To TiVo or not to TiVo? How much is too much of a good thing?

I love TV. I wholeheartedly admit it. I relish nights cuddled on the couch with some knitting, my TiVo remote, and Pretty Boy Probst, Mocking Mahr of Malice, Gruesome Grissom & Co. flashing their pearly whites. I fancy puttering around the house to the lovely tunes of Jamie Oliver on the telly – it’s posh. Okay – so I adore TV. Then why I am a little sad to see all my favorite shows come back in a few weeks? Most likely because I have been reading, on average, a book a week all summer long. With the heartaches of business travel and flight delays come the pleasures of airport quality time spent with celebrity rags, books and knitting (Little Nicky Hilton in a cheap Vegas wedding?? Marc and JLo on the rocks?? Say it isn’t so!). Furthermore, sleepless nights in yet another crummy hotel mattress are best solved with a good novel.

Anyway, when I realized I was sad that TV was coming back, I had to face the fact that maybe I do have a problem with the TV. It’s TiVo’s fault. The downside of TiVo is what should be called TiVo Tension – the pressure you feel to watch all the shows it has so graciously recorded for you – it’s only polite, right? You see, most of my Season Passes are shows that I would “like” to watch, but they aren’t “must watches”. I record them just in case I am laid up some Sunday afternoon with nothing to do. The problem lies in the fact that once it shows up on your TiVo list, you really do feel that you must watch it. If you don’t, a little yellow dot rears its ugly head and then the TiVo Tension mounts even higher. Then starts the cycle of saving TiVo shows to watch later. They reproduce like bunnies after that. Before you know it, you are getting warning messages that you are running out of space for the shows that you DO watch religiously. I need some Zen meditation right now just thinking about. Well, this is coming to an end. This weekend I am packing to move to a new house. In the midst of packing comes the inevitable cleaning and throwing out of junk. I think I will take that same concept to the TiVo. New house, new start with the TiVo. This one book a week thing has been pretty cool and I’d like to see how long I can sustain it. At least until the first Survivor eats a creepy crawly.