My Dumbness, Explained
I don’t read as much as I should, or more accurately as much as I’d like to. I know why. Full-time job. Myriad freelance assignments. Keeping my sterling Twitter skills razor-sharp. The occasional weeknight drinking. But when I decide to stop kidding myself, I realize it’s because I watch TV. An ASSLOAD of TV. No regrets, of course, but I realize that the reason I’m always left behind when the topic turns to books is that my reading time is currently occupied by catching up with Mad Men and Nurse Jackie and Game of Thrones and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.
So I had decided that I would take advantage of the summer downswing in TV options to really get back into my love of reading. Give myself some nice brainy talking points for when cute boys have something to say about The Art of Fielding (which happened A LOT over the winter, I can tell you).
Step 1 was going to sketch out a bare-bones list of the TV that WILL be on this summer, just so I could get a sense of how much more free time I would have. TONS, right? How much summer TV could there possibly be? Well, after a quick trip to the Futon Critic, I jotted down only the shows I would NEED to watch:
Bunheads, Mondays at 9, ABC Family
Real Housewives of NYC, Mondays at 9, Bravo
Drag U, Mondays at 9, Logo
So You Think You Can Dance, Wednesdays at 8, FOX
Big Brother (W, 8pm; Th 9pm; Su 8pm), CBS
Breaking Bad, Sundays at 10, AMC
True Blood, Sundays at 9, HBO
The Newsroom, Sundays at 10, HBO
Weeds, Sundays at 10, Showtime
Mob Wives Chicago, Sundays at 8, VH1
You’ll notice that my proposed “scaled down” TV summer includes such indispensable entertainment as Big Brother (3 nights a week!), Drag U (the least essential of all televised drag products!), and Weeds (season 23!). And even if I’m willing to cut myself some slack and say I will probably be able to deny myself Mob Wives: Chicago, I have to, at the same time, admit that I will probably DVR more than a few hours of American Ninja Warrior. [That said, don’t ask me to apologize for everything. If my summer CAN have Sutton Foster, LuAnn DeLesseps, and Aaron Sorkin at his preachiest, it damn well WILL have all three of those things.]
My point is: this is why I’m a garbage-headed person and will probably always be a garbage-headed person. This is why I can’t have nice things, intellectually speaking. This is why all the well-read boys will find other well-read boys and I’ll be stuck with yet another season of yelling about how stupid Sookie Stackhouse will always be. This is me, then. And now.
