Gone, all Gone.

My favorite t.v. friends, that is. Da Brat and the (surprisingly appealing) Peter Brady from The Surreal Life, all four of those crazy housewives, my girl Sydney, and, most wrenching of all, Bianca, Kendall, and Greenlee. (Yes, that's All My Children I'm talking about, and if you think a person can't be equally entranced with the transnational ramifications of the Irish domestic space AND daytime television, you're wrong. Sadly, wrong.)

We cut the cable today, in a desperate attempt to see me finish my dissertation before 2010. Today was the first test--alone in my house all day without cable. What would I do while eating my lunch? How could I stand missing Maggie and Bianca's first make-out session? How would I combat the 3:00 p.m. drowsies without an invigorating dose of Law & Order? These are questions that will be answered in the months to come. Today however, I stood, plate in hand, in front of a ghostly blank television set at 1:00 pm, EST, thinking: why not just check? Surely we aren't on Comcast's priority removal list, even though we set up the euthanasia yesterday.

Wondrously, disastrously, my t.v. friends flickered to life with a wave of the remote. Not gone yet. One last day, one last lost afternoon, one last gentle massaging of my brain cells before the rigorous pounding of dissertaton-writing takes its place to expel Maggie, sweet Bianca, Dharma and of course Greg, Buffy, Willow, Niles, Pilar and Teresita, Vaughn, Sloane, Joey, Rachel, Carrie, Miranda, Ellen, Cordelia, Gunn, Fez, Kelso, Tina and Maya, Jay and Dave--no, Dave and Jay and sometimes Jimmy, Turk, JD, CJ, Toby, Josh, and Donna, Jack, Sayid, Jordan, Woody, Raymond, Debra, Karen, Jack, Bart, Lisa, and all the other wonderful friends out there I hadn't met yet.

Yeah...clearly it was time to pull the plug.