I watched an entire season of television in one day

Never Done: I watched an entire season of television in one day (Is it still television if it's on a computer?)

It was about the rainiest day possible. Pounding, driving, hard core rain didn't cease. All I wanted to do was hunker down and sew or bake or play Scrabble or watch Friday Night Lights, and the beauty of being on vacation is that I got to do three out of four of those things. (I didn't take out my sewing.) I had finished the abbreviated (by the writers' strike) Season Two when I was still in Brooklyn, and so I made a cup of tea and tuned in to Season Three.

First of all, when a season gets abbreviated by a strike, a LOT of story gets dropped off. So Season Three had to do some heavy lifting to quickly fill us in on important plot. I'm not going to do this here, because I don't want to spoil anything, but I will put in my requisite recommendation for the show. (It's all available on Netflix.) In fact, I am not going to write about the show at all, but instead about how much fun it was to finish one episode and immediately turn on another, and to know that there was no place else I was supposed to be, and no reason to go outside and get soaked. I didn't even get hungry for dinner -- just lots of tea, water, and cider and my place on the couch.

At first I wasn't watching with a goal of completing a season. I was just watching. But at the point that I noticed it would be possible -- (and this reminded me of completing the triathlon in under 4 hours -- I didn't have any time goals until I rounded the 4 mile mark and noticed I could do it in under 4 if I tried) -- I decided to go for it. I started to stretch in between episodes, and moved off the couch to the bed for the final two. (Who knew that watching 9 straight hours of TV would require such strategy?)

As I write this, I am thinking about the mides (middot) in order to see if there's anything ethical about my decision to watch all that TV, and what I come up with is: Diligence: Always find something to do. For those of us who are over-scheduled and under-rested, I think that watching 9 hours of really good TV is actually a completely valid -- and maybe even evolved -- reading of the principle of Diligence. I wouldn't want to do it every day, and I don't even feel like doing it again on this vacation, but I'm pretty proud of myself for slowing down enough to achieve that level of being a lump.