I love television. In fact, many of my friends have told me, or have secretly wished they had the balls to tell me, that I have an unhealthy obsession with television. I watch more television on any given day than most people will in an entire week. Sitting down and watching an entire television series over the course of a few weeks is commonplace to me. I think it’s fair to say that television is kind of a big deal to me. Which is why what happened last night was very un-me.

Last night, I screwed up on the PVR set up when I went to record How I Met Your Mother and inadvertantly recorded Two and a Half Men. It suffices to say I was less than pleased. I went down to watch HIMYM, about twenty minutes into the episode, and saw no wonderul red light on my PVR. And screwing up on the PVR, or the PVR screwing me over, is not the atypical event, but rather what immediately followed it: I sat down and started watching the show.

Often, when I sit down to watch a show my dad will drift in and out of the room, he’ll pay attention for a couple minutes and then head off somewhere else, or even strike up a conversation with me when he knows he should at least wait until the commercial. Last night was the first time I ever “drifted in” to a tv show when it was a new episode. This isn’t the same as flipping to Space and seeing Picard digging a trench on Risa and sticking around for the rest. This is flicking to ABC and seeing John Locke igniting a stick of dynamite and, having missed what came before deciding “eh, what the fuck” and watching from there.

Granted, How I Met Your Mother isn’t quite as continuity reliant as Lost or some of my other favourite shows, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t seen the first two-thirds of that episode. Normally, I’d download the episode that night and watch it shortly after, but that night I sat my ass down and said “eh, what the fuck.” This won’t become a typical behaviour on my part if only because it felt so weird, even in the moment, to not know what had come before but the fact that it happened at all is a sign of my age. Or at least that I’m becoming more like my father, and who the hell knows which is the worse of those.

Well, the final schedule for the San Diego Comic-Con (or “Comic-Con” as it is known among certain circles) has finally been published. I haven’t written about it here, since my dedicated readership is ostensibly me, but I’m going to Comic-Con so this is a pretty big deal for me. Comic-Con is an epic event in the world of comics, film, television, sci-fi, fantasy, and it’s branching into mainstream entertainment as its fame grows. It’s a Mecca for geeks.

I’ve only given the two big days, Friday and Saturday, a cursory glance, but from what I’ve seen I’ve got a huge challenge prioritizing the various panels and events that I’ll be going to. Already I’ve run into a few painful decisions because of the sheer quantity of events. It’s rare that I run into situations such as these with a multitude of temptations. With the advent of PVR and bittorent, my TV watching habits have become much more open. Where I once stopped watching one show because a better one was on at the same time, now I simply watch the lesser of the two later on. I’ve gotten so used to the asynchronous nature of my media consumption that this schedule was quite a blow to me.

Now I need to go figure out what makes the cut. Wish me luck.