When I first came up with the idea for this piece, it was going to be an essay about the internet. Specifically, how that after twelve years of a deeply involved relationship with the interhighway, I am so grossly underwhelmed, unfascinated, and generally uninspired by it, I don’t even mind the fact that I can’t regularly play on it at the office.

(Save, of course, for an uncontrollable burning desire to check my email – but that’s more about gratification than it is amusement. Oh, and I’m not forgetting about the fact that I publish on the internet, so this line of thought basically amounts to me dismissing my primary creative lifeline.)

Now the “twelve years” timeline isn’t really that arbitrary – certainly I’d had plenty of interaction with a young internet prior to twelve years ago. Having first experienced it in the hellish form of AOL back in a time when it was possible to have a screen name without having to add any numbers to it, I felt I was generally ahead of, or at least on the curve, of the this "world wide web" thing. But it was twelve years ago that I went to college and was rewarded not only with the ability to dial into the university network from my room via modem (fancy!), but I also got a job working in the university’s computer lab--at the time a room full of 486 machines running Windows 3-something. But there was also a room full of much cooler UNIX machines, and in the fall of 1995, I spent my weekly Saturday morning shift ignoring students and devoting quality time to the internet, tucked away in the privacy of the SunSparc room. Oh, so many things to do back in those days – everything was new and fresh, unsullied by spam and advertising garbage. And when I got tired of looking at other people’s sites, I started one of my very own (which was, of course, terrible.)

Now, twelve years after the fact, I’ve reached a point where I regularly look at maybe less than ten different sites throughout the day and I seldom see anything new unless it’s presented to me by a friend. I have become a ‘net utilitarian – I use it for the convenience of email, research, and to buy music.

So I’m over the internet, but that’s not what this piece is about. What you’re reading now is about how I’ve stopped watching television in the month of December (As a matter of disclosure, I’m writing this on December 28).

The great “No TV” project of 2007 came about because my darling wife and I came to the conclusion that we watched way too much of it, originally in the sense that we were committed to too many different shows, and had decided that without the aid of our DVR, we would be slaves to the glow of electronic fireplace. We were barely keeping up with a week’s worth of programming when it was a week full of new material. So, spurred on by the ongoing Writer’s Guild strike, we decided around Thanksgiving that we wouldn’t watch TV during December.

I should be clear that we gave ourselves several dispensations in advance – we gave ourselves one to watch Grey’s Anatomy the first week of December because of a “pre-existing cliffhanger situation.” Additionally, we allowed ourselves to watch solid favorites How I Met Your Mother and Scrubs, maxing out at 44 minutes of TV a week, but the way things shook down, only one new episode of each aired after the fact and the weekly dispensations became a non-event.

[Editorial note on January 1 -- as it turns out, when we looked today, the DVR had nothing new on it after December 9.]

Overall, the results of this little experiment proved a little alarming – we found that we weren’t missing the shows so much as simply missing having the TV on to fill space. For nearly the entire first two weeks, both my wife and I suffered from instinctive reactions to sit down and turn on the television when we weren’t actively doing anything else. Hooked on the activity as opposed to the product, the shows – addicted to the idea of television and not the idea of entertainment. We felt, really, really dirty.

We both coped in different ways, my wife took to increasing her reading intake, I theoretically increased mine (read as: “I bought some new books”) but actually didn’t in practice as I devoted my time to working on our house. There maybe was a time when my reaction would’ve been to turn to the internet to fill the void of “entertainment,” but if you read the first 300 and some words of this essay you already know that wasn't a probably outcome.

So life went on. We adjusted. And suddenly, it was Christmas.

Christmas was unusual for us this year in that because of our jobs, we were unable to travel. Christmas Day found us quietly lazing around the home, not engaged in anything. So we broke down and watched It’s a Wonderful Life, because what the hell – it was a holiday. As it was, we only ended up half-engaged in watching the film, as we were both devoting part of our attention to some other sorts of things. We had problems sitting still. Restlessness set in, and it only got worse when we opted to catch one of the showings of TBS’s A Christmas Story marathon. (As a side note, we did find the film funnier this year than we had in a long time, and neither of us had any idea as to why. Well, not beyond the fact that Darren McGavin is awesome.) The net result of this holiday dispensation is that, after about four and a half hours, we were both really tired of watching the damn television. Could it be that we’d somehow detoxed?

So as January and a new year are sneaking up on the horizon, we’ve decided that we’re going to try and keep TV out of our lives as much as possible, even to the point of (Gasp!) canceling the cable. What this means for our previous stable of television shows and our extensive DVD collection, we don’t yet know, but I can’t help but feel that we’ve somehow made our immediate future a little brighter by keeping the screen dark.