For this week, I was planning to write about the Emmys, which aired Sunday.

I could tell you a lot of things about the Emmys, including how annoying it is that The West Wing keeps winning for Best Drama when it�s clearly Law & Order this year more than ever before, and how cool it was that all the Friends were there, even though everyone knew they were going to win, but I was actually oddly happy for Jennifer Aniston since she deserved her Best Actress in a Comedy, but what did Brad Pitt do to his hair, and how Doris Roberts is starting to get more than a little annoying with her constant yammering on about how old people can�t get jobs in Hollywood or something, but I think between the actual Emmy telecast on NBC, the nonstop marathon of bitter hatred spewed from the Rivers gang on E! (which, by the way, constitutes the most work Melissa Rivers has done in, like, five years), �exclusive� backstage access from Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, plus pandering, self-promoting celebrity interviews on all the morning shows, the media has that pretty well covered, and if you cared to hear about it, you probably already have, so I won�t bore you with that, except to say that I taped the three-and-a-half hour show because I was at work, and I saw all the awards I cared to see in about ninety minutes, with a minimum of pain (Conan O�Brien and Oprah, I�m glaring menacingly in your direction) and a maximum of pleasure (the brain cells I didn�t kill by watching the whole thing thanked me until I killed them with Regis and Kelly this morning), and since this sentence is quickly inching its way toward three hundred words, I'm going to have to stop talking about how I'm not going to talk about the Emmys.

But if I�m not going to write about the Emmys, I have to write about something. I could write about sex, the writer�s old standby, but since my sex life is about as interesting right now as a lecture on �perspectives in content valuation,� let�s not go there, shall we?

I guess no one would be interested to know that putting out a newspaper is not nearly as glamorous as people seem to assume that it is, which I suppose is their problem, but I�m beginning to think that nothing is as easy as it looks anymore.

Take sleep, for instance. I�m not allowed to sleep very much these days, because I�ve recently started doing some consulting work for the FBI at night, in addition to my two other jobs, my full-time student status, and the other magical things I do just for fun, so when I do get to sleep, the rules are all weird.

For example, I can only drink Mr. Green at work after 9:00 at night if I�m going to need to stay up, or it will put me right to sleep. I can only seem to remember this rule on nights when I have nothing to do after work and could, ostensibly, go home and go to sleep. I have been finding some interesting things to do at 1a.m. when I can�t sleep, like cleaning my room and alphabetizing my videotape collection, which has its own special rules (alphabetical, unless there�s something on the tape that I feel like watching, and then it goes in the �watch� pile, which has accidentally become the �Quick, I need a tape, I don�t care what�s on it� pile more than once.

But I don�t really record everything I watch...I promise. Last night, as embarrassing as it is to admit this, I watched CBS� entire primetime lineup (totally justifiable if you consider that Nicole Sullivan has joined the cast of King of Queens, I watched Raymond because my parents were watching it, and I watched CSI: Miami because I knew it couldn�t suck as much as the original. I don�t really have an excuse for Yes, Dear, but I�m getting help, I swear.) and I didn�t record any of it. You should be proud of me.

I went to Wal-Mart last weekend and got another 10-pack of blank tapes so I could be prepared for the start of the season. The season started yesterday, and since Saturday I�ve recorded the Miss America Pageant (it�s for my mom; how gross that Miss Alabama came in second), Mad TV, the Emmys, Sunday�s rerun of The Pretender, Monday�s Regis and Kelly, an hour of Will & Grace from syndication, syndicated Weakest Link during what I thought was going to be Will & Grace, and part of an infomercial about alternative diets, which I don�t think I meant to tape.

Granted, this weekend was chock full o� unexciting nonevents as far as television goes, but I think the reality still stands that I have a problem. Heh.

My love of television coupled with the desire to watch things has been taken to new heights since I started taping things religiously. This was sort of fostered by L., who herself has an elaborate system for remembering which color tapes contain what seasons of ER, and between the two of us, we probably have � no joke � about five hundred VHS tapes.

Mom inquired last night as to the location of her tapes of Miss America and the Emmys. The conversation went something like this:

Mom: Did you tape Miss America for me?
Pat: Yes.
Mom: And the Emmys?
Pat: Yes.
Mom: And if one wanted to watch these tapes, how might one figure out which tapes contained what they wanted to watch?

Which presented a fair question (while also explaining [sort of] why I talk the way I talk). I sat down last March with a spiral notebook and spent about a week cataloguing my entire tape collection, but I need to do it again, because occasionally there�s just not time (or money) to go buy new tapes, and I have to record over stuff. Plus, I�ve probably filled up another forty-five or so tapes since then, most of which have yet to be logged.

I know you�re all dying to ask about when I find the time to watch all the things that are on these tapes. It�s another very good question, but I don�t really have a definitive answer. I guess I just like knowing that, even though the show has sucked since its first season, I can watch Ed any time I want. It�s good to know that if I�m ever having a not-so-great day, I can pull out an episode of SNL just to laugh at the Weekend Update jokes I�ve already seen seventeen times.

This summer, during the few weeks I was home, I tried to watch an episode of Law & Order every day, and NBC keeps doing all kinds of West Wing specials on Wednesday nights, so it�s good to have L&O at the ready.

I managed to collect all but five episodes of Boston Common before its rerun cycle on USA ended two years ago. I also have miscellaneous episodes of Friends and ER, as well as a lot of The Pretender, The Mole, and some Seinfeld. I have both editions of Celebrity Boxing, the episode of Paula Sands Live where Paula talks at length about my friend Fake David Schwimmer's pants, and an-ever dwindling number of episodes of Profiler: The Ally Walker Years.

So I guess I have bigger problems than just lack of sleep, which probably extend into the category of some sort of mental imbalance, but what are you gonna do? Anyway, I guess I'll continue taping everything under the sun until I run out of money and/or tapes and/or move off to college, at which point I guess I'll just get practical and start weeding out things like 25 Years of Must-See TV and Five Fabulous Weeks of the Chevy Chase Show, but until then, I'm going to keep hitting record when I go to the bathroom.