The Sequel: I Can't Stand You but Come on in and Stay Awhile

A few weeks ago, I blogged about how I watch TV show with characters I hate. I mused over why I keep it up and decided that it was because I was committed. Upon reflection, I realized I have quit TV shows before and maybe I should quit these. I was going to do it, but found that I couldn't. I deserve no pity, not even from myself.

Then one night, while watching one of these hell shows, I had an epiphany. I now understand why I continue to watch.

This is what happened: This particular character is a grown woman, with teenage children, who has moved back in with her parents. Since the series began she has designed a shoe that did not go to production, bar tended, let her kids sass her, bar tended some more, broke the heart of a perfectly nice successful guy, apologized to her kids for causing them to sass her, slept with her daughter's fresh out of college English teacher, tried (and failed) to become the manager of the bar, and took up with a man who had the morals of an alley cat and no compunction about kicking her to the curb. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Well, week before the last, she remembered that she used to write songs. She locked herself in the guest house and wrote (in longhand) all night long. I assumed she was writing a song. But no. She said she didn't know what she had written, but it fulfilled her and made her happy. She took her messy pages to the before mentioned English teacher for critique. He read it and pronounced it brilliant. This thrilled her because everybody knows that all 22 year old English teachers are the best judges of everything--especially if you have a sexual history with them. Anyway, she still didn't know what she had written. He told her it was a play and she had to finish it because it was so dazzling, not to mention clean and crisp.

Somewhere along the way The Guy stopped the DVR. He knew I needed to rant. He is tuned into me that way. It's either (A.) because we are like those blue people with our pigtails all wound up together or (B.) because I was doing that thing where I close my eyes, grit my teeth, shake my head really fast, and do jazz hands in the air.

"Go on," he said. "Get it out."

"Oh, yeah! That happens all the time. Writers just sit down and start writing with no idea if they are writing a book, a play, a song, a travel guide, a speech, or a eulogy for the Easter Bunny. They still don't know when they get done, but that's okay because it fulfilled them. Plus, they have an adolescent English teacher who will jump off his skateboard and set them straight. I cannot believe the stupidity of this. And what makes it worse is a writer—one who is getting paid—wrote this down and gave it to that woman to memorize!"

And then it came to me why I watch. Unlike Kathy and Cheryl, the sweet girls on this blog, but exactly like the other demon spawn, Stephanie, I like to make fun of people. I'm not proud of it and I try really hard not to. (It wasn't always that way but we are talking about the here and the now.) I decided to stop making fun of people because it's mean and I have plenty of shortcomings myself that people could pay me back with.

So that's it: I need these fools on TV to make fun of. It like a former smoker's bag of hard candy--not really a good thing but better than the alternative.

Do you have a vice you have to distract yourself from?

(Or--a vice from which you must distract yourself? Any skateboarding English teacher will tell you that's really the correct way to say it. I used to have a skateboard. That was before I had an English degree. One is about as good as the other in terms of making someone into a writer.)

Anyway—tell us about that vice and how you distract yourself.