I am shopping for a new TV for the upstairs bedroom slash office slash exercise room.

It takes a village of distractions to get me to walk 40 doctor-ordered minutes on the treadmill every day. So when lightning apparently fried the old set minutes before my workout, I declared a household emergency.

“The TV isn’t working! The TV isn’t working!” I ran crying through the house like Paul Revere before the British invasion.

Upon further inspection, my husband determined that the old Mitsubishi had, in fact, suffered a fatal electrocution. After a moment of silence while we struggled to unfasten the cable connection (who in the world has fingertips that small?), we carried the tube to the attic, where domestic devices without extended warranties go to die.

A walk through our attic is like a stroll through a New Orleans cemetery. Electronic equipment, dead and dusty, dots the landscape like so many crypts. Wandering through the lifeless TVs, stereo components, water heaters and window air conditioning units, you get a real sense of our family’s history as consumers, our aversion to extended warranties and our fervent – albeit unrealistic – hope that someday, somehow, these dearly departed machines will magically come to life and serve us again. Otherwise, why on earth would we be saving all this worthless junk?

As soon as the TV found its final resting place on the attic floor, I said to my husband, “Now let’s go buy a new one.”

“What for?” he asked. “Just use the one from the other bedroom.”

“That one is too old, and it doesn’t have closed captioning. I need captioning for the treadmill! I need to be able to read the screen while listening to my iPod while browsing through magazines! A muted TV just isn’t enough. I need captioning, I tell you. I need to overload my brain and bombard my senses or I can’t go the distance!”

“But our checking account :,” he pleaded.

“The doctor said to walk 40 minutes every day, and I simply can’t do it without captioning! Think of it as a medical expense. Or do you want my blood pressure to go back up?”

Thirty minutes later, we are in the electronics store looking at televisions. I’m delighted to learn that all TVs are now closed caption-enabled. All we need to do is find a model that fits our price range (cheap) and our TV stand (small). The decision takes less than 30 minutes and, within an hour, I am off and running on the treadmill – OK, walking briskly – Aretha in my ears, In Style in my hands and the transcript of “E!’s 100 Sexiest Movie Moments” scrolling across my new TV screen.

And I know I’m being ridiculous, but I don’t care. Because walking a treadmill is No. 3 on my Top Five Most Boring Activities on the Planet list, right behind watering the flowers (No. 2) and holding the flashlight while my husband fixes the garbage disposal (No. 1). And since I have the world’s lowest tolerance for boredom and not a Zen bone in my body, I believe that all diversions – and by that I mean anything that makes me forget I’m scampering in place like a hamster on a wheel – are fair game.

And besides, the endorphin-induced “high” – that feel-good byproduct of exercise that everyone is addicted to – is hit or miss with me. So if I can’t get a buzz from a pulse rate of 135 beats per minute, I’ll surround myself with enough stimuli to tweak out a Buddhist monk.

I’m reminded of those nights in college when, in the absence of anything better to do, my friends and I would mute the TV, put the Grateful Dead on the turntable, and dub our own hilarious dialogue over the late, late movie. (Of course, that particular brand of buzz may not have been endorphin-induced.)

Still, I fear I have become too dependent on technology for my own good. And technology, as our attic graveyard reminds me, is a fickle and fragile thing. So I will suggest to my husband that we rethink our position on extended warranties. And, from now on, unplug all electrical devices when a storm approaches. And maybe, just maybe, begin to wean myself off of all these distractions and learn to enjoy the simple pleasure of walking in stillness.

But not until the “100 Sexiest Movie Moments” finishes counting down.