I’m home alone, all by myself. And White Christmas is on BBC America right now (one of my favorite musicals). I didn’t call it up from some on-demand service; I stumbled across it while flipping channels.

And watching a movie, “live,” as it were, has a very different feeling than on-demand would. I don’t quite understand it. There’s something in the knowledge that other people are watching the same thing at the same time, seeing and reacting to the same things.

I don’t know who they are, don’t know where they are, will never interact with them. And yet… yet I still find watching on television more appealing, more of a communal feeling, than on-demand or on DVD or VHS or whatever. Not communal like sitting in a movie theatre (which I think I’ve done once in the last six years), nor even with a few friends or family members in the living room. But still, there’s that hint of doing something as a group rather than all by my lonesome. Does that make any sense to you?