30 Days

In the vein of 30 Days of Truth comes 30 Days of Shamelessness. Here are days one through four:


Declare your love for an uncool TV show.


I'm kind of a nanny show addict (Super Nanny and Nanny 911) as well as an addict show addict (Intervention). I will watch any show where women try on wedding dresses (Say Yes to the Dress). I also like watching those shows that document people's anxiety disorders and OCD habits (Obsessed). Crazy parents parading their little girls around in pageants (Toddlers & Tiaras)? Yes, please.  To me though, of course, those are cool shows.


I've never been a fan of soap operas or housewife-based reality television. Shows about animals and nature almost uniformly depress me. I would rather use my right hand to cut off my left hand than watch a singing/dancing competition like Dancing with the American Idols Got Talent or whatever.  I have never and will never watch any vampire-based television show. And the only space/fantasy show I can stomach (Star Trek: The Next Generation) was cancelled in 1994.


Look a fool.


Looks like someone forgot a comma in that command, no?


I constantly look a fool, actually.


Reminds me of a line from Raymond Chandler's book The Long Goodbye: "Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had."


Eat. Whatever you feel like eating.


That's a funny thing to say to a woman who used to weigh 400 pounds. I've done it. 


Waste time.


Waste time? I'm the master of wasting time. I've wasted most of my life.


Here is another quote, this from Walker Percy's novel The Last Gentleman:

"But if there is nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all."

I was a huge Walker Percy fan at one time, probably twenty years ago, even though I never could make it through his most famous novel, The Moviegoer.
 
Who couldn't help but love a man who could write this:

"It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon." (from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)