Mind your own guilty pleasures

OK.  So I eat peanut butter out of the jar. 

Sometimes!  Not every time!  I admit to taking my spoon and dipping into the Skippy.  Yum! 

I don’t even sit down.  That’s right.  I stand at the kitchen counter with the pantry door wide open.  After a couple of nibbles, I bring out the apricot preserves and go full-on decadent:  Peanut butter residue in the jelly jar. 

It’s crucial to be able to explain yourself if you’re caught in such instances, so I can rationalize it:  Even though it’s gauche, it constitutes fewer calories than a straight-up, socially acceptable peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Yeah!  Never thought of that, did you?  And, it’s gluten free!  Take that!

You didn’t consider the possible benefits of my guilty pleasure because you were too busy judging me!  Oh yes you were.  No use denying it!  You got all uppity.  You would never eat Jiff out of the jar!  Or, more accurately, you would never fess up to doing it. 

Tell the truth now – you have a secret treat of your own.  Maybe you eat your peas with honey – I’ve done it all my life.  It makes my peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife!  Sorry.  My Asperger’s kicked in.

Still, most of us maintain an underground extravagance.  Perhaps you read romance novels under the covers at night and cry every time over lost love – it’s so beautiful!  Or, you can never drive past Krispy Kreme so you dispose of the incriminating wrappers before you get back to the house. 

I knew a woman – a weight loss consultant – who confessed she hid the evidence of her binge ice cream eating in the washing machine.  No one else ever looked there! 

Maybe you Google all your old flames and follow them on Facebook.  What’s that alternate email account for?  Or when your spouse comes into the room, you have to switch channels away from the Kardashians.  Really. 

For me, it’s “Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda.”  Well my, my, my.  I like watching this crusty old detective.  Mostly I love seeing the bad guy get what he deserves.

That also explains my indulgence in back-to-back episodes of “ForensicFiles,” the no-nonsense crime solving series proves time and time again that no matter how “highly intelligent” felons are, they cannot account for every insect wing or area specific weed pod or thread or fiber or eyelash!  Haha! 

My husband finds it macabre.  I say it’s no more graphic than Shark Week.

BuzzFeed describes a guilty pleasure as something one enjoys and considers pleasurable despite feeling guilt for enjoying it.  The "guilt" involved stems from a fear of others’ discovering one's lowbrow or embarrassing tastes.  Harmless, but awkward.  Borderline mortification.

So yes, I’m fearful.

I imagine my erudite friends would find it difficult to appreciate my weakness for the decidedly lowbrow adult cartoon, “South Park.”  I don’t want them to know I watch it and I certainly cannot recommend it to their genteel selves.  Cartman is so hilariously reprehensible!

They might not understand Kenny – neither do I for that matter, but that’s his appeal.  And how can I explain his gruesome death every episode – those bastards!

Oh yes, if I’m found out, there could be consequences.  So, if South Park ever comes up, I feign ignorance, or shock and revulsion.  I don’t want to be expelled from their book club!

According to that pre-eminent source of cultural wisdom, Wikipedia, “guilt·y pleas·ure” means “something, such as a movie, a television program, a piece of music or fashion, behavior, certain foods – or eating habits – that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.

Say, for example, Elvis.  Elvis is held in low regard.  Pretty sure dying on the toilet did it.  That, and the hair and the bloat and the sweat and the jumpsuits. 

But I cannot forsake the King.  Since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell, down at the end of Lonely Street, at Heartbreak Hotel… with my Teddy Bear and the volume up high when everyone else is out of the house.  Air guitar.  Swivel hips.  Sneer.

Please – don’t tell anyone.  Uh…thank you.  Thank you very much.

Is Time Running Out for the Beautiful People?

Here’s the beginning of our ignominious end - NBC News anchor Brian Williams teased viewers this week with the headline of an ominous lead story coming up on the nightly news:  certain hip replacements are failing and will have to come out. 

