What's bothering me is this: since I've been working so hard on tying up the semester's loose ends so I can get to Christmas break, I've had little energy to do anything else. And it sucks for multiple reasons. For one, I don't like the notion of wasting my time watching television. There are a few key shows that I actively try to catch ("The Office," "Scrubs," "Friday Night Lights" [shut up], "House MD") and those are fine. But... I've noticed myself just veg-ing in front of the television, and that disturbs me.

On top of that, I've got a pile of about five books that I finally got from the library and which are the next steps in my reading agenda. I've also got about three more on loan from Kory that I want to tackle (as well as a pile of 'zines). Yet, I can't convince myself, after a day of reading and writing, to come home and read. It's unfortunate in a way that in my job, I'm doing what I love to do, yet when I come home what I love to do is no longer recreational.

Does that make sense?

So, in the past few weeks, despite the pile of excellent reading, we've been also piling up movies and TV shows from the library. Right now, we're pretty obsessed with "Six Feet Under" because we FINALLY got the elusive first volume of the first season and could start watching the series.

[Sidebar: Amy also rented us "Sex and the City" because she thought it had come with Kory and Amy's recommendation. Unfortunately, she had apparently confused "Desperate Housewives" with "Sex and the City." I have to say, "Sex and the City" is the cheesiest, crappiest, most predictable comedy ever. Even the occasional gratuitous nudity doesn't help its cause. Like, with "The Sopranos" there was always nudity and violence, but that was totally a bonus to a truly engaging story. On "SATC", it's basically just a mediocre yet predictable sit-com with a little more skin and a little more vulgarity. Maybe I'm just incapable of understanding? Either way, the whole experience has given me a vendetta against all TV shows supposedly -- but maybe not -- suggested by Kory and Amy, and against "sexy" comedies. So long, "Desperate Housewives," you're a casualty of my vendetta. So sue me.]

The weird thing about being so obsessed with "Six Feet Under" is that, as you may know, the beginning of each episode shows a person dying whose cause of death has links to the plot. These links are introduced because the body is taken care of by Fisher & Sons, the family funeral home in which the show takes place. So, because we're currently obsessed with the show, it's almost like every action I take, I end up viewing in the context of the remote possibility that I'm about to be killed by some obscure cause in order to set up a plot for a television program.

Like when I was putting Christmas lights on our front porch, I thought about throwing the Christmas lights over the awning, but noticed that the power line was close enough to be a risk. So, once I noticed that, I played through a scenario in my head in which the lights would hit the wire and electrocute me, and then the screen would fade to white and say:

"ANDREW BENJAMIN SHEARS"
"1981-2006"

Hrm... I'm just crazy.

I definitely need to get out more.