Vegan (Couch) Potato

So in what turns out to be the ironic twisting of the universe (this week), I find myself in the posession of a fully renewed gym membership before being in posession of 839 channels of glorious, full color cable. "How did this happen??" you ask. Trust me-- you're not the only one asking.

Back when Prince Consort was laid off from his Full Time Job With Benefits almost four years ago, we were very practical. We decided not to panic immediately, and to take things as they came, which we hoped would include a new job (and ideally, one that was more interesting to Prince Consort than the last one had been). He worked gigs and odd jobs as they came along, all the while sending out resumes and taking online classes (one of the perks of being laid off from the Full Time Job With Benefits was a year of tuition reinbursement). And little by little, as time went by with no long term work and fewer and fewer interviews, we started making cuts in our budget.

The gym was the first thing to go. We didn't even like the gym. It was a necessary evil, a self-inflicted torture that we avoided whenever we could while trying to justyfy keeping up the payments. By the end, we weren't even pretending we would go most nights, and as we used the gym less and less, it became the obvious first item in the budget to get the ax. Mind you, this was after going approximately three times a week, nearly every week, for close to 5 years. Or was it 6 years? Either way, we had started out quite well, fighting the good fight regularly. And it was a hellish fight. Natural couch potatoes, we had to reach down deep to find motivation. But we did for several years. A high school reunion was the best gym-motivation in all that time.

But as our resolve grew weak and our bank accounts weaker, we gave up the gym memberships. It felt pretty good, too. No longer did we guilt ourselves several times a week into doing something we loathed. We had more time for things like television and Facebook! We told ourselves we would go walking in our neighborhood for exercise and keep trying to play tennis at the local park tennis courts (and that's a story for another blog entry...). We would make an effort not to get fat and lazy, but we wouldn't spend money on our fitness endevours.

In the meantime, we kept the cable. Only an insane person gives up cable before it really becomes necessary! And yet... after more time had gone by with little to no work for Prince Consort, and with my own paycheck now covering medical, dental, and vision for both of us, cable became... a non-essential.

You may have heard the agonized cries of anguish the day we said "Good-bye" to our 839 channels of non-stop media blitz. Prince Consort came home one day with a little, black box to convert our non-digital tv into something that would at least receive the basics: ABC, NBC, CBS, and, for cartoon viewing only, Fox. It felt like we'd had a Ferrari taken away and replaced with a pogo stick. But just as we'd gradually learned to live on less and less money, we slowly started to find our way in a cable-free zone. Hulu became a new best friend. The internet was not only good for distracting us from our empty television, but also for providing tv shows we could no longer get from cable, even if it meant waiting a while for the episodes we wanted to become available. Netflix streaming tied Hulu in the competition for our love. And I could always put on one of my many Anglophreak movies again. The Young Victoria got quite a bit of airtime in our apartment.

And then one weekend, we went cat-sitting for a friend who had cable. We rejoiced at the idea of being able to catch up on tv show episodes we couldn't get online or through Hulu or Netflix! We eagerly anticipated seeing cooking shows we'd never seen on the Food Network channel, new Britcoms on BBC America, and fascinating documentaries on Discovery, TLC, and the History Channel! We sat down with Luscious the cat and prepared to be engaged by all cable had to offer!

We flipped through hundreds of channels and found the best options were a Say Yes to the Dress marathon, Teen Mom 2, and a Valerie Bertinelli biography on Lifetime. Really? We asked ourselves. Surely there must be something more! But the Food Network was showing nothing but meat barbeques, the History Channel was showing 24 hours of black and white footage of WWII airplanes, and BBC America was showing Top Gear alternated with Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmare for the next 7 hours. We had access to 839 channels, and there was still nothing on. We began to realize that our decision to cut the cable to save money had indeed been the right decision.

Fast forward several more months: Prince Consort has a new Full Time Job With Benefits! It may pay about half of what he made before, but after almost 4 years of unemployment and temporary gigs ranging from sanding foam muscles and wiring electrical costumes to installing ceiling fans and unclogging drains, he was happy to have it. So we're now cautiously adding expenses we cut back into the equasion. We tried a free week of Hulu Plus to see if it might be worth the $7.99 a month fee. We've gone out to dinner here and there, whereas before, we would have given a lot of thought to doing so and probably would have stayed in for leftovers instead. And yesterday, I renewed our gym memberships. For a full year.

Because the truth is that even when we do go walking, it's not necessarily for the full amount of time we'd spend at the gym. And walking, while excellent low-impact exercise, isn't nearly as strenuous a work out as the eliptical is. And we've gotten fat and lazy, despite trying not to. Sugar is always more tempting than a fast walk around the block, and chocolate beats stomach crunches every single time. So we're going back to the gym. And we're not going back to cable.

Who knew?