Earlier this year I was flipping through channels, wondering why I pay so much for cable when, more often than not, there isn’t anything good on. Gone are the days of dramas and sitcoms where, week after week, perfectly penned episodes were aired and enjoyed by all. Now-a-days, these have been replaced (sadly) by reality television.

I am not a huge fan of reality television, although I have to admit that I was addicted to the first season of Jersey Shore…I mean, who wasn’t. I would come home late at night and there wouldn’t be anything else to watch and let’s face it, once you watched one episode, you were completely hooked. Thankfully, my addiction only lasted for the first season and I have yet to turn on the proceeding ones…though, I can hear about them practically everywhere.

I have never been into Survivor or Dancing with the Stars, or any of the likes for that matter. Then one day, it all changed. I flipped on the style channel. Now, I don’t remember if I had turned it on to watch my fix of Sex and the City reruns or not, though, that is why it was on last night, but I came across this show called How Do I Look…and my opinion of reality television changed forever (at least, for this show that is).

The premise of this show revolves around one new person every week who has a terrible sense of fashion. Last night’s episode consisted of someone who is living in the ’80s…big hair, spandex, red lips…need I say more! So, the host, Jeannie Mai, along with a panel of three people, two of which are somehow connected to the fashion offender and one who is not, perform a much needed make-over. Each person of the panel is responsible for picking out a collection that the offender has to try on and model in front of a mirror…and later choose between. At the end of each episode they have an unveiling in which the former offender comes out in an outfit from one of the collections and just looks fabulous.

Last night, as I watched the time drone away, I turned off the show after the modeling of the collections and before the end result. I actually do this often. To me, the end result isn’t as entertaining as the process of purging the old and modeling the new. This show is highly addictive and at the same time intelligent. If you have not already done so, I suggest flipping on the style channel and watching How Do I Look. If you love fashion as much as I do, you will not be disappointed.

Over the weekend my friend, we’ll call her Z, and I attended a wine class. We had signed up for it over a month ago and had really been looking forward to it; what better way to spend a brisk November afternoon then to learn about wine with one of your closest girlfriends and be warmed by it. We had thoughts of coming out of the class slightly tipsy and then of continuing out festivities into the evening. We would be onto our nightcap while everyone else was just starting their night. Little did we know however, that things were not going to go exactly as planned.

As I hauled my ass into Manhattan from Queens my friend impatiently tried to hail a cab from the east side. Despite the fact that I got into Penn Station about thirty minutes before the class was going to start and it was only a few blocks away, I took a shopping detour and then had to rush down through claustrophobic sidewalks to get there. Z and I try to make it to places early but we always end up comedically rushing to get anywhere on time.

We got to the class about five minutes late but luckily, there was only a handful of people there and a long list, so the instructor informed us that it would be another fifteen minutes before the class started. We found a spot away from the rest of the people and after playing musical chairs to get the ones that were the least uncomfortable, we hunkered down with lowered voices to get a little girl talk in. The only thing that was missing of course was the wine.

About twenty minutes later, after more people had shown up, the instructor came up to the front of the room and said that he was going to begin. The first thing that he told us was that there wasn’t going to be any tastings. I think all of us probably looked at him in shock. What did he mean no tastings? Was he serious? he went on to clarify that although we were going to be discussing wine and learning the basics, we would not in fact be drinking any. He should have put that in his course description, because I doubt that that many people would have signed up for a Saturday afternoon class with the knowledge that there wasn’t going to be any wine. I mean, how can you actually learn about wine without tasting it. Z and I looked at each other, each giving the other the let’s-get-out-of-here eyes, we even turned and spoke to a few of our neighbors and asked if they knew that there was not going to be any wine, and they were just as shocked.

During the beginning, Z and I kept looking at each other, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. We were sort of half paying attention and then we got into it. It turned out that it wasn’t so bad. It would have been nice to actually taste wine too and we weren’t going to pretend to understand why there wasn’t any when the class had, after all, not been free, but we ended up having a decent time.

More than half of what he had been saying, I realized that I knew…an old friend of mine from high school and junior high is an assistant sommelier now, so, he must have taught me more than I thought. I know that I’m going to sound a bit pretentious when I say this (my uncle’s words, by the way, which I had to laugh at), but I liked the class more, knowing that I knew most of what he was saying. It’s silly I know, but true.

