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It is important to note that, 4 more weeks after I posted this entry about how much I wanted that green plaid scarf from Target, I am now finally in possession of it.

Marques came to pick me up from the metro on Friday afternoon after I had gotten off work.  It had been a particularly harrowing ride home.  I had gotten to Farragut West to catch the blue line, got on it, and then was promptly forced to get off due to a service malfunction.  This meant there were twice the people on the next train, which annoyed me because if I wanted to ride a ridiculously packed train, I would’ve moved to Clarendon so I could ride on the orange line.  I was lucky enough to perch on the edge of a seat, but then this group of tourists got on at Rosslyn and the girl was dressed, looked like, and whined like Kenley Collins, my least favorite Project Runway designer ever.  I then spent the next 20 minutes listening to this horrid girl who talked so loudly that I could hear her over my headphones.  At one point, I glanced over at my seatmate - a lovely-looking woman in her upper forties, I’d say - and she was staring at this girl in total annoyance.  We both gave each other the sympathetic “what do you do?  kids these days” glance which is kind of hilarious because, you know, I’m 25 and I can also be annoying.

So I get out of my annoying commute home and I’m walking to Marques’s car when I spot a flash of green on the seat.  I immediately think, “Oh, yay, my ebay purchase came!” (so, yes, I bought two new scarves from ebay making my grand total of scarves to… an embarrassing number and I should be killed) but then I think, “No way, I just bought those yesterday!” and then I think, “But maybe it was fast shipping from China!” (oh, yeah, the scarves are from Hong Kong.  Hopefully they’re not made of melamine, but hey, I’m not going to eat them) and as I get closer, my heart starting bursting with joy because I realized, hey, TARGET GREEN SCARF.

My boyfriend is so great.  Whee.

I immediately decide we need to have a proper date night so I can wear my scarf in public.  So we drive down to Old Town in Alexandria, do some walking, do some PaperSource lusting (I drool over paper), do some waterfront gazing, and eat dinner at Mai Thai, which is our favorite Thai restaurant because Marques would make out with their panang curry if offered.  Afterward, enamored with each other and panang curry, we decide to drive down to Del Ray and grab some Dairy Godmother.  The Dairy Godmother, by the way, is my favorite ice cream shop ever - I would make out with their custard if offered.  The flavor that day was chocolate Heath bar, which was good, but Marques got a pumpkin milkshake, which I pretty much drank half of.  Their pumpkin milkshake is worth a trip to Del Ray, I don’t care where you are.  You need to do it before they stop serving it.

Then we went home and spent the rest of the night watching season 2 of 30 Rock (I have a major, major crush on Kenneth, that kid is so. cute.)

“I don’t drink coffee, sir. I don’t drink hot liquids of any kind. That’s the devil’s temperature.”

So anyway.  Green scarf now in my possession.  Kenneth Parcell is cute.  I love pumpkin milkshakes from The Dairy Godmother.  See how easily that wraps up?

I was never into television. I had a few shows that I liked watching, but I was never into television. Freshman year, in the dorms, every Wednesday night, Lorrie and Jasmine could be found watching Dawson’s Creek. I would watch Dawson’s Creek with them because I’m a good friend, but more often than not, I was hogging Lorrie’s bed, flipping through Jane or Cosmo.

When I moved out of the dorms and into The Greatest Apartment Ever with my friend Ruth Ann, we spent our television time not watching the popular shows of 2003. We devoted hours upon hours of time to VH1 countdowns (Top 40 Worst Songs of All Time? Just fodder for one of the best mix cds we ever made), watching old music videos on VH1 Classic (we were big fans of metal hour) and lots of Adult Swim.

It wasn’t until Marques and I started dating that I really entered into my television renaissance.

It started innocently. It was a cold February evening, 2006. Marques and I were in the first few weeks of our relationship. I’m pretty sure we had just had sex like 8 times in a row because, you know, that’s what you do when you first start dating someone. We must have been tired and sore because I brought up the idea of watching some Arrested Development. When he revealed to me that he had never seen it, I was flabbergasted and immediately began to rectify that injustice.

