Daughter, you will be thrilled to know that I haven't had a television set on for more than 6 hours total in the past several weeks. The latest Survivor and The Amazing Race ended, and PBS has been screwing around with the schedules and obsessed with the holidays, so I can't get my Ballykissangel fix, so one day I didn't turn a TV on, and haven't much since.
I used to say that living alone, I needed a television on in the background to remind me of time passing, otherwise I'd get lost in time and space. Well, that's true to some degree. Used to be when I heard the pretty lady judge's voice, I automatically started looking for something to eat. When I heard the late night shows, I started thinking about bed.
Now, without the TV, I often discover that it's 11 pm and I haven't eaten anything all day. And 3 am comes on surprisingly fast. But that's not the biggest problem!
I have rediscovered why I need voices in the background.
It keeps the music out of my brain.
You know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head, and it keeps playing over and over? I get that in spades! When it's quiet in the house, whatever was the last piece of music I heard keeps running through my head. Classical, folk, belly dance, carols in a store, instrumental or voice, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it's so strong and so loud I can't think of anything else. It's driving me batty. One day without thinking I played the Tibetan singing bowls CD in the van as I was heading home, and that night I was ready to shoot myself. The past three days it's been Joan Baez's Please Come to Boston.
Having the TV or talk radio on keeps it at bay.
I refuse to give in to it. I won't be forced to turn the TV or radio on.
I'm trying an experiment this evening. I loaded the CD player with five hours of mixed genres, set it for random, and we'll see what happens.
If you find me on your doorstep in the middle of the night, screaming "Make it stop! Make it stop!", you'll know it backfired.
~~Silk
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