When is a guilty pleasure not a guilty pleasure?

Guilty pleasure… right now I have a bit of a complicated relationship with guilty pleasures.

One of my favorites has always been spending the day in bed. It’s my belief that high levels of attention should be paid to properly outfitting a bed with soft bedding, comfortable pillows, warm blankets; curling up in bed should be like floating. When I left my last real bed I moved onto a foldout couch for a month. Needless to say it was less than ideal; I bought a four-inch foam mattress topper in order to make it bearable. When I moved and got back to a real bed I held onto the topper and learned to vault up onto the high stack of boxspring, mattress, foam pile.

Haute Cuisine versus Weight Watchers’ Smart Ones

I love food. I mean I love GOOD food. Truly good food. Growing up on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and Spam, creamed tuna poured over potatoes so overboiled as to be almost mashed, and the occasional green pepper stuffed with something called Spanish Rice (but bearing no resemblance to the mouth watering plates of rice made by my Puerto Rican downstairs neighbor), I always felt something missing in my life. I was a child of the 70’s and dinner parties were made festive by the addition of Maraschino cherries and pineapple rings. Our treat of a night out consisted of a trip to the nearby Pizza Hut (of which I still admit a terrible fondness for their cardboard crust, plastic cheese, and something mysteriously called “pork topping”).

When I went off to college in Philadelphia, I started hitting up some of the better restaurants, paid for by skimming off the cash registers at my weekend job in the gift shop at the Natural Science Museum. Sometimes my friends and I would walk away from a good Saturday afternoon with $300 in our pockets and a jaunt down Market Street to our favorite Italian place. This is when I discovered that there were meats other than just chicken or pot roast.

Oh, Mr. Sandman…

In 1963, Andy Warhol made his first movie. The title was Sleep and, true to my beloved Warhol’s nature, was strange indeed. Although Andy originally wanted to film Brigitte Bardot sleeping for eight straight hours, the final product wound up being six hours of sleep footage of his then lover, writer John Giorno. In the years to come, Warhol would go on to make over 270 films and 228 four-minute “screen tests.” His topics ranged from eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building at dusk (who knew that dusk lasted so long in the City that Never Sleeps) to a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes (now THAT’s a mushroom worthy of C.S. Lewis’ attention) to the blatantly campy Batman Dracula.

Although there were many who screened the movie, only a handful of folks ever really got it. I’m one of the ones who gets it. Sleep, or rather napping, is my absolute all-time guilty pleasure. It is a rare day  when I go without a nap. I normally phase out around 1:30 or so in the afternoon and although I tend to set my alarm for an hour just in case, I usually wake up completely refreshed after 25–30 minutes and can then continue my day.

Produce can be deadly

A year or so ago a friend and former colleague of mine told me a story of how she bought a large bag of green grapes at the local grocery store (we’re talking the middle of Massachusetts here, not the middle of Borneo) and stuck them in her fridge when she got home. Later that day, she dumped them into a colander to wash them and, as she ran water over them, she spied a couple of long black legs inching over the side. Horrified, she had no idea whether or not her kids had already reached into the bag for a snack or not, but there she was…grapes, colander, water…and a black widow spider that had made its home in the fruit. At that point in the story, I believe my arachn0phobic brain shut down because I have a vague memory of a jar and a narrowly missed near-death experience but can’t tell you exactly how the story turned out. To this day, I have not bought grapes again.

The Bad Leading the Blind

Ray Charles. Jose Feliciano. Stevie Wonder. Andrea Bocelli. Scott MacIntyre. Scott MacIntyre? For those of you who aren’t into the massively guilty pleasure (notice how I deftly weave my YouTuesday, Guilty Pleasure, and Thursday Rant all into one seemingly effortless post) of being thoroughly addicted to American Idol, you won’t recognize the last name on this list of brilliant, blind musicians. To be honest, I don’t know if Scott is all that brilliant but he’s managed to make it through hundreds of thousands of Idol hopefuls to the now top 10 which means he will also be joining the American Idol summer tour.

And what does having Scott on tour with AI mean for the producers? Coming up with more new and unique ways of working a blind man into seriously cheesy choreographed song and dance routines.

Guilty pleasure: Barbie

Happy birthday Barbie! You’re 50 this year, but really you don’t look a day over… well, I’m not sure. I’ve never been particularly good at guessing people’s ages. And to be honest it’s been a while since I’ve really studied you all that closely. It’s nothing personal, really, we’ve just fallen out of touch. It’s my fault mostly. I apologize.

