Okay, now it's out there and I don't feel all that much better . . .

I have a "meeting" today. From 4 to 5 p.m. And I must not be disturbed. The widget will be in his room, with a teeming bowl of pre-inspected, approved, and opened Halloween candy. I may even pull out that new Transformer I was going to save for Christmas.

You see now that I mean it, this do-not-disturb-me-at-nearly-all-costs thing. "Nearly" meaning blood. Or loss of limb. (Which I imagine to be bloody?) Or a radical jump in developmental level. Like native fluency in Japanese. And don't think I will not enforce it. I will. Because today, from 4 to 5 p.m., is the final episode of Charmed.

I've said it. It's out there. And yes, I do feel a touch of silly, accompanied by a tingle of confessional remorse. Maybe I should delete this post and just write about landmark vetoes and light rail.

(Oh, honey, it gets worse.)

Okay, so it's not THE final episode of Charmed. The show kinda very much ended in May 2006. It was late May.

(So much worse.)

And it's not even the final episdoe in syndication, because if what happens at 5 p.m. is any indication (Charmed runs 4 times a day, twice in the morning, twice in the early evening), the series starts over from the beginning and will continue on until, a few months from now, we'll get another final episode. (And even sooner than that because TNT offsets seasons. The morning episodes are a bit behind the afternoon shows, maybe a couple of seasons.)

(Oh, you thought that was it? You know not of whom you read.)

And sure, we own a DVR and I could just record the rerun of the final episode of this show that really isn't that critically engaging. (It's not like it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after all.) But I won't. I'll watch it "live" and I'll run to pee and heat tea during the commercials and I will aggressively shush anyone who tries to disturb Paige when she tries to orb an object across a room. And I will cry when, I hope, Leo is brought back into the arms of Piper. And I will cheer when, I hope, Phoebe finally finds love with Coop (short for Cupid. I'm serious).

And I will do all this--sugar-up my kid and shut down any meaningful dialogue with the fam and turn off my life for a full hour--and not because it means anything or holds some kind of poignant significance to/in/near my life.

But precisely because it doesn't.