Guilty Pleasures

Okay...so there are a number of indulgences of which I am deeply ashamed. The picture above is just a quick example of such things. Firstly, the appalling Photoshop collage of these three images is below amateur and bordering on absurd. However, it is never a threat to the nation of absurd as it is constantly locked in the battles of a Civil War...the great war of self-deprecation.

So let us begin. Michael Bolton. He hasn't exactly had a lot of headlines or articles devoted to his marvelous talents in quite some time. I remember very fondly back to a high school english class where a certain teacher (who shall remain nameless) decided that it would be an effective strategy to include relevant and contemporary pop music in order to demonstrate some literary term. She chose to use Michael Bolton's Love is a Wonderful thing...I believe because it was a blatant rip-off of some poem we had just read or something. Regardless of the intention, she held the entire class captive and flabbergasted and she swished and swayed in her moo moo-like polyester garb. She made an impression alright but it certainly wasn't about plagiarism. It was this very memory however that inspired me to revisit Michael Bolton a few years later. It was then that I discovered to enormous gems, "How Can We Be Lovers If We Can't Be Friends" and "Said 'I Love You' But I Lied." Now, if you can ignore the lengthy song titles (and I am sure you can since we've been made to deal with much longer ones thanks to Panic! At The Disco). Now when you listen to these songs, you can easily understand why Michael Bolton's face always looked like it was concealing a brain aneurysm in progress...it's because he is FEELING every single note and word...each of which slightly ups a millimeter of Mercury in the ol' barometer. I remember being completely thrown off by the "Said 'I Love You'..." song title, thinking that this gobstopper of a cheese ball would never sing a break-up song...but all it really takes is one closer listen to reveal:

"Said 'I love you' but I lied. Cuz this is more than love I feel inside/ Said 'I love you' but I was wrong. Cuz love can never ever feel so strong"

Whew! No wonder he was plucking the heartstrings of every housewife in America...they'd all been lied to about being loved, but not quite like this before. It really IS a shame that while cutting his hair did wonders for his looks...the ol' Delilah snip removed all of his powers and he quickly washed away like a color rinse on Ashley Judd's prematurely gray hair.

On that note, shall we engage the trashiest of all my guilty pleasures, namely Coffee Mate. Now this stuff is just wrong...it should probably be used only as a compliment to Sanka decaffeinated Coffee Crystals. I can't be sure exactly what this non-dairy creamer actually is beyond a chemically enhanced form of Palm Seed Oil. I can just see a palm tree going in one side of a factory alongside barrels and barrels of poisonous and noxious materials to have a nice little container of coffee mate hopping out the other side. So I blame my alcoholic, white trash ex boyfriend for getting me started on coffee mate. He was too much of a drunk to ever keep any fresh food in the house...let alone half and half (a necessary evil for coffee consumption). But Joy of Joys, coffee mate didn't ever go bad and this is what he had lying around...though I think it was probably some giant generic canister of the stuff. But nowadays, I find myself unable to live without at least one treated cup of this a month...I go back to my normal lattes and cups of coffee, but there is some redneck, trailer trash kid that lives inside my stomach that demands this stuff at least once a month.

Speaking of that hillbilly hick that lives in my stomach and makes dietary suggestions louder than any FDA office ever could...this kid also demands a more frequent dose of something even more despicable: Beef Jerky. Now, don't get me wrong, historically I would venture to say that this country was BUILT on the slaughter of the Native Americans and the drying of meat products...without those two things, we would not be where we are today. However, the beef jerky of prairie times was made out of necessity...they would kill a buffalo and know that they would never be able to consume it all before it spoiled...so they would jerkify it in order to munch on it later on in the year. They didn't have access to sodium benzoate and msg to really amp up the nasty factor. Today, the packaging very clearly reads:

"The meat contained herein is for personal use only and not for resale. It is derived from animals that received ante- and post mortem inspection and were found sound and healthy and has been inspected and passed as provided by law and regulations of USDA."

Which makes me wonder...is Beef Jerky made from cows that just ended up croaking, in walks the FDA and says "Yeah, you can make jerky outta this one." I am just disturbed by this message and yet I cannot stop eating beef jerky.

So yeah...those are my guilty pleasures. Granted there are TONS more than that. I guess in the end I just needed something to write about. JOI!