With excellent hearing in all ranges, I find the sound of a TV jarring, especially football games. It puts me on edge. As a musician, I can't tune it out. That's one reason why I never bought a TV.

Six years ago, my then-boyfriend bought me a smart TV. He said I was socially deprived. I laughed. He hooked it up, thank goodness (I'm inept with electronics). I subscribed to Netflix. A movie buff, I enjoy laughing at intelligent comedies in these dark times.

I love what Lily Mooney wrote in An Ode to the Mute Button.

"Where I currently live, the TV goes on before 7 a.m. each day and stays on until p.m. every night. The awkward staccatos of morning news cascade into an endless cacophony of cable — the dour melodies of WWII documentaries, the tinny early-Western gunfights, the crunch and wail of cop dramas audible in every room.

"This aural overload persists into the evening whether or not someone is watching, as if the TV were a scented candle or a clock rather than the roaring content waterfall that it is. Wherever I go, I hear it all, I receive everything, and I enjoy almost nothing.

" I choose my battles carefully. Occasionally, when someone leaves to take a walk or run an errand — inevitably leaving the TV on — I sprint on frayed nerves to the TV room and give myself a gift, the highlight of the day, the joy of all sad pandemic joys: I press mute.

"Never possessive, only inviting, patient, kind, the mute button beckons my surrounding world closer, and nudges me, in all my cabin fever, a little closer to the world."

Isabel Allende

"Soft music can contribute to making the meal a sensuous experience, which is why the spectacle of people who sit at the table with the roar of a football game or bad news blaring from the television is so abominable," Isabel Allende wrote in her deliciously sensual book, Aphrodite- A Memoir of the Senses.

[nbcnews.com]