After the class, Z and I were both starving, so we set out to find something to eat, and wine. We had walked halfway across town when we decided to walk back towards the direction where we had just come from and go to this cute little irish Pub right near Penn Station. It’s the spot that I used to go to with my aunt for burgers and wine. They have delicious burgers and fries there, and I believe that if a place does not have good fries, then you just simply cannot have burgers there.

Before we even decided upon the food, we b-lined it for the wine list. Since we hadn’t actually tasted any wine, it was only fair that we test out out new found obnoxious wine skills on these unsuspecting victims. Z picked out an ’06 Bordeaux and, because it was French wine, I was satisfied with the choice. We told the waitress about our now infamous wine class and she didn’t mind our obnoxious behavior at all. Needless to say, the Bordeaux turned out to be fabulous. I love a good Bordeaux. Actually, I love French wine in general. Oh, and the food was really good too. By a quarter after seven, we were out of that restaurant and onto our nightcap.

What we learned fromm all of this? Just because you sign up for a wine class, don’t expect there to definitely be wine. Also, Z and I can pick out an awesome bottle.

Long ago, I started a list of books that I wanted to read. I figured I’d check them off as I went and slowly, I would actually read them all. The list is a mixture of classic and modern literature, some of which has been recommended to me and others that I knew of and have wanted to read myself. One novel that I had been dying to read was Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I picked it up last summer and started reading it, and when I say last summer I mean the summer of 2010. I was so excited to finally be reading this novel that I didn’t care how thick it was or how heavy. People laughed when I would pull this book out of my purse and ask me why I was lugging it around. They couldn’t understand why, in their minds, I would choose to read something so grandiose when there was plenty of literature available in the “smaller” variety. There ignorance of this great work of fiction was the encouragement I needed to continue…or so I thought.

I have to confess that I have only gotten through about a quarter of the novel. It’s not that it isn’t entertaining. I actually laughed out loud numerous times while the novel accompanied me as I rode public transportation or sat at my desk at work. The problem that I found with Don Quixote was not so much the content, but the repetition of it. The main character, Don Quixote, constantly gets into scrapes and then gets out of them. He has his own reality and constantly miss-assumes things as other than what they really are. I got a little bored with the repetition and am sorry to say that my copy has been sitting on my shelf collecting dust for the past year, but I have decided to open it up again and delve into it with the determination to finish it this time around. It really is a great novel; just one that might need to be read in strides instead of all at once.

Once again I find myself devoid of the one thing that I want the most…sleep. You would think that after all these years of being a professional insomniac I would get used to the long, sleepless nights that go along with it, but you never really do. Sure, not all nights are bad. Some are better than others, but some nights, like tonight, are just intolerable. I live alone. I love living alone. There’s no one to answer to. You can do whatever you want, when you want it. I feel that everyone should live alone at some point in their lives. You learn a lot about yourself and what you can handle. Your apartment becomes your world and you cherish it at the end of a long day at work. You may think that you appreciate your space, but the true test comes with what you do with it on these lonely, sleepless nights.

I keep a lot of things to myself. A lot of thoughts and feelings, trapped. It’s hard for me to open up to people, to really let them in. I grew up in two homes. In the first one, opinions were not voiced. It didn’t matter what you thought of anything really, because there was no one there to listen. I had a strict bedtime. Always. No exceptions. Many nights, I would lay in bed, completely awake. I didn’t dare to leave my room or go downstairs. The understanding was that it was bedtime and that was where I was expected to be, regardless of the fact if I was sleeping or not. So, I would lay there, my body completely still but my mind racing with thought after thought after thought; I couldn’t turn my brain off. Every so often thoughts of sleep and why was I not sleeping popped into my head…when that happens, you know that you’re in for a rough night.

My second home was completely the opposite. Opinions were encouraged to be voiced even if they were in disagreeance from someone else’s. Everyone’s thoughts mattered. There were no bedtime laws. Everyone there was a sort of insomniac like me. At all hours of the night, you could bet that someone would be awake; you could hear the soft paddle of feet in the halls or voices in the kitchen. I didn’t feel alone there, but I also didn’t partake in the evening rituals of walking around the house, of actually getting up from my bed. I stayed in bed as I had been trained to do so, quietly and still with only my brain for movement. I tried to train my mind to stop thinking, to focus on nothing, to clear the mind as the expression says, but to no avail. Some nights, sleep just wasn’t meant to be.

