guilty pleasure

I have a problem. Usually I’m pretty good at looking out for Future J (we’re counting the PhD as a pass and a hard lesson learned), and I’m not usually especially over-indulgent with things like staying out all night, my credit card, or (believe it or not) calorically dense fried potato products. I exercise, brush my teeth, eat vegetables, visit the doctor annually and occasionally call my mother. These are all Grown Up things that I do because Future J (and increasingly Present J) will thank me for them. What neither Past, Present or Future iterations of myself needs is Dear Prudence.

For those of you who don’t read the Washington Post or Slate, Dear Prudence is an advice column. Never having been a “Dear Abby” fan, I’m not sure how it stacks up, but I am desperately, embarrassingly, no-hope-in-sight hooked. I think part of it stems from my epistolary instincts and my deep love of wit—and while I’m confessing—puns (we could call it word-play, but that’s euphemistic at best). Part of it too is that my favorite kind of freude has always been schadenfreude. But deep down I think it’s just that I have a bit of downtime and I’ve succumbed to the age-old satisfaction of other people’s problems being more interesting than mine—and having the rush of having someone snarky tell people what to do about them.  I know, I know, I might as well spend my days watching talk shows.

But now that I’m deep into back issues of the column (it will be a sad day when the archive finally runs dry), I think I might be sabotaging Future J a bit. For example I’m so horribly embarrassed about reading this that I keep minimizing it whenever one of my co-workers walks by. It’s wicked conspicuous and they probably think I’m looking at something far worse than I am, but given the hours I sink into this, I *should* be embarrassed. The other problem is, the real news doesn’t seem interesting any more. I get three lines into some rant against Romney’s tax returns or Marcellus Shale or Joe Paterno and SNOOZE. I want the good stuff: the I slept with my daughter’s boyfriend and now I’m racked with guilt but secretly want to leave my husband and run away with him since I’m carrying his love child anyway grade A shit. And then I want a clever pun about quasi-incest and terrible mothers and stifling the selfish urge to elope. And then possibly a pro-choice lecture about how some choices are better than others. I want—no I need—to catch the media high, and the presidential election is not doing it for me; I need socially sanctioned voyeurism.

All the education in the world and it’s come to this.

(Not) Lacking Prudence