We tore through season 1 in like two days. And that was the beginning of the madness.

We both asked each other what tv show we’d like to start watching and both of us answered, “Lost!” Lost, at this time, was in the middle of season 2, so I bought the first season and we started watching that as well.

We spent the entirety of March and April laying in bed, alternating between sex and watching television on DVD. It all kind of gets blurry after that.

It’s been two and a half years since the sickness grabbed hold of us and it’s still pretty strong. We tried to list all of the television shows that we’ve watched, but it’s a long list*. We did do some mathematical equations and determined that the average time it takes us to finish a season of television is 12 days, which isn’t too bad… I think.

Sometimes, though, I think about it and I wonder what other things I could be doing instead of being curled up in bed, watching whatever Netflix dropped off that evening. I could donate my time to the homeless, or write a novel, or cook more intricate dinners, or finally learn how to sew. But I also learn a lot from television - for instance, don’t create robots to do your bidding because one day, they will revolt and bomb your colonies and you will be forced to travel throughout space evading them. And that true love conquers all, even a transfer to the Stamford office. And trust Jack Bauer above all other people, even the president, because Jack Bauer knows what he’s doing and even if you think he’s selling America out, he’s not, he’s just trying to infiltrate so he can torture a random leader.

And Brian Krakow is a much better boyfriend than Jared Catalano, who can’t even read.

Unfortunately, we’re starting to run out of quality television shows. The current Doctor Who is on my radar, but other than that, I’ve pretty much got nothing. If it continues this way, we’re going to be be forced to finally dip our toes into CBS programming, which makes me cringe as I am neither a menopausal woman nor a religious zealot.

And as much as I despise watching actual television with commercials and everything, I do commit myself fully to one television show a day - Good Eats with Alton Brown. Although I’ve seen nearly every episode at least three times, it never fails. I usually go to bed around 2 a.m. and luckily, Alton Brown comes on at 2 a.m.. I am able to drift off to sleep with the voice of Alton Brown crooning about barley wheat. Alton Brown combines one great love of mine with one mediocre love of mine and tops it off with a pair of glasses and a skull tattoo. If I could choose my perfect man, it would be a facsimile of Alton Brown - someone who can use visual aids to explain science to me, and then cook me up a grilled cheese sandwich.

And the glasses, well, they certainly don’t hurt either.

*This is an incomplete list of all of the television shows we’ve watched so far. I am almost embarrassed to post this. Number of seasons are in parentheses. If the show is still on television, there is a “+” after the number of seasons. Shows that only one of us is excited about it did not make the list (i.e. my brief lesbian crush on Dani from the first season of Tila Tequila, Ugly Betty, all of the 8 Sportscenters Marques watches everyday, my daily dose of Good Eats)

Arrested Development (3), Lost (4+), 24 (6+), Heroes (2+), Battlestar Galactica (4+), The Office (4+), Project Runway (4+), 30 Rock (2+), Jericho (2), Gilmore Girls (7), Six Feet Under (5), The Wire (5), The Sopranos (6), Carnivale (2), Deadwood (3), Big Love (2+), Sex and the City (6), Flight of the Conchords (1+), Dexter (2+), Weeds (2), Californication (1/2), The L Word (1/2), Joan of Arcadia (2), My So-Called Life (1), Veronica Mars (3), The West Wing (5), Sports Night (3) [Marques has a huge mancrush on Aaron Sorkin], Freaks and Geeks (1), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2+), most of the Unsolved Mysteries series (roughly 20 discs total).

That is 90 seasons of television. NINETY. That averages out to 3 seasons per month that Marques and I have been together. This is shameful. This is almost as bad as the time I calculated that I had played close to 288 hours of Mario Kart. No wonder I am so pale.