Y'know, it's not absolutely necessary to check the TV listings and watch every plausibly entertaining movie so you can feel you get your money's worth from your cable package (as I too often do). You can also just turn the stupid thing off and, say, read a book.

It's funny: when the tube is off, I often have the sense I'm on vacation. That's the time we tend to turn it off because we don't want to have the sense we've blown our vacation doing what we could have done at home anyway.

Having it off, interestingly enough, can actually feel to me like a luxury while having it on can feel like work! Are we crazy in our culture or what?

Recently I was thinking of what we used to watch when first married. It was before cable TV and the only things we felt like watching were reruns of the Honeymooners and Sergeant Bilko. After our daily belly laughs (just after supper, I think) we'd switch it off, leave it off, and not give it a second thought. And life was better.

Yes, yes, TV has its place, but it's a place that should become less important the healthier we become. In Amusing Ourselves to Death cultural critic Neil Postman concedes TV can be a blessing for sick people. They might feel too lousy to read, think, pray, or converse, but they can at least watch TV for relief.

The reason people today feel the need to use their televisions so much could be that the pace of life has made them, in a sense, sick. The other reason could be that, without thinking, they've formed a really bad habit.

It's time for me, at least, to form a new one--or rather, an old one.