Wednesday, January 6, 2016

HGTV: The Drug-Free Sleep Aid

My husband has been binge watching some award-winning TV series like Breaking Bad and Dexter.  Both are violent, and the latter is quite gory—the protagonist, after all, is an expert on reading blood spatters. Call me crazy, but I prefer to watch House Hunters or Love It or List It before I go to sleep.  Some evenings I may spend an hour pondering which Property Brother is cuter or check to see if Jo Jo has uncovered any shiplap on Fixer Upper.

I know that some people get annoyed with the house hunters’ obsessive desires for granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, but I don’t mind.  Personally, I live in two places without either of these amenities, and I am quite content.  I think buyers are just filling up air space with snooze-worthy topics because they have to keep talking while looking at walls and floors.

Years ago, I remember watching a particularly intense episode of ER right before going to bed.  In this episode, a woman delivering a baby in the ER tragically died because of a series of unfortunate events.  I was so caught up in the drama and distraught with the results that I tossed and turned all night thinking about the poor dead (fictional) woman and her baby. On HGTV's Love it or List It, deciding whether to leave a beloved neighborhood to move to a bigger house is as intense as it gets.
So, I know I am better off reading a book and then watching an episode or two of one of the HGTV shows before I go to sleep.  Sure one partner or spouse may prefer a contemporary look while the other likes traditional.  But these problems are not earth shattering, and they are neatly resolved by the designers and realtors in a half-hour or hour-long show.  I’m not saying that HGTV is boring, but it is usually pretty low key with a resolvable crisis.  So I can drift off to sleep knowing that Sophie and Peter have their dream home or that Eduardo and Greg have a perfect setting for entertaining that is not too far from their jobs.  Ah, HGTV, you are my sleep-inducing nighttime channel.

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