Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

This post was inspired by the fact that the same day I drafted the National Independent Bookstore Day post, in which I reaffirmed my need to read the books I own before buying more, I found out that I had some extra cash that week so I immediately went and bought 4 more books in a 25-book series called Mysteries of Lancaster County. I finished the first four books I had of this series in about a week and then went and bought a bunch more. Months ago I finished book number 18 and it was a good point to take a break. Spoilers that one through line of plot that just kept building the anticipation gets an answer and I was overjoyed. But there are still 7 more books. I told myself when it made financial sense I would buy more. At the time I was in credit card debt and then I built other financial priorities. Well, they say unexpected cash should go into savings but I chose to spend $87 on the next four books in this series and the rest was a toss-up between going into savings and making an additional dent in my student loans. 

I am normally not the type to commit to a new series especially when its more than 4 books long, but I didn’t know how big the series was when I found the first few. Long story short I was given permission to go through someone else’s bookshelves and take what interested me and I found four books about a trio of 50+-year-old sisters living in Amish Country who own a second-hand store and solve mysteries. This premise was thrilling. I was at first a little surprised at the amount of Christianity in the books (I wasn’t expecting any) and that’s how I found out that Guideposts Publishing is a Christian-oriented business seeking to promote Christianity. However, I found the instances of faith mentioned didn’t come off as preachy but rather as character-building. People have values that are important to them and for these sisters, their faith is a central element of their life so it comes up at least once in each book. The first is such a cozy mystery and then in the second, someone breaks into their farm (because of course they live on a farm) armed with a gun. So prepare for that.

This got me thinking generally about guilty pleasures. Different people have different understandings of and relationships to that phrase, which is ultimately not for me to get into. Personally, I frame something as a guilty pleasure if it’s something I wouldn’t comfortably share with someone I just met for the first time and that series definitely falls under that category. I do still take a lot of joy in these and there’s really no shame for me, I just know they’re not common enough to be shared with a stranger and receive a reciprocated interest.

A guilty pleasure I’ve had for years is salad dressing on pizza. Don’t ask me how the memory is not very clear, but at one point in elementary school we were given pizza and apple slices for lunch and salad dressing happened to be out on the condiment table so I made a decision to put a light coating of French dressing on an apple slice, put that onto the pizza and take a bite. I remember being surprised that I liked it, but I never ate that concoction again. In the past couple of years, I’ve started eating a buffalo chicken pizza with ranch dressing to tone down the spice and then that morphed into liking cheese pizza with ranch. Granted I will mostly eat cheese pizza on its own, but every once in a while…

A more common guilty pleasure is watching drama recaps of situations I know nothing about. For long-form content, I would tend to lean toward beauty community drama, but the two creators I really liked have since taken a hiatus. So now I primarily consume content via TikTok. If you are interested I would highly recommend @Aerithgirl. She has both a niche tea series that is great and an assorted beefs series that I’d recommend. I find that these videos tend to fill the same interest as gossip. I know every 2000s movie wanted to instill the idea that Gossip Is Bad (TM) but I do believe there are ways to engage that aren’t inherently harmful. Afterall, humans are a social species of course we engage in a number of social behaviors including talking about others and their behaviors.

So that’s three of my guilty pleasures. Do you share any of these types of guilty pleasures or is there something else you love but hesitate to openly share? I am a huge proponent of embracing self-compassion and letting go of unnecessary shame. So  I hope that starting this conversation on this blog can help us all embrace our joys.