Sporty Spice

My friend Tyler e-mailed me Tuesday morning to check in on me, presumably because he was worried I might have died from overexposure to TV. He had cause to worry. And because all this TVness has relegated my blog to the back burner, I'm stealing from Tyler to create a long overdue post.

Here is the message from Tyler, entitled, "News High":

It all started with pre-Olympic hype, followed by media saturation in Beijing, with an afterglow of gold medals and Shawn Johnson overload (poor girl!).

Before you could say “degree of start difficulty” we went RIGHT into DNC!

Then Hurricane Gustav held our attention for about half a day, and then that was topped off with a Veep’s daughter (non?) news of teen pregnancy.

And since Gustav didn’t promise enough drama, the media promised “more hurricanes were on the way”

And now we have the RNC to ignore…….

Throw in a US Open weekend and you should be spent!

Oh, Tyler, how wise you are. Of course, you forgot to mention the 24-hour 90210 marathon on Labor Day, followed by the Tuesday night 2-hour debut of the NEW 90210.

All this, and the US Open, too. Day and night. Night and day.

It's a rare day that I can state with utter truth that I'm on my fourth consecutive week of watching sports coverage every night.

Who am I?

I'm over it.

So I'm back! I finally finished my big project at work on Friday. Hallelujah!

And, after celebrating with some co-workers, some Grey Goose and cranberry cocktails and a matinee of Mamma Mia!, I have to admit that I could not have been less productive this weekend.

To say the last few weeks left little room for downtime and/or TV-watching is an understatement. And apparently, unbeknownst to me, I decided to more than make up for that this weekend.

I didn't realize just how much TV I'd watched until I had lunch with my friend Dee on Sunday and halfway through realized that every sentence had started with, "Then I watched this show where..."

Yikes! Quite pathetic. But I did kind of deserve a weekend of vegging out on the couch.
Being productive? I was over it. (Incidentally, that was my catch-phrase the entire last week of my project:

• Co-worker: That paragraph should really be indented. Should we fix it?
• Bess: I'm over it.

I was over a lot of stuff. A coping mechanism, I suppose. But a surprisingly freeing statement if you truly internalize it and really mean it. As I did. A lot.)

Anyway, for those of you who don't believe I watched enough TV to entertain every person on mainland China for three years running, here's only a partial recap:

• I rented Sweeney Todd and P.S. I Love You and watched them both.
  
• I also watched parts of Brokeback Mountain, which was playing repeatedly on Bravo.
  
• I watched back-to-back-to-back episodes of 90210, all of which I have seen before, multiple times, but which never seem to get old.
  
• I watched a marathon of the Bravo series called "Flipping Out" which is great drama wherein this guy who is flipping million dollar houses has to fire his house manager. To complicate matters, the house manager happens to be married to the guy's right-hand employee, Jenny (who looks exactly like Elaine from Seinfeld). So in order to make sure not to lose her, the guy has to install a "nanny cam" so he has proof the woman's husband wasn't working. He fires the guy and then the marriage quickly dissolves. At this point, flipping houses is the last thing on any of our minds! Such drama... Sadly, I first caught the marathon at the end, so wasn't clued in to all the characters and plot lines. So when I caught it later in the weekend, earlier in the marathon, I had to watch again.
  
• I caught the re-run of the first episode of this season's Project Runway, which I had missed.
  
• I caught the first episode of VH1's Brooke Knows Best. Can't believe I watched it given how loathsome the Hogan Family has seemed lately...
  
• I watched lots of Food Network (they sadly seem to be pushing the Barefoot Contessa aside for new shows, so I may have to boycott.)
• I watched an episode of Kathy Griffin's My Life on the D-List, which I had seen before, but which is still so funny to me.
• I watched an interesting documentary at 5 a.m. on MTV about young people traveling the world for months at a time. I think it was called "A Map for Saturday." Interesting. Much better than what's on MTV during the hours most people are actually awake. Sad state of affairs.
  
• I watched a sorry excuse for a made-for-TV movie that I only endured because it had two of my favorite late 80s/early 90s actors in it--Craig Sheffer and Gabrielle Anwar. But it was so bad...
• There was more. I'm sure of it. But it's all a blur of remote controls and commercials and thoughts that perhaps I should be doing something more productive...

Like I said. It was a lot of TV. But now, thankfully, I'm over that, too. So I can spend the rest of my week off working on the To Do list I created of stuff I've been neglecting at home/in my personal life - some of it fun (buying a new black purse! buying new dishes!) and some not so fun (cleaning my master bathroom. touching up paint on my walls.) But it's such a luxury to have no pressing deadlines. No place I *have* to be. No To Do items that actually *have* to be done... they're merely suggestions. I could choose to ignore all the To Do items and simply go enjoy reading books on the Starbucks patio. And singing Mamma Mia! songs as loud as I want. And blogging as often as I'm inspired to.

Because this "I have nothing to Blog about" feeling? I'm over it.