Day 11 - More Channels/Less Temptation

It seems like a corner has been turned. The TV urges sometimes still rear their heads, but they have a more distant and abstract quality. Those characters in the shows that I'd become accustomed to are now shadowy figures that I don't miss. The BBC & CNN anchors/correspondents who were my reliable friends have been replaced by faceless radio newscasters, whose voices project enough personality to make up for their invisibility.

Not sure where I am in my overall relationship with the box. I can't logically explain what I did today when the cable company called today. The guy tried to sell me a 'special' package that involves more channels for a very modest price increase. Recently I've been considering cancelling my cable altogether and going back down to the basic 3 broadcast channels. But I've hesitated to do that, because I can foresee justifying watching those 3 channels using the rationale that it'd be a reasonable vice. In the end, I agreed to upgrade my cable. I'll be paying for 15 more channels that I won't watch.

But hold on, there's a (twisted) strategy behind this: A friend of mine decided to take a month off from his cigarette habit last winter. His method was to have a full & open pack perpetually sitting on a table in his kitchen. The idea being that every time he passed the table, he had to either renew his resolve to not smoke, or smoke. He said that by the end of the first week he had made that decision to not smoke so many times that it became nearly effortless after that.

That's how I'm looking at today's cable decision. On the surface it seems like a waste of money, but I'm looking at it as insurance against future time misspent.