My mother's plague

Everyone has that vice. That one thing that always gets them. It may be as simple as having to stare at the stars as they walk drunkenly home one night… It might be the alcohol itself. It could be any other material item that has any addictive capacity in society.. My mother is plagued by one of these wicked little devils. Something that when she sees it, it turns her into a small child and she sits there transfixed for hours at end. She becomes enthralled in this entity, this ridiculous product of modern Western society. My mother is a smart woman, quite possibly one of the smartest I know… I am just as transfixed in her obsession as she is into the obsession itself. I remember the first time I noticed this strange, strange obsession. We were sitting at my Aunt’s house, and my Aunt made a comment about her most recent purchase from the Home Shopping Network. My mother’s face lit up, she got all shaky and excited. And my cousin, my sister and I all looked at each other with the same strained look of a child with a mother possessed by the HSN demon. Now, to most it seems harmless enough, right? Well, when your mother sits there for 45 minutes staring intently at the television while you sit there bored out of your mind listening to ridiculous women with gaudy jewelry on and wayyyy to much makeup; you begin to understand the hypnosis capabilities that lie within flex play and a machine that cuts shapes out of paper. Tonight for example, we were having a nice evening with some Dane Cook. Then, commercial time came, and in my mother’s fashion, she turned the channel to pass the time. Then, she went to that deviant channel in the middle teens, and there was a touch screen computer. The look on my mother’s face was not one that I had ever seen before.. I would call it nothing short of pure, unadulterated computer lust. She sat there, so into what this man from whatever random computer company that came up with this unnecessary atrocity, and she completely forgot about me.. The dog… my sister… we all became a blur.. And Dane was for sure left in the dust. I wonder how my mother becomes so excited. How she can sit there and listen to people talk about jewelry.. JEWELRY.. For over 20 minutes. HSN, QVC, and all those other phone in money suckers on the television are the bane of my existence. Is there rehab for an addiction to HSN?