Lost

So I have an addiction. I think I can call it that.

The other morning I took my first sick day in almost two years at my current job. A combination of lack of sleep, insane weather changes (15 degrees in Atlanta?! Seriously?) and sitting for four hours on a plane carrying what seemed like around 200 pneumonia-stricken Bostonians, left me with a cold that I think almost killed me.

And so, sometime on Sunday afternoon, I retreated from the rest of the world, pulled my dachshund into bed with me, took a rather large dose of NyQuil and tried not to focus on how much breathing hurt. 24 hours later I was starting to feel like a semi-normal person again. Rosie didn’t look like she had four heads and I found ingesting oxygen to be a somewhat pleasant experience. I briefly considered attempting to be productive and actually working on one of the many articles that had been piling up in my to-do list for weeks, but after a short trip to the refrigerator left me feeling like I’d just climbed Mt. Everest, I decided to do something requiring a little less energy.

Which is how I ended up on abc.com. Those people at ABC really knew what they were doing with the online episodes. In putting old episodes online they have managed to make me become an avid Desperate Housewives watcher, obsessed with Dirty Sexy Money and disappointed that 6 Degrees was ever cancelled. Mind you, I never would have watched any of these shows if I hadn’t seen them first online. Until a year ago I was strictly a Grey’s Anatomy on the occasional Thursday night kind of person. Those days are long gone.

So back to my addiction. Abc.com now has every episode ever of Lost online. I’d never watched Lost with the exception of a random viewing of the finale of the first season. After my sick day I am unstoppable. Yesterday morning, as I was getting ready for work, I didn’t bother with my usual Good Morning America – I had to find out who this John Locke character really was! Last night, during dinner with friends, I kept trying to calculate how many episodes I could watch before I went to bed. Today, I can’t stop thinking about it.

This is a problem for many reasons. First of all, I’m like 70 episodes behind. That’s a lot of time. I mean, I don’t have any really big plans this weekend, but, well, there are only like 60 hours in my weekend. And I have to sleep. And then what happens when I finish those episodes? It’s not like the show is over. There’s no conclusion. There are other more tortured souls than me out there right now just waiting to see the next episodes when they actually come on television. So this is my problem. I’m hoping that maybe after a few more days I’ll feel satiated. I will have had my fill of Jack and Kate and their constant sweating and concerned looks. Until then, assume my next entry hasn’t come yet because I’m pretty busy watching glorious HD streaming on abc.com.