Noooooooooooooo!

I knew it was coming. But, man, I held out an irrational hope that it wouldn't actually happen. And like all irrational hopes, this one was dashed. Dashed!
So, my downstairs neighbors are relocating to another unit in the building because they recently had a baby and it's damned hard to survive with a newborn in a one-bedroom apartment. From what I understand of the parenting world, you need a spare room to occasionally lock yourself inside and scream. Or maybe you lock the baby in there and let it scream. Whatever. Specifics. I don't care for them that much.

Anyhoo, so the neighbors are moving. This is great news for me — not because I don't like them or anything — but because it lets me off the hook for the middle-of-the-night shenanigans that invariably happen in this apartment thanks to my odd work schedule and my cats' insistence upon playing hyper-tag every morning at 3 a.m. So I've been reveling in my ability to walk around without tiptoeing and I've even let my cats wrassle at midnight without spitting profanities at them. It's been great!

Er, was great, until my former neighbor reminded me the other day that their moving also means the cable will be transferred to their new apartment. Which means no cable for me. Perhaps you remember this incident, in which I tried to get cable, but couldn't. The neighbors, a few weeks after I tried in vain to get my own cable, graciously offered to share theirs with me. Which I'm pretty sure is only illegal in communist China, because I TRIED to pay for cable and was told by the cable dudes themselves that it wasn't going to be worth the wait. So for the past two years I've been sharing cable with the neighbors and now they're gone and *poof* so is the cable.

This would be a lot more palatable if my remote worked and I could at least use my DVD player. I've got Netflix envelopes stacking up and a ton of movies/TV show DVDs I could watch. But no. My TV is stuck in cable mode. I guess I need to hunt for a universal remote.

In the meantime, this means no more VH1 countdown shows, no more hilarious rape-themed movies on Lifetime, no more over-wrought episodes of CSI, no more Paranormal State, no more 13-hour ANTM marathons that render me unable to move, no more Real World/Road Rules challenges, no more INFOMERCIALS. You may think I'm better off for it, and you may be right, BUT YOU'RE WRONG. Cable makes me what I am. It connects me to the rest of humanity's lazy contingent. It gives me ideas and pisses me off. Cable is life.

Ha! I'm kidding. I know plenty of people who survive and even thrive with no cable. Hell, I've gone through periods without cable. That summer in Birmingham, the first several months I lived here, the first few months I lived on my own in M'boro, many many months during my formative years (although we did have illegal satellite for a time when I was a pre-teen). I can do it. I can do it.

I just don't want to.