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[profjw]

Barry Manilow (he's on tour!)
The Simpsons

[infovoyeur]

Gosh when weary from Landside Logos or too much left-brain wording, I like Ishmael? launch toward the pool of Seaside Ikon or right-brain visual.  In POEP Plainer Old English Pleaze I launch into PHOTOSHOP. Unable either to paint or draw [& having nothing to "say" via those media], I nevertheless enjoy manipulating existing images aesthetically via the powerful program not just for retouching photographs.....  Take sushi menus and via Pshop's tools [layers, filters, gradients, skewings, colorings, etc.] create a "Japanese restaurant." Take spot drawings, engravings of old kitchen utensils or labels from vegetable boxes--and play. Indeed, it's the essence of "play" as Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape define it: investigating the unfamiliar and following certain choices at the expense of others toward a pleasing result for its own sake.... Thank heavens for two hemispheres: associative-lateral "thinking" refreshes from linear-logical... Of course this does not deal with guilty pleasures, such as Sex or Drugs or, but on the other hand of course...

[daurousseau]

I maintain a blog that would be of interest to only a few dozen people in the world, but none of them read it.

[jgcarroll]

I want to write an addendum to my previous posting about buying CDs. The only illegal thing I do is to drive my car without a current inspection sticker because I am a struggling doctoral candidate who doesn't yet rate a decent salary as a lecturer. Otherwise, I don't feel guilty about a single thing I do with my life. If I indulge in pleasurable pastimes outside of work, that is my business and I don't feel guilty.

When I wrote my last post I nearly wrote that my guilty pleasure is kicking on my Rat distortion pedal when I play my guitar, but I don't feel guilty about the nasty tone and increased volume. It might be an offensive sound to some people, but I don't care. I don't do it to offend people, contrary to the image of rock and roll and jazz as transgressive, profane art forms. I do it out of an artistic impulse, and if some people like it and others don't then that's the way of the world. I don't feel guilty.

The long and the short of it is that somehow - and this is exemplified in this forum strand - we are trying to prove to each other that we have not lost our sense of humanity as we have entered into academia. Somehow - and I am guilty of this too - we come to expect that as we enter into academia we will become the prototypical stuffy Prof. Kingsfield of The Paper Chase and we will be horrified. Somehow, we all seem to think that some sort of transgressive "guilty pleasure" will prove to ourselves and to others that we have not become the image of Prof. Kingsfield: that we can still get drunk, drown ourselves in chocolate, play Dungeons and Dragons, crank up our electric guitars, exercise our toes, or do whetever it is that brings us comfort and reminds us that who we are is not the resume-stuffing chasers of tenure that we are often forced to be.

In addition, somehow there seems to be an implication in some of the postings that if our "guilty pleasures" are not transgressive enough, then we have not achieved this state of proving that we can still act like regular people. From my perspective, I have never stopped being a real person. I can still talk to my next door neighbor the plumber without being condescending. Why the hell should he care if I can draw connections between Sun Ra, the Bible, Fletcher Henderson, and Ferdinand de Saussure? I write that stuff for my own intellectual pleasure, and it happens to be part of what I do for work. I don't feel the need to pretend that I don't crank up my amp and howl at the moon sometimes; it's part of what I do to make a living as well, and it's part of who I am. I don't feel guilty about any of it.

So if our respected colleague wants to tell us that she enjoys Yoga Toes then I feel good that she has found something that helps her to feel good. Getting down on her for not being transgressive enough is a reflection on our own insecurities, not on her. As I tell my daughter when she starts to get cranky, "Take a chill pill."

[losemygrip]

Junk food, chain restaurants, _Survivor_, and other things unmentionable in mixed company.

[masterofnone]

80's karoake (competitive);
Single malt scotch (sedative);
Dilbert (executive);
Texas Hold'em (quantitative).

[samoa55]

Hmmm...Guilty pleasures?  Let's see...
1.  Tattoos - I have half-sleeves on each arm.  Working on finding artwork for full sleeves.

2.  Smoking - Can't sit in traffic without having one.

3.  Drinking - Need to have the occasional double-tall Jack & diet coke.

4.  Music - 80's Hair Metal

5.  Dancing - hip-hop dancing & Hula

[kilpikonna]

I think musclememory might just be awesome.  Can I share those lyrics with a fellow academic who I think would also get a kick?

[conjugate]

I add my congratulations to musclememory for the song takeoff; she and Vox Principalis should compete to see who can do the best song parodies.  (I think it was Voxy who did such a good job of this in other threads; if not, I apologize.) 

I'm a fan of classic animation.  So, I have three, and will soon get two more, collections of old Loony Toons cartoons, and have a number of DVDs of other old cartoons in various states of refurbishment.  I am probably one of the few mathematicians who would recognize the name of Ub Iwerks, or who has a big boxed set of Betty Boop cartoons.

Haven't gotten the old Superman or Popeye collections, yet, but give me time (and money)....

[illimit]

I don't think you want to know my academic indulgence.:)

Illimit
Pure Consciousness
http://www.Illimit.com

[nemesis]

Handgun shooting
Israeli Martial Arts
Driving a performance car.

In themselves, they're unspectacular. However, being a religious studies professor these things are a bit "unconventional."

[furrygodmother]

LOLcats.
And something else that would far too easily identify me to anyone who knows me and reads the fora too.

[dr_stones]

NASCAR. 

And racing my little British roadster.

[fiona]

LOLcats.
And something else that would far too easily identify me to anyone who knows me and reads the fora too.

Silly. You're not the only stripper/trapeze artist/Wiccan on these boards, you know.

The Fiona

[furrygodmother]

LOLcats.
And something else that would far too easily identify me to anyone who knows me and reads the fora too.

Silly. You're not the only stripper/trapeze artist/Wiccan on these boards, you know.

The Fiona

Pffffft. Those are a dime a dozen. But I would be a little surprised to see more than one or two other people with my particular "indulgence", although I know there are a quite a few academics among our ranks.