I’ve left NaBloPoMo in the dust, as you can see. It’s flailing on the road, baking in the heat. Sorry, dear. Meanwhile, the lovely Petya has tagged me for a meme. I don’t know that I’ve ever participated in a meme before, except maybe way back when, during the heady days of Friday Five (most of which, I see now, were lost during one Movable Type update or another). But I wanted to participate in this one, because I’d been thinking about its subject, guilty pleasures, when I was composing my Five Situations post. So, Six Guilty Pleasures.

1. Breakfast cereal. For most well-adjusted people, breakfast cereal is not a guilty pleasure. Most well-adjusted people don’t scarf down entire boxes of granola in a day, forgoing all other food groups to consume shredded mini-wheats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I know it’s wrong. I can’t even keep cereal in the house.
2. Hippie cheese-pop. I lived with my friend Jenny in a big, echoey apartment in Brooklyn when I was at my height of obsession with super-poppy, cheeseball, 1960s soft-rock, and the poor girl really got an earful. My disc player was pretty much permanently trained on a collection of singles by the Free Design. Later, my interests turned toward the Millenium, but my heart really belongs to the Beach Boys and the Zombies. This is only a guilty pleasure because no one else I know can tolerate listening to this stuff for more than ten minutes.
3. Friday Night Lights. You know, the television show about high school football in a small Texas town? I know, I can’t explain it either.
4. Long, hot showers. Listen, you might not know this, but I am kind of a closet environmentalist. I bring bags everywhere; I toss kitchen scraps onto the compost pile; I wash and rinse the dishes in separate turns in the sink; and, honestly, I am totally of the “if it’s yellow…” school at home. (It really does cut your water bill in half.) So I really can’t justify my undying passion for long, hot showers. Like, use-up-all-the-hot-water showers. Steaming, almost blistering. Especially in the winter, when it seems to be the only thing that warms up my perma-frosted feet.
5. Popcorn. See breakfast cereal, above. I think this runs in the family.
6. Flickr-stalking. I could spend hours looking at the insides of people’s homes, their moody self-portraits, their snotty-nosed kids, and their bizarre and incomplete salt-and-pepper-shaker collection at Flickr.