guilty little pleasure

I like soap operas. I am embarassed to admit it. It's so not - cool, you know? (because I am the epitomy of cool - HA!)

When I was in university I taped Another World religiously. Even though I no longer watched it by the time it went off the air (when??) I taped the last episode.

Europeans have a fondness for Bold and the Beautiful - when we still had European cable, we used to be able to see it in multiple languages. I remember watching the first episode ever of B&B as a teenage mother's helper.

When I was pregnant with Stuart I was sick for about 6 weeks. And discovered that the Dutch channel we got, RTL4, showed As the World Turns in English with Dutch subtitles. I justified watching - despite the fact that they were about 2 1/2 years behind the North American broadcasts and were celebrating Christmas in July - by thinking it would help improve my Dutch.

I watched again for a while in the two months before Julia was born - in Luxembourg it's mandatory that pregnant women start their maternity leave 8 weeks before their due date.

The arrival of SKY (British satellite) put an end to my sporadic soap watching. No soaps besides British ones, and somehow Eastenders doesn't have quite the glitz of an American soap.

Yesterday I decided to tackle the mountain of laundry in my ironing basket. Of course I did this in the afternoon while the kids were at school. I have the ironing board in the basement. I flicked on the tv for entertainment and realized... it was soap time.

I watched As the World Turns for the first time in about 3 years. And I ironed. And thought how funny it was that Jack and Carly had broken up - again. And that Parker is now a teenager (huh??) It's quite funny how they recycle characters until you think a city will die out with people marrying what has to be their cousin.

Anyhow - I have no intention of making this a daily or even weekly event (though I suppose ironing should be...). But it was a silly escape for an hour.