I’m writing this on the fly thanks to the internet magically eating what I had intended to post. Yes, I know any IT person will tell you that the internet doesn’t “eat” things and the dorkier ones will give you a run down about the digestive system to boot which will invarably be followed with something trite about “user error” – all amounting to them thinking they’ve said something pithy but typically leaves you fantasizing about whether there is a “perfect” crime. (God bless the run on sentence.) I used to be the IT gal at work and am a recovering perpetrator. What I’m trying to say, since I am writing it on the fly, I’ll be fiddling with the post for awhile as I groan at obnoxious spelling and grammar mistakes. If you find a pet sentence I didn’t fix, then that’s too bad for you. Groan on and forge ahead.

The previous post was about this past week. I’ve already typed it and even though it didn’t make it here the thoughts have been thought and expressed. Suffice it to say the Neon is gone, Jay has a Kawasaki Ninja and the phrase “thank you” can leave someone on the floor with a dislocated knee – I have proof. Oh, and the obligatory statement about how I hope my brain tumor flares up before I go to the reunion or maybe the reunion is causing my brain tumor to flare up at the thought of me glad handing and feigning interest in people I hope will wilt at my glance. Anyone from my high school who might read this – that isn’t in reference to you.

What I’m on about at the moment evolved from a post of a post I saw about women’s reading habits that irked me and started a chain of thoughts that lept from “gross generalities” to “what I personally like” and finally resolved itself into “my guilty pleasures”. It’s a lot like “the list” from last week or the week before or whenever I posted it, but this is a little more specific – not the “I like sunshine days and rainbow giggles.” Here are the things I like that I’m completely unapologetic about:

Books
Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, American Gods and Neverwhere
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series
William Gibson – everything – pulp cyberpunk novels – love ’em
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series – if you haven’t read it and feel you have something clever to say, stop yourself from commenting and go back to your DaVinci Code (incidently I have read that and it only caused my brain tumor to flare up again)

Movies
Sex, Lies & Videotape
Clerks
… and since this is “guilty” pleasures…
Something About Mary – makes me laugh every time

TV
Battlestar Galactica – the new series
Firefly (In my world the movie “Serenity” never happened)
Deadwood
Carnivale
24 (First Season)
… right back to guilty pleasures …
Ghost Hunters
Amazing Race – love the hippies!
Tough Enough – reality based show where you won a WWF contract
Fear – MTV series where young adults scared themselves stupid by walking around in the dark

Food
Cheese
Anything involving a tomato base
… and anything that has cheese and a tomato base – in fact you could pour spaghetti sauce over cheese and I’d be set

Now, I’ve read the things you’re supposed to read, watched the things you’re supposed to watch and can drone on about symbolism, protagonists, the rising/falling action in a story, realism, nihilism, and the accute sense of ennui you’re currently experiencing as you read this sentence. That, in a nutshell, is dull. I get really tired of reading about what I ought to read or see based on some largely ambiguous set of standards and I tend to think the authors perpetrating that sort of nonsense tend to think of themselves as scholarly, well-informed sorts who would very much like society to conform to their world – a world where they have a little utopian bubble of like-minded souls (and people who continue to write run-on sentences will be shot).

To wrap it all up – that’s my guilty pleasure list which evolved from reading a generality about what I as a woman like to read. For the record, most of the authors I like to read are men and if you’re looking for a “good” book versus a “guilty pleasure” book I think Anna would be easily with me in recommending: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.