you make this difficult.

   I knew I was going to have to make some sacrifices when I made the leap to go to college. I knew my eating habits would get pretty bad, I expected to lose precious sleep, I even anticipated that my hygiene would suffer. But never did I expect this:

Nothing but class.

   In the beginning, I thought I’d be all hippie-like and not need a TV at all. That was short lived. I've come to realize I need that half hour every day to completely shut my brain off and watch something that requires absolutely no intelligence to understand. Like The Bachelor. I coerced my dad into letting me take our enormous prehistoric TV to school and was excited to set things up.

   Until I realized you don’t turn on a tv and channels just magically appear. In fact, the only thing that magically appears is a blue screen. Obviously upset, I decided to trek to Walmart while cursing adulthood under my breath. Twenty dollars later, I escaped that deathtrap with some sort of channel-creating-contraption. So close to relaxation!

   Luckily for me, it was easy to set up. I plugged things in, fixed the settings, and voila! It told me to do a channel scan to see how many were available for my area with my antenna.

   Eleven. Eleven channels. Twenty dollars bought me less than a dozen channels. Actually, ten, because one of them is some weird Montana Currency Trading station or something that only ever plays elevator music and shows really tired looking people discussing things in a room with no windows.

   I've made due with my lack of entertainment for the past two years. In fact, I’ve memorized the schedule for when shows are on that I actually enjoy. I’ve learned that The Price Is Right is actually kind of amusing, that The King Of Queens makes me laugh, and that SouthPark is not very fun to fall asleep to. Nonetheless, I’ve provided myself with the half hour of brain-shut-off-time that I so desperately wanted.

   But there is a definite downside. Whenever my upstairs neighbor walks through the right side of her living room, signal cuts out. Whenever a large truck of some sort drives by our house, signal goes out. Whenever you walk in front of the tv, signal goes out. When the wind blows too hard, THE SIGNAL GOES OUT. Sometimes it just goes out because it wants to and I spend fifteen minutes trying to figure out why. Then suddenly it comes back on like nothing happened. F U antenna, if you were a person I would not be your friend.

   Last night, for instance, I was trying to watch American Idol (yeah yeah, I know) while writing a paper and things were going great for the first half! I even took a second to thank my antenna for cooperating despite the absurd number of cars passing and a slight breeze. Then wham-o. Signal lost. Determined, I fiddled with the “bunny ears”, putting them in all sorts of positions. Pointing up, crossed, crossed to the side, pointing down, crossed to the other side, touching the wall, one up – one down, crossed again. NOPE! I admit to knocking it on the ground once, “patting” it a little, then maybe saying an unladylike word or two when deciding to give up. But then an idea struck me to put it on the ground! It worked. I’m a genius.

   Note: Spellcheck just had to correct the word “genius” for me…shucks.