my love/hate relationship with cable

I’ll admit it. I miss having cable. I have a serious issue with the cable company that has a monopoly on our area. They have terrible customer service, and I have had many nightmarish experiences with them and their inept record keeping. The most recent nightmarish experience with them  occurred when we moved this summer. First, they NEGLECTED to turn off my cable at my old apartment and THEN failed to install cable at my new place, but still continued to charge me for services at my old place and started charging me for nonexistant services at my new place… we are still in dispute over it almost half a year and many hours on the phone, several visits to their office, half a dozen people assuring me that they’ve cleared my record, then me getting bills from them and letters from collection agencies… yeah. Nightmare. For the first few months, I enjoyed not having cable. I did other things instead of watching TV, which I barely had time to do much of anyway. I enjoyed feeling like I was not a slave to media and advertising. My checking account had an extra $60 per month in it. But now that we’ve moved our TV to make room for the yule conifer and we don’t even get good receptions on our three channels, I’ve decided that I miss TV. This has made me realize that I AM guilty of several things that I like to try to avoid. I use TV for company. I use it to unwind. To withdraw. To entertain. All of those things that I was so confident that there are other things in my life that fill those roles. I guess though that TV habits are culturally ingrained in me or something.  I’d like to be able to have CNN or something on when I’m getting ready for work, just to have some noise to keep me company. I’d like to mindlessly flip for a few minutes a week  just to decompress. I STILL have not seen Christian Amanpour’s documentary about world religions. It’s the holiday season, and I don’t have the simple joy of stumbling across a showing of one of my favorite childhood Christmas movies.It’s the principal of the thing that I don’t want to give money to Time Warner ever again. I don’t want to rot my brain with complete nonsense. But even stronger than those wants, I WANT CABLE!!!  Maybe it’ll pass. Who knows.  Until then, I’m stuck watching fuzzy sitcom reruns and snowy Fox “news” until my head hurts from trying to decipher the picture.