The Five Mild Chagrins

[dr_pretentious]

I don't generally do the meme thing, but jasminewind has been indispensably helpful over the past couple of weeks, and now she's tagged me.

Guilt	What is yours?	Explain yourself
Culinary:	Starbucks mocha	Everybody but Starbucks has mocha that's too sweet. I hate corn syrup. I like chocolate and coffee. Is that so wrong?
Literary:	I wrote a doctoral dissertation when I should have been writing genre fiction. Oops.	People who meant well but should have known better gave me bad advice. I tried to do the safe, deathly dull thing, because it made the people who feared failure on my behalf feel so much less nervous. I'm over that mistake now.
Audiovisual:	At the movie theater, I watch the credits to the bitter end, much to the consternation of my moviegoing companions.	I remember the days when there would be a little reward for the die-hards. Remember the Muppet Movie? James and the Giant Peach? The latest X-Men? You never know when your faith and patience will be rewarded. But usually, I admit, it's not.
Musical:	I can listen to the same album--the same track--a thousand times before getting bored. Companions on road trips have been known to burst out wailing, "New track! Please, please, new track!"	I'd chalk this up to the way grad school stretched my attention span so that I'm almost incapable of boredom now, but I was always like this about music. Anything that can once catch my attention tends to keep it. Maybe it's that I inherited a propensity toward addictive behavior. I'm grateful to the universe that the addiction thing manifests mostly in my writing rituals (must! write! daily!), coffee habit, and music consumption.
Celebrity:	Robert Pinsky	He's a famous poet--that's why you've never heard of him. No American Poet Laureate has ever made better use of the position than he did. Plus, he's kind of dashing, in an elder-statesman sort of way.

I don't know that I'd really call these guilts. They're a little embarrassing, but the stuff I actually feel guilty about is way worse than this. It's silly of me to swoon over Robert Pinsky when he speaks at the Dodge Poetry Festival, but some of the dumb things I said to my spouse when the grad school stress was heavy...now, that's guilt. Aren't you glad we're not caught up in a meme about the five things you've said that you most wish you could take back?

These are more like product warnings. If you're stuck on a ten-hour car trip with me, be prepared for the possibility that I may subject you to the latest Afro Celt Sound System album five or six times before we arrive at our destination. I'll probably prefer holding out for rest areas whose signage promises Starbucks. Unless, of course, you ask me not to.

(awritersweekend, I promise to not to annoy the person I'm picking up at the airport in any of the above ways.)

Comments

[sligoe.livejournal.com]

I do the same things with movies and music! And it's contagious---my kids all do the very same things.

I love watching credits---I love the interesting names and film functions. It helps me to stay young when I see something I don't know about and I look it up later---just because.

As for listening ot the same tracl over and over again---that's what we musicians do! LOL I can't tell you how many times I've listened to the same songs over and over, just to hear a certain chord progression or dissonance---I get it fixed in my brain that way. I once took a trip that lasted over 8 hours and only listened to one CD on the way. What fun!

[oaktavia.livejournal.com]

Yup!!!
me & Tabitha both do the same thing with movies & music too!!!
we will say out loud the weird names or functions... ("hey, this movie was catered be 'on the hoof'... do ya think they were meat eaters or what? LOL")

and those neat little snips at the end are called "easter eggs" no idea why, but that's what they're called... and there's one at the end of both Pirate's of the Carribean (in fact there are parts of PoC2 that don't make sense unless you've seen the 'egg' after pt 1

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

I watch the credits until the end too. All those best boys and dolly grips deserve recognition too. Plus, if you leave early you sometimes miss the best part of the movie. If you missed the last 5 seconds of Priscilla Queen of the Desert you haven't seen Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

I will cheerfully road-trip with you. I once made an audio tape of a single Loreena McKennitt track (The Bonny Swans), repeated over and over on both sides, and played it in the car for weeks. And I *love* AfroCelt Sound System. >:-)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

When I was an undergrad, I became obsessed with a couple of songs by Innocence Mission. The week before I submitted my senior thesis, I would listen to "The Wonder of Birds," which is barely a minute long, about thirty times a day to manage the deadline pressure. By the end of the week, I had no idea whether it was actually a good song or a bad one, but I was past caring. Fortunately for my housemates, I had really well insulated headphones.

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that it is not really convincing. They ask me "What is your worst fault?" and I'm supposed to respond "I'm so obsessed with giving the right information, I look things up more times than I should" Which is true..

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

But job interview performances are supposed to be mostly fictional. It's not like potential employers are going to fess up to their worst faults, not even in your field, where it's a seller's market for labor these days.

I know the meme is designed to solicit guilty pleasures, but pleasure isn't generally something I feel guilty about.

