I am looking at my television.

Looking at the machine, that is.

Not at anything that might be on it.

We have a TV in the corner of our living room. But we never watch it. Because we aren’t paying to have it hooked up.

How is that working out?

Thanks for asking.

It’s working out … OK. Which is a bit of a surprise.  But not a big one, since this is pretty much how we lived in Hong Kong, 18 months ago.

This is how we survive:

1. We know from two months of TV in a hotel here in Abu Dhabi … that very little worth watching is available in this town. Arabic-language stuff, a couple of news channels (including Al Jazeera in English), some really old and really bad U.S. shows. If we got it for free we probably wouldn’t watch. To pay for it? No.

2. We have moved into the “stolen streaming video” age. We see a fair amount of network TV; it’s just many hours (or days,  even) behind its original exposure back in the states. And sometimes with Japanese subtitles. But also sometimes in HD.

The way this works is … odd little people from who knows where capture episodes of most  American network TV, post it on the internet on fairly coherent and easy-to-navigate sites … and just about anyone anywhere can download it and watch it on their laptops. At no charge. With no commercials.

Kind of the way to go, really.

So, this is how a night might unreel. Leah watches a few hours of whatever it is she wants to see that I don’t, because I’m still at the office. This is when “Greek Life” (I believe it’s called) has been showing.

When I straggle in, around midnight, we watch whatever show both of us might like. Lots of comedy in here, and a bit of reality and some police procedurals.

So, tonight? Two episodes of “Modern Family.” (Kind of weird, but it has its moments.)

Tomorrow? We’ll check to see if the CBS Monday night lineup was 1) on and 2) has been posted. That would be The Big Bang Theory and Two-and-a-Half Men and Castle. More than enough stuff to get us through a night.

Later in the week … 30Rock, Lost, Survivor, the Mentalist, Saturday Night Live, Flash Forward (great re-start episode last week), New Adventures of Old Christine, Gary Unmarried … about in that order, except with Big Bang fairly high up. Not a whole lot else. So we spend very little time watching lame stuff while waiting for the limited number of shows in which we are interested. If we have any extra time, we read or surf.

Sometimes, we forget about a show, and then might watch 2-3 episodes back to back to back, taking up about an hour or real time instead of the 90 minutes you would spend with commercials.

Eventually, we will go back and watch The Wire. Madmen, when it comes back. And we never did see the final six episodes of The Sopranos. (And, yeah, sounds like Tony did get whacked.)

We could have and should have brought a few more DVDs with us, but we were worried about the weight. So we have the first two seasons of 30Rock, but we wish we had the compleat Seinfeld, for instance.

We’re dealing with TV this way because we don’t have much option. Let’s see, bad local TV and a fairly high cost? Or specifically what we want to see, at no cost at all?

An easy call. The post-TV era … but with TV. Just not doing it according to the accepted custom — one episode a week, wading through commercials, etc. And, admittedly,  on a fairly small screen. Even our “Napro” brand TV (no, I don’t know what that is, either) is twice as large as this computer screen. But it’s not like we’re sitting miles away …

I’m thinking this is what we all will be doing in a few years. Watching TV on our laptops. Perhaps with dead TVs still in our rooms. We just got to this a big more quickly than most because we’ve been out of the country most of the last year and a half.

Though I do wonder who is going to pay for this stuff, once advertisers realize no one is watching them anymore. Here in the Post-TV Era.