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

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?