dlandon has tagged me to do one of those memes where you list your guilty pleasures: culinary, literary, audiovisual, musical, and celebrity.I don't have most of these. I am no good at guilt. If I'm going to feel guilty about eating something, I don't eat it. It's not that I never eat anything unhealthy, it's that I do so without the slightest hint of guilt. Ice cream? You bet. Often. Statistically, it's probably a miracle I'm not eating ice cream right now. (Okay, I exaggerate. I almost never eat ice cream before noon.) But do I feel guilty about it? Not in the slightest, thanks. And I carry around one of those little printable pocket guides the Monterey Bay Aquarium puts out for which fish you can feel okay about eating, environmentally speaking, and which are screwing up the planet at an alarming rate, and I consult the guide before ordering rather than feeling guilty after. (I am something of a prig about this, I suspect. But do I really need king crab instead of stone crab or Canadian snow crab? Not so much.)
Sometimes I feel guilty about eating one of
timprov's bananas, because he needs the potassium with his medication. But he's already said I shouldn't, on the grounds that they sell more bananas. I don't think this is what the quiz means. Oh, I know! I've got it. I sometimes throw away the brown bananas instead of making bread or muffins or bars out of them. I do feel guilty about that, but some weeks other things intervene and overpower the guilt at the waste and the love of baking.My celebrity guilt is that sometimes I fail to have compassion for celebrities as human beings and just respond to news items about them as though they were idiotic objects instead. "I'm sorry you're so stupid; it must be a terrible trial for yourself and your loved ones," would be a much better reaction here than, "What a moron!"
Similarly, my literary guilt is that sometimes I shut a book a few chapters in and announce to the absent author, "I don't care about you!" I do feel bad about this. What I should say is, "I don't care about your stupid book!" As a person the author might be quite nice, with their banality and their narcissism all worked out on the page.
That leaves audiovisual and musical. Umm. This is mostly like the food, though: I enjoy some dumb movies, but they're good dumb movies. The fits of giggles they send me into are not accidental.
timprov and I recently watched all six episodes of "Police Squad!", and I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt about that. I love the endings particularly. I feel all skittish and squirmy about labeling a genre of something a "guilty" pleasure, because people do that to us all the time. I feel pretty sure that there's someone somewhere on lj answering this quiz that, they know it's all crap, but their guilty literary pleasure is "sci-fi novels." And I don't want to do that to other people's work, either, embracing it one-armed and dismissing it with the other.Maybe I should substitute in a different minor guilt. Postural: I feel kind of guilty about how I often sit with my right knee under my chin when I'm typing, or with my right leg thrown over the chair arm. It's not good for me, and I regret it later, but it's so comfortable at the time.
Musical guilt: I played the piccolo for two years in my early teens. Enough said there? Yeah, I think so. I'll be working off pic guilt for years yet.
It could be worse; I could have played the banjo.
