather used to call “the boob tube.”
When I decided to write a blog post about this, I had a great idea. I could start a new blog (I always think I should do that 
) where I call myself the Couch Potato and rate television shows based on my years of viewing expertise. I could use a photo of this truly disturbing stuffed critter that my parents have stashed up in their bedroom – a real couch potato with spindly little green arms and legs and bulging plastic eyes – and give shows “two arms up” if they were fantastic stuff or “two arms eaten” (accompanied by a picture of Couchie with both of his arms stuffed in his enormous pocket-style mouth) for the dreck that needs to be cancelled immediately. Thankfully, I then remembered that I am terrible at keeping up with this blog as it is, and that a commitment like that might actually make my fingers fall off, so for now, you’re stuck with this little bit of floating babble that occasionally percolates its way to the Internet.
By the way, I feel like I must give a shout out to two really great bloggers who are much more together than I am and post regularly, with purpose and intelligence and a few laughs thrown in. Both have written books based on their blogs, which I also highly recommend. Rachel Held Evans writes about her experiences in faith, from her intensely apologetic youth to her more mature but less certain faith of today, in Evolving in Monkey Town. If you prefer a little more tongue-in-cheek wit in your discussions of all matters religious, check out Jonathon Acuff’s book Stuff Christians Like, or head over to his blog of the same name.
*** Danielle
