my guilty pleasure

I don't like disappointing Eddy. So here I go.

After literally two years of empty promises, my dad finally installed cable last week. It wasn't anything spectacular, like the start of the new football season or the waste of having a huge yet fuzzy TV screen, that prompted this change. Instead, my dad finally bit the bullet because of Project Runway. He watched a marathon run of Season 2 over the summer with my sister, and he was hooked. Ah, the perils of living in a house with three women. The ironic thing is that he's on call on Wednesday nights, so I can't even watch brand new episodes with him.

As an aside, I have to say that Project Runway and America's Top Model are far superior to Dancing with the Stars. No question about it.

Anyway, the cable (Direct TV, to be precise) is set only in the living room and my parents' room; I purposefully kept it out of my room for fear that I would never leave. Although a good idea, it doesn't actually solve my problem. Now that I know there is cable, I always want to watch it, which means that I now camp out in my living room and hop around from station to station like a little boy who ran out of Ritalin. I'm hoping that the novelty of cable in my house will wear out, and I'll return to my normal life, but that may be wishful thinking.

To my surprise, my favorite station is not MTV or VH1 or even National Geographic (Dog Whisperer!). It's SoapNet. For the uninitiated, SoapNet is a station devoted to soap operas. Soap operas usually air during the day for stay-at-home mommies and daddies, but SoapNet re-airs them during the evening for the working folk.

One of the soaps they air is All My Children, which is just my absolute favorite soap. I started watching it one summer in junior high. I don't know why exactly: maybe I watched it with my mom one day, or maybe I was just bored. In any case, I've been watching it on and off since I was probably 12 or 13. I tried watching other soaps, like One Life to Live and General Hospital, but neither compare to All My Children. I can't even explain why. Even though I know the general plotlines of the other soaps through commercials and the random viewing, they just don't engage me like All My Children does.

Watching a soap opera is not really cool, so I try to keep this under wraps. I first felt guilty about watching in high school, when my high school teacher compared girls watching soap operas to boys watching porn. (BTW, Gary has a tres funny story about Donald Faison and porn. Ask him about it the next time you see him.) As far as he was concerned, both warped your sense of relationships and doomed you to unrealistic expectations. And then there are all those nay-sayers who say that soap operas are so trashy and lame. So I tried to stop watching for a while, but then I would catch a snippet here and there, and I was hooked again. There was even a brief period of time when I even checked discussion boards, but that phase ended a long time ago.

Try as I might, I can't really let go of watching All My Children. Normally, this isn't a problem because I'm usually at school or working, so I usually don't have access to a TV during the lunch hour. But SoapNet has changed everything. Not only do they re-air each day's episode at night, but they also air the previous weeks' episodes on Saturday during the day. Five consecutive hour-long episodes of All My Children ... which, I, um, watched on Saturday. I didn't mean to!!!! But I was editing papers and I needed some TV to keep me from falling asleep and I watched one episode and all of a sudden it turned into five!

I didn't feel that weird about it until I told my sister last night ("What's wrong with you?!?"). And then the weirdness finally set in when I realized that I wouldn't be home in time to watch the 6 o'clock airing of today's episode and then I considered TIVO-ing (another great addition to my household!) the noon episode. Do I really need to know what happens to the autistic girl in the woods today? That can wait until at least Saturday -- at least, that's what I keep telling myself. I also tell myself that watching All My Children can't be worse than watching Laguna Beach or The Hills, where ridiculously rich teenagers share their oh-so-hard lives. At least the people on my show don't say "like" all the time, something that Gary can perhaps appreciate.