My daughter and I had what we jokingly referred to as a “Jewish Christmas” this year. Neither of us really wanted to do the standard quasi-Christian celebration, considering it was the first Christmas without my husband. So we went out to a movie (Wicked: For Good) and then to our favorite Chinese restaurant for dinner. The place was packed, we actually had to wait for about fifteen minutes and we’ve never had to do that.

This was only the second time we’ve been to the movies all year, and it really cemented for me the reason why: going to the movies is prohibitively expensive and exasperating. It cost us nearly $50 for tickets, popcorn and water, and we had to sit through close to forty-five minutes of ads and trailers. Now, I don’t mind the trailers, but the ads were really frustrating.

And it isn’t confined to going out to the movies… you could spend more than $200 a month if you wanted in streaming services now. It’s really ridiculous. As it is, I’m spending nearly $50 for just two of them. But I flat out refuse to spend more.

So what’s the answer? I guess pirating, which has drastically increased over the past couple of years. The streaming services don’t seem to have caught on yet that people are getting frustrated with the plethora of choices and just pirate the media. There’s also the ethical concerns, and no, I’m not talking about the legality of pirating. With more and more media disappearing every day, a lot of people who pirate have said they feel almost as if they’ve become a repository for movies and TV shows that will otherwise just “softly and suddenly vanish away” for good.

It used to be that reruns fueled the airwaves, Star Trek TOS and TNG on every night of the week. That doesn’t really happen any more in this day of one or two corporations owning every broadcast affiliate and dictating what can and can’t be shown (see the debacle of Jimmy Kimmel). Sure, there are a few shows (here I’m thinking—unfortunately—of Two and a Half Men) that show up ad nauseam on cable outlets, but what about shows like Eureka or Person of Interest or Orphan Black or many others that seem to have vanished without much of a trace? Unless they were released in DVD format, they are gone. Think about it, will Stranger Things or the Knives Out franchise ever get released on DVD? I highly doubt it.

Sturgeon’s Law says “ninety percent of everything is crap.” That goes for what we watch on TV too. But for every Two and a Half Men there’s a Babylon 5. Maybe it’s up to us to be the keepers of media in the face of ever-encroaching obsolescence. I don’t know. It seems as if the whole idea of going out to the movies or even watching a movie at home has become the purview of the Haves, not the Have Nots. So what are the latter supposed to do?

I guess pirate.