I’ve never been one for sitting patiently through commercials.  Before cable, which was the sad state of life into my teens (other than a two year period with a gigantic satellite dish that the movie Contact tells me could have gotten signals from 26 light years away), the mute button took care of them for me.  When cable arrived channel flipping staved off the boredom, and then with the advent of picture-in-picture I never messed up and missed the return of the show.  I don’t know what it was about commercials that drove me up the wall.  Maybe it was the interruption of my beloved show, or the pandering, or the general lack of quality.  I always watched the Super Bowl (and I really could care less about football) so it was probably some combo.  With DVR, commercials were a thing of the past, unless I taped a sporting event entirely for the commercials (but really who would do that?!) and I could finally ignore all of Madison Avenue, except Mad Men of course.  
My name is K; I have a DVR; no, I couldn’t live without it; and, Nielsen, I never watch anything at its normal time (nor often in that week you give us).  But apparently, my fast-forward/pause/whenever-I-want-it-life has caused me to miss out on some extremely important things.  For instance, there’s a birth control pill that if you take it you have to get a blood test.  What pill is it?  I don’t know, the commercial didn’t tell me.  The-pill-it-isn’t gives short periods and only causes blood clots if you smoke and other fun stuff.  This information may not be disturbing to most of you, but as I’m 3 months from my graduation from medical school (3.5 months from where Izzy, George, Meredith et al were at the Grey’s pilot), I’m quite disturbed that a commercial knows more than me about birth control pills.  And, further, very disturbed that I wouldn’t know anything about this if I hadn’t been in the middle of a game of Orisinal Floats and couldn’t grab my remote.  
    This episode brings to mind my doctoral dissertation defense in Oct. 2006 (yes I’m dangerously over-educated and I have the T-shirt).  After 6 years of torture that would make “water-boarding” seem like feather-tickling, my advisor introduced me by saying something about how knowing me made him want Head-on.  The crowd roared with laughter.  Ok, fine, the little room half-filled with my committee, my parents, and my drinking-buddies /similarly-desperate grad students found this hilarious.  I, thanks to my best friend in that last year of grad school purgatory, had no frakking idea what they were talking about.  Supposedly there’s some deodorant bar-like thing that gets rid of headaches if you apply it “directly to the forehead” and its commercials are very memorable. For the first time in years, my parents were more with it than me.
    Anyway, out of curiosity, after hearing this ground breaking news about the pill (and googling it to figure out what pill will stop your heart – read to the end to find out the answer!) I decided to actually watch the rest of the commercials in my Wednesday night lineup (Cashmere Mafia, ANTM, Project Runway, American Idol).  By break 2, I decided to just not fast-forward through them, if they grabbed my attention from Floats than super for them.  

Lessons learned Wednesday prime time:
1.  If I ever get locked in my car with one or more un-weened badgers (supercharged cooper convertible, red with white racing stripes, try and kill me with your un-ending jealousy), I will get my face gnawed off.  
2. OMG, channel news at 5 investigates: texting while driving – is it dangerous? (Only if you’re a fastidious speller).
3.  Extra gum will take all the fat from my belly and reform it into an awesome ****.  Is my grocery store open 24 hours cause I need to start chewin!?
4.  Diet Coke has now put out a version with vitamins & minerals!  ANTM ladies, it’s still no different than taking your daily multi-vitamin with 1 of your 10 daily Diet Cokes.  10 of these daily is not 10 times healthier, it’ll just make your brain swell (MD/PhD ****! I’ll explain at the end) and not in a good way.   
5. TV takes a lot longer with commercials.

