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

[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.