I didn't have TV since the beginning of December. The provider is bbtv in Taiwan. Their internet is fine, but their cable TV service is wanting. Actually, to be fair I didn't even try to notify anyone there was a problem. I left it to other people on the floor who apparently didn't mind not having TV as much as I didn't mind. It's totally possible bbtv would have responded immediately and had service back up pronto.

Internet did go out at the end of December, the same day I killed that spider in fact. I knew someone would call the landlord for that and internet was back up two days later, but for some reason no one mentioned TV and the person who fixed the internet didn't realize TV service was out, too.

No internet was not fun. A little lonely maybe? When it was back up I wanted to run to the internet and say oh my god, i have so much to tell you! I didn't have anything to tell. That was just the weird feeling. And not to anyone, mind you, but to the internet itself. I watched three movies on my computer in those two days.

I adapted to no TV, even though it disrupted shows I was watching, notably season 4 of Fresh Off the Boat, Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, and Discovery Channel shows How the Universe Works and How the Earth was Made. I'll watch anything on astronomy or cosmology, geology, earth sciences, earth history, archaeology. Things that span and give insight on how this all came to be.

After TV went dark, I checked every few days to see if it was back up, and after a few weeks I stopped doing that. I found new ways to completely fill up my time to the point that I felt I didn't have enough time. I started spending a lot more time with my bass as well as watching YouTube videos voraciously.

Today, after maybe a month I checked the TV not expecting anything and it was back up. Only Fresh Off the Boat is still airing. I missed a bunch of episodes, but they'll probably re-run them.

On one hand, two months without TV, I think, really did break my TV addiction. I don't even want it, I don't want it on all the time even in the background as I had it before. I'm sick of channel surfing when there's nothing on. On the other hand, it's February leading up to the Oscars in March and HBO is cramming Oscar classics and there's a lot I know I'm too weak to miss.

Another unexpected side effect, I think, was that what little of my Mandarin speaking ability went completely out the door. Even watching English language TV, Mandarin entered my ears through commercials. And at times I would have local news on as background noise. Without that I was completely in a non-Mandarin environment unless a Mandarin language song came up on my iPod and I long stopped trying to understand lyrics while listening.

As it is, my flatscreen is default connected to my laptop, not TV. I'll peek at TV schedules to see if there's anything of interest coming up, but I see breaking with TV as a good thing.