Day 18: Reality TV is my Sunday Reality

My mom told me that when she was younger she used to hate Sundays. She loved the weekends, especially going to see whatever long-distance boyfriend she was currently canoodling with, but she dreaded Sunday: the day before reality.

The anticipation of going back to school or her job or whatever her real life was at the time ruined the entire Sunday and therefore half of her precious weekend. That always seemed a little ridiculous to me. Why ruin a perfectly good weekend with the fear of the inevitable return of reality?

Here is where my mom and i differ. I never feared the reality of Mondays; reality, in fact, was a welcomed break from the usual insanity of weekends. Mondays brought back the structure and safety of routine.

But Sundays now are different because they aren't followed by a healthy regiment of the predictable work and class schedule but instead by the frightfully free time of unemployed Mondays; Mondays where nothing "has" to be done but everything "should" be done. My Mondays are now just as dreaded as my mother's were 30 years ago.

Usually on weekends you can rest guilt-free knowing you will be back to work in a few days. You can allow yourself freedom to be unproductive because that American 40-hour-productive work week lays right around that lazy Sunday. But when weekends are not followed by the productivity of the "work week" then weekends become a hideous reminder that no part of your life is productive; that you have no reality to return to on Monday.

So instead of face the fact that by life is embarrassingly useless, i submerse myself in Sunday reality TV show marathons. I usually get hooked when I click on the TV for some background noise and find there is yet another ANTM marathon. I now know just about every winner of the show- including my girl Whitney, season 10 winner and first plus size model at a whopping size 10. I try to take solace that if Whitney's pant size is ever a question on Trivial Pursuit, i will kick ass...but since i haven't played Trivial Pursuit since I was 11, it isn't much consolation. I am still left living my Sunday reality through reality TV marathons.

It is just that somehow watching others live their reality, makes me forget that I don't have a reality waiting for me on Monday. The bliss of mind-numbing reality television is the escape from my reality-less existence.

Maybe my mom and I aren't so different. Maybe we both hate facing our Monday realities: her's of a low-paying social work job; mine of a non-reality unemployed existence.

Yet maybe if my mom had had reality TV back in the day she could have blissfully lived in someone else's reality for a Sunday instead of her Monday-fearing Sunday reality. And maybe if i could disconnect the cable I could get busy living my Sunday and forget the reality of TV.