Frumpy Mom: Why I’m sitting home with my big streaming TV
You’re not going to believe it, but I’m sick of traveling.
After too many long plane trips this year, I just want to stay home, kick back in my bedroom recliner and watch the zillion streaming TV channels I pay for every month but never much watch.
A while back, I bought a 65-inch 4K television that’s so big it can be seen from space. It hangs on my bedroom wall, dominating my decor, such as it is, reminding me constantly that I’m paying for a lot of shows I don’t watch.
I never intended to have so many streaming channels available at any given second. In fact, I find it rather daunting.
It’s like going to a restaurant when you’re really hungry, but you’re so overwhelmed by the enormity of the menu that it’s hard to choose anything at all.
But there’s that inevitable moment when everyone else has ordered and the server is standing there looking at you, tapping her pen on her notebook, and you have to actually make a decision.
So you panic and finally just blurt out, “I’ll have the soup and crackers.” Later, you wonder what on earth you were thinking, because you hate split pea soup and there were 18 other things on the menu you like better.
But you couldn’t stand to have everyone looking expectantly at you, so you just went with the first thing that came to mind.
That’s generally my relationship with my giant TV you can see from space.
Not only am I paying for too many channels, but occasionally I somehow veer onto the “Watch Free” area, and find myself scanning even more options for viewing. Which is ridiculous, because I’m never going to watch a movie with commercials when I have so many streaming channels with ad-free movies.
Occasionally, I’ll just randomly scroll through my gazillion channels and add things to my watch list, instead of committing to one of the 183 things I’ve already added.
I would compare this to window shopping. I no longer enjoy shopping at the mall, because I already own too much stuff, but I do like shopping with my TV remote and picking random shows that I’ll probably never watch, but what the heck: It’s free to add them to my queue.
Then, later, it takes me forever to get through the bulging queue, because I’ve added episodes of “Naked And Afraid” that I know I will never watch.
I keep trying to reduce the number of streaming services I pay for, on the theory that I can always add them back later. So far, I’ve purged Apple TV+ and Disney+.
Only Netflix seems to take this personally. At the last price increase, I decided to get rid of Netflix temporarily and watch some of my zillion other shows in my various queues.
But this is not okay with Netflix. Like a scorned lover, it keeps emailing me nearly every day, begging me to come back.
“We have plans starting at $6.99!” the emails always start. “Come back and see what you’ve been missing!”
Yeah, but here’s the catch. For $6.99, the shows have … commercials. Really? Commercials? Isn’t that the whole point of paying for streaming? So you don’t have to watch ads?
No, thanks, Netflix. I really think you should just move on and try to restart your life without me. Maybe therapy would help.
Life has been hard for me for the past three weeks because my friend Lori went to Paris with her daughter.
The reason this has been tough is because we watch TV together nearly every night – in different cities. And so I had to wait for her to come home to see what was happening on our current show.
She lives in Pasadena and I live near the beach, so it’s hard to get together to watch shows in person.
But for years, we’ve been calling each other up, picking a show and then just using our remotes to synch up before watching in unison.
We stay on the phone so we can complain to each other about what’s going on, laugh at the jokes or count the slaps.
We’ve noticed over the years that in shows produced in Spain, there’s a lot of slapping going on. So now we’re really not happy unless there’s at least one slap every episode.
When we first started doing this, we made a rule that we had to take a drink of wine for every slap, but then we realized that was way too seldom.
Plus, in the current Danish show, “Seaside Hotel” we’re watching, no one seems to ever slap anyone.
We’re on season 5 and I recommend it if you can stand watching subtitles. My only problem with subtitles is that we both have to pause the TV if either one of us needs to go into the kitchen for a snack. Which is often.
Lori got home from Paris last night, so hopefully we’ll be back in Denmark together tonight for an episode or two. Meanwhile, my recliner says it’s missed me, so I plan to stick around and do all my globe-trotting on TV. At least until I get a better offer.
Note: Hey! Come and say hi! I’ll be plunked down in my lawn chair behind the Ruth Bach Public Library in Long Beach from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. this coming Sat. June 24. 4055 N. Bellflower Blvd. Long Beach. By Heartwell Park. Come and just say howdy, get your book signed or buy a book. Nasty weather cancels. See you there!
You can email me at mfisher@scng.com. I love hearing from readers. Oh, and keep sending those diet and grooming tips. I’m kidding. Don’t send them.