Contrition not necessary.
I was asked to name five of my guilty pleasures. So.
1. Singing along, loudly, with pop songs that I don’t really like when I listen to them too closely.
You know the ones. You know these songs are not really all that great, that there’s something inherently factory-direct or otherwise uncool about them. But damn if you don’t sing along, at the top of your lungs, to Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” or anything by Sugar Ray.
2. Butterscotch. Lots of it.
You can taste the late-onset diabetes in every drop of this stuff. I know it’s terrible for me on so many levels and in so many parts of my body. But what can you do with something so irresistible but devour it and the scoops of ice cream underneath?
3. Excluding drivers from an auto policy.
One of my tasks at work is to run a Motor Vehicle Report on selected drivers for an insured’s auto policy. Their violations over the last three years are assigned an arbitrary point total, and if a driver has six or more points, they are processed as excluded. I admit a ghoulish appreciation for this task, since quite often a driver who cannot drive under an insured’s policy is one who will likely not be working for that insured much longer. There is a certain amount of guilty schadenfreude in that, although at the same time I feel unapologetic for punishing the driver who has two Improper Left Turn Into Oncoming Traffic trangressions as well as a Speeding 26-29 Miles Over Limit on his MVR. Some people should simply not be driving. And if they are, we shouldn’t be insuring them.
4. Arguing with conservative trolls on liberal blogs.
I do this less and less, as it exhausts me to throw that much at the brick walls that are Bush apologists. But periodically, I will feel a genuine sense of mad-on at a particularly specious bit of spin on an egregious story–say for example, the paper-thin excuses for FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina–and I will let loose. I know it accomplishes nothing, especially on a liberal blog, except adding more noise to the echo chamber.
5. Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi trilogy.
With the possible exception of the original, these are profoundly silly action films. I can’t help myself, however, because Antonio Banderas is so damn smooth in the lead role and the violence is so over-the-top that I can’t help but shrug my shoulders and say “Okay.” I feel somewhat the same way about John Woo’s American films, especially Face/Off.
Creative Control 