I Confess...

Even though I claim--I think truthfully--to love books, and even though my day job is not NEARLY mentally taxing enough to make post-work reading some sort of brain-strain, and even though I'm trying to launch my career as a full-time, capital-A Author...

...I watch a lot of TV.

And not all of it is good.

Yeah, yeah, I know...

I think TV has finally matured enough that most people grant it a greyscale of quality (one we've long since allowed for film and literature). It's no longer ALL brain-rotting; there's legitimate art playing out on television.

On the one end of said scale are blindingly-bright shows--in my mind this includes everything from Planet Earth to The Killing (Danish version)--that people consider enriching, intelligent, deeply layered, or any number of other words that imply that watching them is an effort not to just kill time, but to attain some level of cultural or intellectual literacy.

Then there's middling stuff, equally entertaining and well done, shows that people don't judge you for watching. I'm thinking Game of Thrones goes here, possibly Sherlock, and maybe my new addiction Orphan Black.

I think of these shows like I think of really well-executed genre fiction (which, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm deeply attached to): some people still look down on them slightly just because they entertain, but if you're not a total snob, you can see that while they may not focus exclusively on matters of great philosophical weight, as well-written entertainment, they still add value to peoples' intellectual lives.

And then there's the other stuff I watch, the stuff that absolutely sucks brain cells out slowly through my ears (more quickly when I play Candy Crush at the same time). Really, I think the majority of TV falls into this category: the intelligence-rotting, time-wasting, lowest-common-denominator crap that I'm SO DEEPLY ADDICTED TO.

Not only do I know who this woman is, I DELIBERATELY LISTEN TO HER TALK. 

I now follow fully four franchises of the Real Housewives series. I will throw away 45 minutes of my life watching awful women--sorry, awful Dance Moms--scream at one another and generally eff up their children's lives permanently. I think I have seen at least 98% of the episodes of Ghost Adventures, something I tell myself I'm hate-watching, which, at this point, has become indistinguishable from just watching.

Besides, "hate-watching" is just a term smart people have made up so they can feel better about their lowbrow tastes.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who, occasionally, takes the braindead way out on a Tuesday evening.

The rest of you must have guilty TV pleasures, too, right?

RIGHT???