Flash to my present day rituals of curbing my insomnia. In the comfort of my apartment, I lay in bed as I always had, but now I get up. I roam around my dark apartment eating snacks or running to the bathroom. I do not believe that the comfort of a good book will aid to clear my mind so that I can sleep. They don’t do that for me. They keep me awake, wanting to read more and more which is why there is never a book at my bedside. I turn my lamp on, I sometimes turn the television on (sometimes not), I write in my journal. Believe it or not, all of these things can help at times, but sometimes none of them can. That’s when the loneliness kicks in and I wish that I didn’t live alone all of the time. Will I go to sleep tonight or do I have many more hours to brave alone? The answer to that is always unknown.

I have lived in the same studio apartment for a little over five years now and looking around, there is only a scant amount of furniture in it that I have bought myself. Out of that scant is only one piece that I actually love; the rest was all given to me by various people, trying to “fill up” my apartment. The same goes for just about everything in my apartment aside from my clothes, shoes and books. In fact, the only thing that I had bought for my apartment over the years was my glassware from Pier1, which to this day I still love. A few months ago, I treated myself to a new dinnerware set, but we’ll save that for another time. Today, I was on a quest to find the perfect couch, or rather, loveseat because I feel that a couch might be too big to fit into my place despite the roominess of it. I don’t know about you, but I am an avid online shopper. From the second that I discovered online shopping, I was hooked. Its the easiest way to shop. You can spend the same amount of hours shopping from the comfort of your own home that you would by physically going to a store. So naturally, this week, when I decided that I was going to make the investment into buying a loveseat, the first thing that I did was go online. Me, being the incredibly picky person that I am found a lot of stuff that I just wasn’t interested in. They were either the wrong shape or color. It is hard to actually know what the color of the fabric will look like when it’s in your own home or if the loveseat is even comfortable.

I obsessedly badgered my mother via multiple ways of communication this morning (i.e. Texting, messaging and phone), even got her to surf the web a bit with some of my qualifications in mind and it was only after that, that I listened to her words of wisdom. The only way to really go loveseat shopping is to do it in person. And of course, she was right. It really isn’t possible to know if you will truly be satisfied unless you go in person. After being cooped up in the house yesterday, due to drenching rain, this morning I started my day off early. I got up, showered, made breakfast, did laundry and then ventured out into the beautiful crisp sunny day to set off on my quest.

I found myself walking into Bob’s in hopes that they would have something I wanted and a decent price tag. Upon walking into the store I was greeted by a salesman, who although seemed very nice, was a bit over-the-top. Immediately, I wished that I had brought someone with me.

Although they had many different loveseats to choose from, I was looking for something specific and nothing quite jumped out at me…at first. Then, something did. It was the wrong color, a grain-y beige fabric with, I want to say, dark honey wood legs, but it was really comfortable, so I kept it in mind. Then, upon my hundredth walk around the store, because I firmly believe that you have to constantly walk away from something before deciding on your purchase, I happened upon another piece. This one reminded me of a friend’s that I loved. The cushions were a taupe paisley and the wood trim was a sort of mahogany. After carefully considering it for a bit I realized that I actually liked the couch and oversized chair better than the loveseat, so I walked away from this one too.

I was almost about to give up when I came upon two very different, leather loveseats. I had been staying away from leather because I feel that it’s hard to snuggle into on a chilly winter night, but I was suddenly drawn to these two pieces that it seemed like I had to give them a chance. The first one was chocolate leather, really soft, the arms were high and curved out, there was a wood trim that boasted multiple shades (darker on the outside and lighter in the middle). This loveseat had an old world feel; something that could easily be found in a Long Island home or in a posh Upper East Side apartment. Classic. The second one was black leather, not as soft (I later learned that the first was actually bonded leather, which means not much leather at all whereas this one was actual leather), the arms were shorter and nothing to brag about and there wasn’t any wood trim. What I did like about this loveseat though was that it felt roomier, though in actuality, it was smaller. I sat on one and then the other and back to the first one, back-and-forth and back-and-forth.

I could tell that the salesman was getting impatient with me, but to be fair, I had told him from the beginning that it would take me a while to make a decision and that I was extremely picky…he must not have thoroughly believed me until now. I took pictures of both of them; sent them to a few people, spoke on the phone. There was in fact no consensus. Half of my “consultants” preferred one and half the other. So, I decided to do my walk around again…I walked the full length of the store and back, and upon my arrival I had fallen in love with the chocolate one.