Agony or Ecstasy?

I have a very strange relationship with television. I do not watch television, I do however watch a select few television shows. (I just love semantics!) Alrighty then, to explain this, it helps to know that we live in the sticks. We do not actually "get" any television stations here at the ol' ranch. Therefore, to feed our love of pop culture and stuff, we purchase tv shows off of iTunes, and then watch them on a laptop computer while snuggled up on the couch. Yes, we pay for what most people get for free. It's worth it.

I really like this system. See, I can't have regular tv in the house because I have trained myself out of it. I have no resistance when it comes to turning on a tv, nor do I have that internal filter that allows one to do stuff while watching it. And speaking of filters, I also can't filter out the horrendous gratuitous violence that is standard prime-time fare these days. Despite this extreme sensitivity to all things gross, one of the shows we do watch on a regular basis is Grey's Anatomy.

Half the time, I'm fine with this show, the episodes about sex and relationship nonsense. The other half the time I sit there sweating and hyperventilating and saying "Why, oh why, am I watching this?" Not to be a spoiler or anything, but last week's episode (or we could download it last week, is it the same in the real world?) had me nearly catatonic with panic. Unfortunately The Hub also picked that show to sleep through, despite my persistent poking. I didn't realize exactly how awful the show made me feel until I had to listen to it AGAIN while The Hub watched the next day. I had to get up and leave. And I couldn't even see the picture from where I was. And yet I can't wait for the next one. Is television supposed to be this masochistic?

And this is not the final extent of last week's strangeness. We also watched the latest Battlestar Galactica which was all about inoculating Sagiterons, those freaky hippies that refuse medical treatment. And this was the day before we were to take The Little Man in for his first vaccinations. See I have been (a freaky hippy) stalling on these things because there is a small, but possible, chance that your baby could a) have an allergic reaction to some of the ingredients b) get the disease or c) have some horrendous extreme reaction and suffer brain damage and/or death. Having already dealt with a death from seizure disorder, this vaccination process brought me to (you guessed it!) near catatonia due to panic. And here was my pop culture reinforcing my worst fears. Thanks. Thanks a lot you guys!

So (yes, Dad) we are proceeding with the vaccinations, we are just going in a very slow and conservative manner so that if he does have a reaction we will know exactly which shot is to blame. But I do have to put in (yet another) two cents here about potential allergens. These days they have you (they, the doctors) avoiding wheat/yeast products and egg white in your child's diet until they are a year old. But guess what's in vaccinations (that are supposed to be administered at the tender age of two months old)? Yeast and egg products. Whose brilliant idea is that? Ok, done now.

So here are Tank Boy's delicious little chubby thighs, and one of the symmetric band-aids placed there by the evil stabbing nurses... Although I seemed to have cried more than he did.

Oh! And one last tv show. We have also been watching Heroes, and there's nothing gross in that one! No sir! Except of course the guy who goes around cutting open peoples skulls to get at their brains, and the cheerleader who regularly has to stuff her ribs back into her chest cavity, and that guy who thinks he can fly, but keeps crashing. Nothing gross there! And definitely no panicking here!