Fear of Commitment

It's 7:37PM on Friday night.  Nick's upstairs getting ready for an evening with his friends.  Jay just wrapped up his own little get-together and is settling in for a fun-filled night on Facebook.  The big dilemma facing me is whether or not to suck it up and finally watch "X-Men: First Class."

We've had the "X-Men: First Class" DVD for almost 3 weeks.  Jay's already watched it.  Nick isn't interested.  I've heard it's good so I've not let Kim send it back yet.  But, I just can't bring myself to sit down and watch it.  There are so many reasons why that I don't think I can list them all.  Let me just give you a couple of them.

• We have three different DVD players.  Each one is tempermental.  The basement works through Jay's PS3.  I have no idea how to work it so that one's out.  In our bedroom, we've got a portable DVD player that's hooked up to the TV.  Unfortunately, the DVD's remote is broken so you have to actually stand next to the player and hit buttons by hand.  That's a bit too old-fashioned for me.  That leaves the player in the family room.  After you turn it on, it takes a good 30 seconds to actually become operational.  I know that, of course.  But, it doesn't stop me from hitting the "power" button and then repeatedly pressing the "open / close" button on the remote until the darn thing finally opens up for me.  Invariably, I get frustrated while doing this and start cursing under my breath.  By the time the player finally opens up, I'm wondering why I even started to try and watch the movie in the first place.
• There are no movies made anymore where the dialogue takes place at a consistent level throughout the entire movie.  I feel like I spend the entire movie doing nothing but adjusting the volume.  The sound is either so loud that it gives me a headache or so soft that I can't understand what's being said.  Each scene becomes a game -- I guess if it's going to be a loud scene or a soft scene and adjust the volume in advance.  Sometimes I'm right.  Sometimes I'm wrong.
• I hate making a commitment to spending two hours watching a movie that may not be any good.  I have no trouble turning off a regular TV show or flipping to something else when whatever I'm watching on the current channel starts to bore me.  But, I still feel guilty turning off a DVD before it's over.  In fact, I think I've only done it once.  The movie was "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"  Trust me, it was horrible. 

So, there will be no "X-Men: First Class" for me tonight.  I'm pretty sure HGTV is still running back-to-back episodes of "House Hunters International" on Friday nights.  I think I'll give that a try for a while.