Part of me reason for giving up TV was the hope I’d be more productive.  If I’m not out with my friends, I’d like to be home writing or recording.  Having worked from home most of the year, I did not need to unwind after a day at the office.  The big victory  came in Spring when I actually did give it up–the habit of just putting on the TV when I’m home.  I have continued to Netflix and have had a few binges on a string of Gossip Girl or Weeds DVDs.  But for the most part, I’ve been TV free since about May 15.   I did record a bit and finished my book so I guess there was a payoff.  I keep the radio on often too much and should switch to music. I still feel like I wasn’t a well oiled machine, like I could be even more productive and more social.  This is another one of my obsessions–the pull to be everywhere, see everything, be part of one thing and another and another.  Or that I have a million things to do with the songs and stories or just purging my ridiculously full inbox.

Giving up TV was a really big deal for me. It was on all the time as background noise and I would get sucked in to the most vapid, ridiculous B or even C movie or rerun upon rerun of some Bravo show because I am fascinated and curious by so many things.  It’s all “material.” I guess I tend to read magazines as a substitute and I have read more books since the quit (including Broken, Huck Finn, Scarlet and Black, The Forgotten Soldier, Life Inside, Blink, Sleeping Arrangements, a massive Joan Didion collection that included The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the only one night commitment to Remember Me? and currently Berlin Stories) which does not make me feel guilty, though I do have to watch that this, while a better distraction, is still a distraction.  TV, as I’ve shared in previous posts, made me feel crappy. Like I purely wasted time.  Even if a show has merit–and there are many brilliant shows with great writing. If I Netflix it, it feels like a movie which is time better spent.  Yes, I still need to work on efficient use of my time, and especially allocating time I spend on my music and writing better.

Nonetheless, as year comes to a close, (and what others are calling a difficult decade, which it was for me though it seemed scarily arbitrary to lump it all together and write off 10 whole years), I feel like this thing I gave up really did change my life and I am happy I did it. I have other bad habits to break and this is proof, like my quitting smoking years ago, that I can.  So the next big quit I need to do is…