Guilts

[mrissa]

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.

Comments

[laurel]

Around these parts, Kevin will sometimes note that I feel guilt that the world is round. Um. I just have a lot of guilt and regret in general that I carry around.

Years ago at a panel at Fourth Street Fantasy convention about guilty pleasures, someone (I'm pretty sure it was Neil Gaiman) declared that they don't believe in guilty pleasures. That stuck with me. When it comes to stuff I enjoy, I tend to not feel a whole lot of guilt just because of what it is (if that makes sense).

Maybe it's not "cool" to admit you read trashy magazines or fanfic or watch soap operas or (pick an item) but this won't stop me from liking things or admitting I like 'em. Maybe that's the rare area in my life where I rarely feel guilt? Huh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It'd be a good area in which to skip it, to be sure. "High" and "low" art don't map to good and bad art very well.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Thank you very, very much for the link to those guides. I've just printed one out, trimmed it, folded it, and tucked it into my wallet. I'd rather feel priggish than guilty any day of the week.

guilt?! guilt's my second middle name!

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

-for liking Kish, a canadian half-white, half-japanese rapper whose only hit was in 1991 and never made it out of canada. most people find him supremely grating. i feel bad when i subject them to it in hopes that maybe ONE other person will like it? ever? they never do!

-for writing fanfic instead of "real" fiction (but it's so much fun!).

-for sitting on my Kovsky doing the above instead of riding on the exercise bike.

-for telling people things i shouldn't. i have that guilt worse than anything! you'd think 29 years of this would have led to my keeping my mouth shut or at least my foot out of it, but it doesn't. on the other hand, i so rarely get busted for this that maybe it's not a big deal after all.