Guilty Pleasures

I'm finding that part of growing old for me is losing that sense that the bad things I do are actually bad. I mean, I'm so obsessed by my weight and unfitness that drinking a milkshake feels earthshakingly awful, but in reality, only a newspaper reporter with nothing better to do would act like a milkshake might cause the end of the world. So there are two things bothering me on this front:

1. The milkshake. I took Hunter to McD the other day, and I ordered a small pumpkin milkshake. Ordinarily, there is nothing at that place I will eat, but add a little flavor to a soy(lent-green) shake and I'm all over it. I saved it for lunch the next day and it was sweet. I figured it would be another year or so before I had another. But then I posted about it on Facebook, and my sweet Sweetness bought me another one! Which I also enjoyed with complete gusto. The "problem" is that I have this feeling of doom now, like I will gain 100 pounds and die of organ failure or something. This seems like an overreaction, right? I attribute this to all of the media stories about fat people ruining the world, and the immediate death that results from eating fast food.

2. I'm going out with friends tomorrow. We have planned for ourselves an exciting evening out without kids or husbands. Is there drinking? Dancing? Half-dressed boys trying not to look obviously gay while we wave dollar bills at them? Not so much. We are going out for dinner and a movie. The thing is that I'm really looking forward to it with as much excitement as I would have for gay dancing boys. Just a nice, suburban night featuring other adults and a movie that isn't for kids.

So here's the problem: I feel like our culture can distort both good and bad things until it is hard to tell which is which. I have overwhelming guilt about two milkshakes, when I shouldn't have thought about them at all once they were in my gullet, because I've been told over and over that only self-indulgent Fatty McMuffins are so sinful as to drink milkshakes. Second, I feel funny about looking forward to a pleasant evening because the plans aren't filled with drama and excitement. It's as if I'm comparing my fun times to some sort of celebrity meter, and because there is no space in my life for Brad Pitt and bright lights, I'm almost embarrassed that such a tame night could cause such anticipation.

Does anyone else ever have this sort of cognitive dissonance?

Anyway, my mid-October resolutions are to not ruin a guilty pleasure by over-indulging in the guilt part, and to enjoy to the full even the mildest, most ordinary social occasions, without worrying about insufficient glamour. And to make more room in my life for Brad Pitt.*


*For the Brad Pitt skeptics, I say only this: Legends of the Fall, A River Runs Through It, etc. Movies that are just as good without sound as with are true masterpieces.