There’s a very interesting article in Newsweek (also found online at http://www.newsweek.com/id/185788) about Barbie’s beginnings, and the drama behind the scenes. Apparently much dispute still lingers over who exactly should be credited as Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, or Jack Ryan. I won’t go into details, you can get all of it from the article, but I think it’s pretty fabulous that nothing about this doll is ever without some element of drama.

I know that most of my personal interactions with Barbie involved some element of drama. Though I don’t remember ever having Barbie dolls of my own, I remember my sister having them. She played with them all the time and I remember the tiny little purple shoes that would get lost underneath the bed.

More than anything, I remember how difficult it was to get her clothes on and off, to change her myriad outfits (I mean, what else was there to do with her?), because they were tailored to fit fairly tightly but still had to make it over the insane curves of her plastic hips and bust.

There are certain things, though, that anyone who played with Barbie remembers. Like those tiny shoes, or how Ken had no junk.

Bridesmaid revisited

This was the dialogue I had with my mother as I sped down the MassPike on my way to the airport on Friday morning:

Mom: “So, B is coming to spend the weekend?”

Me: “yes! I’m really excited!”

Mom: “She’s your bridesmaid?”

Me: “yep!”

Mom: “You met on MySpace, right?”

Me: “Ummm…yeah…but we’ve, like, talked on the phone almost every day for two years.”

Mom: “You’ve never met in person?”

Me: “Er, no. But I feel as though we’ve known each other forever!”

Mom: “Well then. I hope you have a lovely weekend.”

Me: “Mom, she’s a grant writer for a nonprofit. She’s really smart and we have a lot in common! She does freelance for the same company I work for.”

Mom: “Okay, dear.  Give her our regards.”

I’m fairly certain she felt this may be the last goodbye. I don’t think my mother actually understands how truly magical this friendship really is—I mean, we were in each other’s Top 4 within weeks of friending each other!

YouTuesday: my kind of epic battle.

This weekend I dedicated numerous hours to researching the longevity of sustained mattress comfort and the impact of non-educational broadcast media. Though arduous, my task was not fruitless. Quite the opposite, actually. I learned three quite important and intriguing facts:

• I discovered that Dora the Explorer will always triumph over Swiper (no swiping!).
• I found that ABC Family, Spike, and FX all play the same three movies on repeat all Sunday long.
• I learned that over the course of an uninterrupted 16-hour period of time, my 4-inch thick foam mattress topper will mold to the shape of my body.

After one of my reconnaissance missions to the kitchen (the roommate was away for the weekend, so I could not rely on his tossing food up the stairs to me as he sometimes is willing to do), I leapt back into bed and landed on the remote. Somehow the signal was strong enough to make it to the tv, despite being blocked by a comforter and my ass cheek, and channels began to fly past onscreen.  Thus wrenched from my second partial screening of “Family Man”, I wound up in the climactic final battle sequence of “Saving Private Ryan”.

Eat, Pray, Love

When I first began reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, I felt as though this woman must have been camping out inside my head for the last year and a half. Gilbert has, for the most part, a resoundingly familiar voice. Her wry, self-deprecating (and I realize that term has been fittingly overused in reviews of her work) style has a kind of “one size fits all” ring to it. I mean, who among us hasn’t, at least figuratively, found themselves prone on the bathroom floor at midnight realizing that they needed an intervention of the highest power?

Gilbert weaves an amazing story of a year-long search for pleasure and devotion, and, ultimately, a well-balanced mix of the two in a clever series of 108 short tales inspired by the 108 beads in the traditional Indian japa mala. As the devout would finger each bead one by one during prayerful meditation, so Gilbert fingers each tale, exploring the nuances as one might feel the intricately carved beads under one’s touch.

Lie to me

No, I’m not talking about that wonderful new show starring Tim Roth, that actor that you know you’ve seen in a gazillion movies but can never name which ones. It’s Thursday and that means rant day. Today my rant involves my 8-year-old kid and his penchant for lying. From the time this kid came squealing out of my belly (lying then about his due date and showing up two months early) I have told him that as long as he tells the truth, the severity of his punishments will never be as bad as they will be if I catch him lying.

Case in point: last year he climbed into the car after school on an unseasonably balmy day with his sweatshirt zipped up all the way to his neck and his hood on. Eyeballing him in the rearview mirror, I asked him what was up with the arctic wear. He claimed he was cold, maybe he was coming down with something.