Your Money's Worth

There was another near miss yesterday with a big screen TV. It wasn't the biggest or the best, but my lovely wife wrangled the financing and we gave in to our purient video urges. For about twenty-four hours. Then reality set in, again. So we're not going to have a great big deluxe plasma life-changing appliance in our living room.
Instead, we'll stay huddled around our thirty-two inch stereo TV hooked to the surround sound speakers with DVD, VCR and Tivo hookups. Alas, we are fated to stay firmly rooted in the late twentieth century. Did I mention the fact that we have three televisions in the house? My son doesn't have one in his room presently - though it was his understanding that if we were to buy another large TV that the trickle down electronic theory would put the twenty-eight inch mono set right there on his shelf next to his snake tank.
Why not? His parents have a TV in their bedroom - with a DVD player attached. We yearn for a TiVo in the bedroom for those moments when we're too lazy to drag ourselves the several feet to the living room to watch what TiVo has kept on hard disk for us. We live in a world of possibility constricted by our cash flow. We rationalize our home entertainment by the amount of time we spend being consumed by it. Consumer electronics - as in they will consume you.
The little TV in the back room is the one I got when I moved into my first apartment in 1981. I remember the year because it was one of those new-fangled "cable-ready" televisions, and I watched MTV on it for the very first time. It now has the Playstation hooked up to it. It makes picture and sound just like it's supposed to - but it's only eighteen inches - diagonally! We might as well be watching shadows dancing on the wall of our cave.
Will we own a monster television? Soon, I would guess. Right now it's all about the guilt and shame of excessive video. I could watch a DVD on the machine I'm sitting in front of right now. But it turns out this is better for writing.