Kamran’s about to start his third year of law school, and I’m ten seconds from breaking up with his ass every weekday when I find myself alone at his apartment, eagerly awaiting his arrival instead of going out with my friends or spending time with my roommate, because I’m so pathetically in love with him. So after two years of begging him to get a DVR so I’ll have something to hold me between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., he finally went and did it two weekends ago.
My best friend’s husband said, “Welcome to 2002!”, but I’m going to ignore the naysayers and maintain my amazement at how new and different life is when I don’t have to plan it around TV. It used to be that if I wanted to spend time at my own apartment, where there’s neither cable nor Internet because my roommate is such a cheapskate, godlovehim, I had to go on a night when there wasn’t anything on cable. And there’s always something on cable, you know? So I basically never spent any time at my own apartment.
But NOW . . . well, I’m still not going to spend any time at my apartment, but now it’s because there’s always something on the DVR. Of course, up until last night when we realized that only one episode of “Colbert” was being saved, I apparently didn’t know how to use the thing, but that’s not the point. I still have enough “Mad Men”, and Kamran enough “Sopranos” to last a lifetime. I would have probably never seen the last episode of “The Sopranos” without the DVR, actually. And now I realize why everyone was so up in arms about it.
And the pausing live TV! Kamran and I do laundry every Sunday night, and we always end up putting it off too long, so by the time we really have to do it or sleep on dirty sheets, we’re smackdab in the middle of some show we love and have to race down to the basement of his building to the laundry room during commercials. But two weekends ago, in the midst of the “Next Food Network Star” finale, we simply paused the show and carried the laundry down at our leisure.
Look! He’s paused!
It’s weird how the lack of commercials really changes TV-watching, though. There’s no painful anticipation of what’s to come now that segments are mere seconds apart, much like watching entire seasons of “Lost” in one sitting. And shows like “Project Runway” that feel the need to repeat whatever was said right before the commercial break when they return suddenly seem extra-ridiculous. However, I’m really pleased at how my fast-forwarding timing skills are progressing.
The one unexpected negative side effect is that now Kamran knows he can have my undivided attention when he comes home from work. It used to be that when he told me he was leaving the office at 6:30 but actually left at 7:45, I could shush him when he walked in the door due to the important nature of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey”. But now that he knows I can pause, he spends hours telling me whatever patent-related nonsense he feels like. Oh, the horror.
