Yeah, yeah, I know, Season 5 of Top Chef has started. Once again, most of the food blogs are tracking the season, people I know are organizing viewing parties, and a guy can’t settle into a blissful hour on the couch with Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style without seeing Padma Lakshmi’s face, over and over and over again.You know what? I can’t do it. I ignored season 1 because I generally don’t watch food shows on television — too much like work — but the reality show got so much buzz that I realized I was missing out on something important. Season 2 launched right as I moved to Seattle. My new next-door neighbor and I started up a weekly ritual of drinking beer and watching the show (she was rooting for Sam; I was rooting for Cliff, and then Ilan, and neither of us for purely gastronomic reasons). Kelli couldn’t help noticing how wrapped up I got in the show. Talking to the screen, flinching constantly — there was some serious audience participation happening. “You’re just not stressed because you never did this for a living,” I’d tell her.My dedication to the show has decreased with each succeeding season,especially after Kelli moved across town and no one was knocking at my doorevery Wednesday expecting snacks and conversation. A couple weeks back, just as Season5 started, I turned on the show one night and saw the cooks in the kitchenhauling ass while the timer neared zero. I turned the televisionright off. The flashbacks were just too strong.In the kitchen, every night is a race that starts the minute you changeinto your chef’s whites and ends (you hope) the moment you spot thefirst customer walking into the restaurant (only to turn into adifferent, even more stressful kind of race to serve them all). Between1 and 5, you’re preparing all the mise en place for your station, whichinvolves everything from picking thyme leaves off a forest of herb sprigs to simmering $100 worth of veal stock down into 2 cupsof a huckleberry-rosemary reduction sauce. As 4 o’clock rolls around, while the waiters areout front leisurely rearranging wine glasses and jawing off about theirlatest haircuts, the cooks are in back, sweating, swearing, brushingpast one another mid-run to the walk-in.In my 20s, I loved it. Loved the 10-hour adrenaline rush. Loved thecompetition, the high drama, the pressure to get every detail right.But a decade later, when I watch Top Chef’s highly experiencedchefs in those 4 o’clock weeds, Ifeel that old surge of stress and fear hit, and I can’t sit still. Withno pots to help stir and no neighbors to talk me down, watching Top Chef is just no fun.So sorry, Tom, Padma, Ted, Gail, Anthony, and all my other TV friends.Good luck crowning your next chamption. I’m sittting this competitionout.