You CAN teach an old b........

Something very exciting happened to me this weekend.

I learned how to use the TV remote.

No, I'm not a Luddite. I just don't care much for TV. I went well over a decade watching virtually no television at all (unless I was stuck at one of those places where you can't avoid it). It just got stupider and stupider until it seemed like a terrible bludgeoning of valuable time ("As if you could kill time without wasting eternity", as Henry David Thoreau put it) and I simply stopped watching it.

Mostly, I think it's even worse now. Those things they call "reality shows", for instance, as if most people actually act like that. And we should not be embarrassed for them.

With my current fatigue, however, I'm finally giving myself permission to do some stupid things to get through the hours when I'm too tired and spacy to even read. One is to watch some TV. At first I developed a fondness for the basketball games of my alma mater, the University of Connecticut. Then I started watching Animal Planet because I was so disgusted with Homo sapiens (that guy who established Chimp Eden is a mensch!). Now--and I would have bet my life twenty years ago that this would never happen--I've become a Red Sox fan (go, Manny! All right, big Papi!), even though baseball games are about as speedy as labor. I do enjoy watching the spitting habits of these stars (click here to read a post from my old blog on that subject) but I've also actually become interested in the game itself. I'll even concede that it's not just the sport of rednecks with beer guts--it actually seems to take some athletic ability.

Next thing you know I'll be watching the New England Patriots.

But about the remote thing: as I said, I'm not a Luddite. I'm at least as good at computer stuff as the average person, and I do own a cell phone. I just stubbornly refused to learn how to use the TV remote, for fear it would turn me into a couch potato. I did do an awful lot of sitting today (all those nature shows, after all), but I'm not an addict yet.

Yet...