Easy for him to say.  Seems thousands of bionic men and women now face the daunting prospect of enduring a double surgical procedure to remove and replace their…replacements. 

So what’s next for Jane Fonda and all the rest of us boomers who’ve succumbed to deteriorating joints and metal-on-metal replacements for our ailing bones?  Jane’s a perfect representative of the post-boom phenomenon.  She’s had knee and hip replacement along with back surgery.  She’s 72, healthy, and looking great.  But that may be more aptly attributed to her cosmetic surgery.  She’s owned up to having the bags under her eyes deflated.  

What if all manner of high-tech enhancements developed and implanted over decades of the boomers’ era turn out to have a shelf life, as it were?  What if it’s not just Jane Fonda’s hip and knee replacements that will need recycling?  What about her baggy eyes? 

More than a few folks have had similar elective procedures.  Sure they’re non-essential and totally vain.  But are they susceptible to the ticking clock, too?  Are we approaching the Y2K of the self-conscious aging elite? 

If we don’t get this under control, we could wake up to the luddites’ nightmare:  All our technology turns on us, rebelling in the most unfortunate and unattractive ways. 

Remember Eddie Murphy in the remake of “The Nutty Professor”?  He had what we all want – a magic elixir – one sip and voila!  Thin!  Sexy!  Funny!  But of course, no Fountain of Fitness can exist in the real world. 

Murphy’s Professor Clump, as his newly svelte alter ego Buddy Love, seized the opportunity to pursue the girl of his dreams, the one his flabby, unfortunate self could not hope to impress.  But alas, in a crucial, public moment, just like Jane’s time-sensitive hip, Buddy’s potion breaks down.  Before our eyes, the professor bulges back to his prodigious former self, body part by gelatinous body part. 

Given the impending expiration of our man-made yet mortal appendages and restitutions, we could find ourselves in the same discomfiting circumstance. 

What if nose jobs expired, for example?  Right in the middle of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” Kim’s pretty proboscis might just revert to its original, lumpy form.  A whole new kind of reality could present itself if the Plastic Surgeons of America sent a recall notice for the scaffolding underpinning Bruce Jenner's face work.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Imagine all the serene conversations in Hollywood bistros and suburban country clubs when, out of nowhere, a timer goes off and dozens of lifted foreheads advance to their rightful, age-appropriate positions, coming to rest somewhere in the neighborhood of one’s delicately plucked eyebrows.  In Washington, Nancy Pelosi would blink, giving Republicans in Congress false hope of victory. 

Why, those eyebrows themselves would travel into real estate appropriated by tacked-wide-open eyes, creating uninvited squints even in the shade of Carrera sunglasses. 

What if Botox … oh, never mind.  It does expire.  We know already that.  The wax melts and you’ve gotta keep getting shot up if you want to maintain that expressionless guise of indifference. 

Otherwise, Joan Rivers might disappear altogether. 

Hair transplants!  That would be hilarious!  What if those perfect plugs just unplugged, on cue, like so many spontaneous champagne corks, no matter where the “plug-ee” might find himself?  Like an electrified porcupine coming undone on the fairway, or the boardroom!   

In an apocalyptic scenario, voluptuous lips would shrink back to their original, severe Frau Bluchers.  Silicon breasts would collapse leaving folds of skin and yards of unfilled fabric limp in their wake.  All those pinned-back ears would once again flap free. 

Reminiscent of the cages being flung open at the zoo, all God’s creatures would run in gleeful abandon, returning to their natural states. OK, maybe not gleeful. 

I decline to reveal where I might wind up in such a scenario.  Parts of me could be susceptible to the fall of the empire, shall we say?  But which parts and where they’ll land remains a confidential, eyes only, need-to-know Top Secret.   

Suffice it to say that I keep the joints greased with glucosamine and the clocks wound tight.  Vigilant.  Ever vigilant.