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

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.