I want my MTV

Just before I left on my mission, I reupped my WWF Magazine subscription for two years. When each issue arrived, my mom dutifully set them aside for me, all the while hoping I would have "grown out" of my interest in pro wrestling by the time I came home.

This didn't happen. Less than a month after my return from Scotland, I had plowed through them all, 24 issues, cover to cover. I don't like the now-WWE as much as I did or for the same reasons I did when I started following it more than 20 years ago, but my fandom has never been a "phase." I was able to cope with the temporary separation, but it did nothing to eliminate the cravings.

I've been dealing with a similar situation since moving back in with my parents. I am an admitted TV addict, and my childhood home has no cable. In New York, I had no TV whatsoever, but I had a good Internet connection, which enabled me to watch almost every show I wanted to online. But as I've chronicled in this space before, my parents still use dial-up (dial-up!) Internet. No chance of loading any shows on Hulu or anything like that.

To be fair, being back in a place with consistent over-the-air television has several advantages over my New York situation: bigger screens, full episodes of So You Think You Can Dance and Saturday Night Live, syndicated reruns of Simpsons, Seinfeld, etc., and, with fewer options, I've had a chance to get back into shows like Survivor that I haven't made time to watch for a while (this has given me what I feel is a pretty funny idea for my blog; I'm trying to figure out how to make it work in written rather than video form, but stay tuned).

But the lack of cable service has forced me to miss out on many of my favorite programs: nearly all of the sports and wrestling programming I like to watch, The Soup, music videos on VH1, and perhaps most of all, the Daily Show/Colbert Report 1-2 punch. I had seen every single episode of Colbert since it debuted about four years ago, but have now gone over two months without seeing Stephen wag his finger or better know a district.

Just like with my wrestling magazines, the removal of these shows from my life has not caused any waning interest. My cravings for sports and satire are as strong as ever. I can certainly live a normal and happy life without them (I'm not quite that pathetic), but I really, really wish I had access to cable and/or good Internet. And that's The Word.