Week 7: My Contribution to the Guilty Pleasure Posts

I’m jumping on the guilty pleasures bandwagon because I’ve enjoyed reading all of the other guilty pleasure posts.  As there have been several posts of this nature, I assume you know the drill: I don’t feel guilty for enjoying these things, but “guilty pleasures” is the most convenient phrase to use for those activities and pastimes that society as a whole may mock or look down upon. I think it’s fascinating that I’ve gotten to know some of my classmates better after reading about their guilty pleasures. Guilty pleasures seem to capture the intricacies and passions of a person in a way that few other things can. When I started thinking about what my guilty pleasures could be, I realized that the things I thought of revealed a lot about me. Here are three of my guilty pleasures:

1.      Memorizing Things: I love finding a new poem that I like and committing it to memory. I have ten stanzas of a very long poem called “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson memorized. I’ve memorized the entirety of “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, and “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. For a lot of poems—“The Raven”, by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, “Tonight I Can Write” by Pablo Neruda, etc.—I only have a couple of stanzas memorized. I love reciting the poems I have memorized to myself and quoting them in daily conversation. In addition to poetry, I memorize movie dialogue and book passages. I can quote five minute movie scenes from memory, and recite whole paragraphs from books I’ve read.

2.      Rereading: I thought everyone read books over and over again just like me for a long time. Then, I had a conversation with someone who had never reread a book and I was mystified. Rereading books is my life! I’ve read the Harry Potter series so many times I’ve lost count. Literally. I have no idea how many times I’ve read those seven books, but the number has got to be in the double digits. There’s an element of comfort in rereading books. It’s like returning home, or visiting an old friend. I love discovering things in a book that I didn’t notice the first time I read it, and it’s so cool to see how all of the plot plays out when you already know how the book ends.

3.      Listening To Bootlegged Concerts: There are hundreds of audio recordings on YouTube of Queen concerts from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I’ve listened to a lot of them. Eighty-six to be exact. I’m subscribed to three bootleg channels on YouTube, and I look forward to each new release. It’s so awesome to think that the recordings I listen to on YouTube today were recorded on a rudimentary tape recorder in the 20^th century. Despite their age, the majority of the recordings are in amazing quality. I feel as though I’m in the room with my favorite band. Bootlegs are technically illegal, but, because I didn’t do the recording, and these bootlegs are decades old, I don’t feel bad for enjoying each one. One of my guilty pleasures had to be about Queen because I have a frightening addiction to this band. I was torn between talking about my Queen record collection, my multiple Queen t-shirts, or my playlist of Queen songs that is seventeen hours long, but I think the bootlegs functioned the best as a guilty pleasure.

            I think this post was just an exercise in self-indulgence for me. I had a lot of fun thinking of which of my pastimes I could classify as a guilty pleasure, and I love the idea of sharing guilty pleasures with others so we can all feel more comfortable with our own interests. We are trained by society to feel ashamed of the things we are enthusiastic about, but after reading Phoebe Robinson’s chapter on guilty pleasures in You Can’t Touch My Hair, I’ve been rethinking my relationship with my guilty pleasures. Robinson wrote, “I’m not going to feel weird or embarrassed about [my guilty pleasures] and neither should you about the things you love” (77), allowing me to present my not-so-guilty pleasures for society’s inspection with confidence.