The flip side
Without DVR tonight alone I would have missed out on so much, like re-watching or over-analyzing all of the following:  
1.  Ricky crying during an interview while being asked his full name, age, & home.     Chris’s “too loud” laughter (Don’t worry sweets, I once had a boyfriend accuse me of sneezing loudly on purpose), the diary of the fierce hair, the Kors crack-up.  Was that the most wonderful reality show reunion ever?  Honestly, with replay, who needs commercials to make a show last hours?
2.  The platinum blond with the squished fetal-alcohol-syndrome face proclaiming “People think I’m just some dumb blond” (and my pause allowing me to text my ANTM addict/buddy Ashley “but really I’m brunette”) making the final 13.  Thus causing the inclusion of Dominique (the finalists favorite “transvestite” – really girls, beating Miss J?) and a (shocking!) ANTM starting with 14 girls! Yeah, squish face was worth expanding from the unlucky 13.  Oh, and another thing, wow, I always thought I was medium sized, or when my Matrix-self engaged, kinda hot.  But now plus-size models have 6-packs.  Seriously, did they always?  Did I used to have muscle-definition and not notice?  Isn’t plus-size Lane Bryant territory?  Doesn’t the fact that I can still shop at Banana Republic redeem me?  Damn I gotta drop my chimichangas & doritos & pizza.

3a.  The previously unseen (by me at least) Alex? Andrea? whose utter un-suckiness and non-center-stage standiness (dancing?!!) had me rewinding to the beginning of her performance in a bit of shock.  Was I drunk? yeah, Was it 3 am?  Dude - DVR! Like I’m really gonna vote. Randy agreed with me (doors gone dog!), Paula said “dope”!  Simon (who once told me via PS2 he’d rather have his teeth pulled sans anesthetic than hear me sing again) disagreed to disagree.  Stupidhead, have you slept throught the previous suckfest so deeply you don’t notice someone who can sing AND move at the same time!.
3b.   Oh God why am I watching this show? Wait, are there 3 identical blond girls (Kristy, Alaina, Kady?  Without DVR I wouldn’t be able to rewind and determine if in fact there were separate people!!  Amy & Brooke are unique by their relative sucki/awesome-ness) Is it bad if the non-Simon judges’ comments center on how funny and pretty you are? Poor Kady, What’s capensel?  Without DVR I couldn’t have rewound 7 times to try to figure out WTF that is & why there was so much boo-ing.  Actually, after rewinding that many times and turning on my closed-captioning, I still don’t get it.  Funny thing though, when you turn on the CC, it writes nothing from Simon’s pre-insult statement until after Paula yells foul and the music starts, and then it comes up with “pencil.”  Is that really the insult?  Aren’t pencils skinny?  I guess they don’t sing well or they’re boring or something.  Or no-one else knew what he said and thought it was a fancy British insult like calling cigarettes by that F word.  Oh, and a 360 Randy, really?  So Simon went in a full circle?  WRONG! Says my DVR, Simon went from loving her (“you’re the best”) to hating her.  See Randy, as Ryan pointed out before you wrongly corrected him, it’s a 180.  Kinda like where he went with Ramiele (Thanks again DVR!).
    

    So will I start watching commercials to get the full TV viewing experience? Yeah right.  Will I pay more attention to drug & soft-drink (and gum) commercials to really see the medical miracles that as a doctor I will have to advise my patients about?  Nope.  Will I always rewind and rewatch funny bits?  Duh. Did I finally pay my electric bill this month because they threatened to turn off my TV?  Yeah, life would be a drag without DVR, and near-pointless without TV.

Bonus for reading to the end: Why would 10 vitamin-filled diet cokes swell your brain?  Ok they wouldn’t.  Too much vitamin A (at least 10 X RDA) can cause it to swell, but A is really only optimally absorbed with some fat, and the ANTM certainly don’t have that.  I guess people who order Diet Coke while eating at the Cheesecake Factory might be in some danger, but it’ll be awhile before the vitamin stuff’s coming out of the taps.  And lazy that I am, I haven’t even looked at the vitamin make-up of the drink to determine the necessary number.  
So what’s the bad pill?  Yasmin, supposedly – it has a funny progesterone in it that makes you retain potassium (too much potassium eventually stopping your heart).  I guess it’s due to the attempt to try to rid the pill of the water-retaining side-effects.  But I really don’t get pharmaceutically what the progesterone & potassium interaction is.  The maybe some jackass just added a diuretic and potassium to balance it to try to get rid of water.  Oops.  I hear it’s really great for acne though.