Addiction

Hello, my name is Ruth and I'm addicted to TV. (Hi, Ruth) It started as a child, hours and hours of TV. When my mom married the man we call dad (he adopted us from our bio-dad), he had some new rules. The easiest one was the "no-thank you helping". You had to try one bite of everything served at any given meal/function. My brother and I are the least picky eaters I know! We'll try anything. The toughest rule was "only 2 hours a day of television". Seriously, is that even possible?

We quickly found ways of skirting this rule. Our driveway was 1/4 mile long so we could see the folks when they turned into the driveway. We kept a dishcloth in the fridge and put it on the back of the TV so it wouldn't be hot when they came in the house. Various other sneaky methods were devised but that was our favorite. We were major latch-key kids and had a lot of time to figure things out.

Don't get me wrong. We lived on a five acre ranch in California. There was plenty else to do and plenty else was done. My mom taught us to read when we were each 4 years old (mostly to get us out of her hair) and while my brother never took to it like I did, we did a lot of reading. But not as much as our TV consumption.

My husband is always on me about how much TV I watch and how I can't live w/o a show and how pathetic and sad it is that I tape shows when they overlap. He's right but, too bad.

TV is the perfect compliment to my other addiction. Yarn. I can sit on my ass for hours and feel productive! (Course, my ass is getting huge, need to move it more!)

OK, so there's this new channel that is perilously close to fusing said ass to the couch permanently. It's called Chiller. It's all the cheesy, psuedo-scary, schlock you can stand. It has one of my favorite shows ever - only not really. Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I have a ton of Hitch's movies on DVD and I used to love the show. The ones Chiller shows are the weird colorized version of Hitch's promos wrapped around 80's versions of the shows. It's disappointing, I was hoping for the original black/whites but it's also kinda cool because you get to see a lot of people before they were famous. So far, the best sighting was of Joaquin Pheonix
as a child trying to hire a hitman to take out his dad. He was listed as Leaf Pheonix in the credits.

So yet another addiction is scary stuff. When I was under 5 years old and we used to go visit the bio-dad, he'd let us stay up late and watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. Also, when we'd go visit his parents, I'd sneak into his sister's closet where she had a huge hidden stash of Tales From The Crypt comics. (Chiller channel also shows the Tales From the Crypt episodes, albeit a little more edited then when they were on HBO) I've always loved scary books and movies. I used to think I didn't really like slasher films but I'm finding that may not be the case.

I read a lot of Stephen King, Jeffrey Deaver, and Michael Slade. My book cases are segregated into the scary side, the chick books side and misc. in the middle.

You know, I actually had a plan where I was going with this post but seem to have lost it. Sorry about the rambling. I didn't get much sleep last nite. I'll try to be more coherent next week.