In my teens, I was a big Kurt Vonnegut fan. He said in an essay that he never understood it when people hated books, that hating a book made about as much sense as dressing up in a suit of armor and arming up with a lance so as to rush out and defeat a hot fudge sundae. Hate an idea--well, there are plenty of hateful ideas in the world. Hate a policy. Hate a person, if you really can't help it. But why hate a book? And, in the way that fifteen year olds do, I swallowed that sentiment right into the center of my worldview.

There are a couple of Britney Spears songs I think are reasonably well crafted. Writing a successful pop song is hard. I know I don't have the chops to do it. Kull the Conqueror was exactly the movie I wanted it to be--I paid full price for tickets, and left the theater satisfied. Not only have I had, at some points in my life, a serious comic book habit--I've put comic books on the required reading list for a university literature course. I don't feel guilt about any of that. I can't even work myself up to feel mild chagrin.

[happy-dr-friend.livejournal.com]

I had a Vonnegut obsession as a teen too. I have to say, though, that in some ways Slaughterhouse-5 was every bit as "bad" as Jerry Falwell warned me: I read it, thought about it, concluded that the actions of the US as described in the book (ie bombing Dresden) were morally insupportable and have never been able to regain my sense of blind patriotism since. Well, maybe I'd already jetisoned the blind patriotism, but I did used to have the habit of giving the US the benefit of the doubt to the point of being blind. That went away. So it goes.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Cat's Cradle was really important to my thinking about religion. Vonnegut's invention of Bokononism, a religion whose practitioners all believe it to be complete nonsense, nonetheless helps them be kinder human beings, which turns out to be the measure of its success. The idea that committed faith and entrenched skepticism could coexist harmoniously in the same mind regarding the same object has been very useful. Probably every religion could benefit from it.

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

The RPT button on my car CD player is my best friend in times of stress. I have several songs that I listen to over & over again these days. My XM also has a repeat feature that is used often. I agree, probably the mildest form my addictive genetics can take in life.

music

[leapfaith.livejournal.com]

In college, I listened to Vivaldi's The Four Seasons so often one year that my girlfriend (who loved it at the start of our relationship) was starting to seriously dislike it by the end. She nearly ruined Billy Joel for me. I vowed never to so abuse a piece of music like that again. If I'm ruining it for someone else (and I dislike headphones), then I try to change of pace. Still, when my marriage was falling apart, I'd be lying if I didn't say I fell asleep to one of two Enya albums just about every night for two years. But I was sleeping alone.

Down with guilt

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

The idea of "guilty pleasure" is overdone. Guilt is for when you have done something wrong. Maybe finishing your dissertation was wronging yourself, I don't know. But I don't really think that fluffy movies or sugary beverages qualify.

If you go around feeling guilty about dumb stuff like having a celebrity crush, then your guilt mechanism will get worn out. How will you be able to tell when you've really done something bad, and should rush out to make it right?

Sorry, can you tell I've been processing my grad school experience? ;) Some people spend years with guilt every day during dissertation phase, good people who aren't harming anyone, but who are trying to do something really hard. It's useless. I'm not doing it any more, and I'm going to go play computer games now, so there. ;)

P.S. Your celebrity crush is a fine dignified one. I recently transferred my crush from Kyle Rayner (fictional DC comics character) to Carth Onasi (equally fictional character from the video game Knights of the Old Republic.) Luckily, G. is secure enough not to be threatened by ink on a page or pixels on the screen.

Re: Down with guilt

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Sorry, can you tell I've been processing my grad school experience? ;) Some people spend years with guilt every day during dissertation phase, good people who aren't harming anyone, but who are trying to do something really hard. It's useless. I'm not doing it any more, and I'm going to go play computer games now, so there. ;)
Right there with you. That's exactly how Dan and I ended up running that Middle Earth campaign.

All the other candidates I could come up with for celebrity crush were dead: Jimmy Stewart, Christopher Marlowe, Mad Anthony Wayne, Benny Goodman... I hadn't considered the fictional ones. The most embarrassing of those would be Remus Lupin. I don't much care for werewolves, but good pedagogy is sexy.

I'm just not very good at this whole celebrity crush thing. Maybe I should try harder.

Re: Down with guilt

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

Jimmy Stewart! I just caught the last half of A Philadelphia Story last weekend on cable (having seen it before). He is actually sexier than Cary Grant in that film. Who else could pull that off?

Credits 'n' mocha

[garybart.livejournal.com]

With you on both mocha (which is what I usually get at Starbucks too) and movie credits!

I feel the pull of that one song, but I succumb to a little voice that tells me that I shouldn't malign the other tracks on the CD -- for who knows, I may find that I come to like one of them even more. (And to the voice's credit, this often happens.)