MikeyOpp.com

If you are anything like me, then you hate social codes and norms. Perhaps I turned out this way because of my parents, who never believed in setting a whole lot of rules or expectations for their own children. At almost no point in my childhood did either one of my parents go out of their way to try and shame me into behaving like other ‘normal kids.’ They let me dress myself, pick my own music to listen to, and as long as the film I wanted to rent didn’t look too much like porn, it was okay to watch. It’s not to say that my parents didn’t have their own stupid rules to follow, it’s just that they weren’t too big on me fitting into any greater social scheme. This may explain why today, as a so-called fully-grown man, I cut my own hair with kid’s scissors without using a mirror, and why I wear trashy old clothes ‘because they feel nice.’ Well, there is nothing like a trip home for the holidays to help a ‘fully grown man’ realize just how quirky they are, especially when juxtaposed with their family’s recollection of their adolescence. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to see my family, and Thanksgiving dinner was a pleasure (despite the horribly fussy mess that is the annual ‘taking of the family photo’), and when all was said and done, I’m proud to say that the four of us made it through a family reunion with hardly any hurt feelings and no bloodstains or battle wounds. But the thing I realized the most after visiting my parents this weekend is that my life in front of my parents is life under a microscope. To them, I’m a science experiment that consumed their lives for eighteen years, and when I’m back home, it’s time to see how their little zygote is doing.

I don’t think I’m very normal, but I also think that most normal people are boring and hardly worth my time or interest. It’s the quirky and insane people that I meet who keep me distracted from my lofty goal of enlightenment, and keep me working in the relative among my peers, going out to bars, and ‘hanging out’ in my mid twenties. But in the interest of continuous full disclosure and honesty, this week I offer to my parents, as well as my readers, a quick discussion of the real me, the tiny things that make me tick, keep me ticking, and may or may not disgust some of you. I call this my “list of guilty pleasures,” and this is the first week in which I am sincerely hoping that I can reach out and touch some of my fellow readers, by allowing them to feel more comfortable about their own quirks and oddities, because I know that everyone has their own dirty little secrets, and it is the job of the author to bridge the inner personal, private world with the public, shallow ‘real world’ that Hollywood and the media try to instill upon our psyches.

I thought about the idea for this column the morning after Thanksgiving when I got up from the kitchen table, where I was surfing the net one morning, laptop in hand, and my mother asked me if I was headed back downstairs, to my room. Without thinking about what I was about to reveal about myself, I simply replied, “No, Mom, I’m going to go to the bathroom, and I want to continue adjusting my fantasy football lineup for this week.” I didn’t realize, until I saw the look of disgust on her face, that it’s apparently abnormal to use your laptop while on the toilet. But I think this is precisely why one should own a laptop, so that they can use it where they feel most comfortable, and not just at a desk. So I feel comfortable in the bathroom. And furthermore, if another one of my guilty pleasures is my sick addiction to my fantasy football team, then why not combine it with my pleasure of surfing the net on the can, thereby creating one awesome power house of a guilty pleasure? As an added bonus, if this fact about me really does disgust people, then from here on out there will be less people to annoy me by asking to use my laptop.

After discussing, in limited detail, the pleasures of taking your time on the toilet, with my family, and a few friends, I’ve discovered that this seems to be a somewhat sexually biased issue. While it is common law fact that women take forever in the bathroom, contrary to what most men may think, women are not actually enjoying the enormous amounts of time they spend in the bathroom, whereas men, we enjoy a nice Sunday morning Pow-Wow on the toilet because it is a sovereign space in which we can read our magazines and take some uninterrupted time to ourselves. But I will concede the point that there is something weird about people who talk to one another while on the toilet, be it on the phone, or verbally, stall to stall. Consider this my compromise on the issue.

Another social faux pas that I think is undeserved, and needs to be flushed down the toilet (pun intended) is the social stigma that people get for the occasional nose picking. Don’t get me wrong, facial tissue is quite useful, but sometimes, when you’re on the go, and you can’t find some Kleenex, but there’s something stuck in your nose, it just has to go. I think that our culture is completely unfair in its bias against picking your nose. Don’t get me wrong, if you are full of mucus, it’s disgusting and not the healthiest move to make while in public, but if there’s something dry and crusty, and it’s making your breathing rhythm change, then I don’t think that there is anything wrong with a quick pick. If there is lint in my belly button, I clean it out, If my boxers are riding up, I’ll pull them back down, and if there is a booger in my nose that I cannot remove with Kleenex, whether it’s because I’m driving in my car, or the thing cannot be blown out, then I’d rather live with a social stigma, then the pain or annoyance of an ill placed booger. Only a moron allows society to influence them into choosing personal discomfort over so-called shame**.

But I’m not sure if picking my nose in the car is really a ‘guilty pleasure,’ so much as a necessity that must sometimes be performed. I only know that I’m supposed to feel guilty whenever I do pick my nose; and to be blunt, I do not. But a pleasure that I have delighted myself in for the last several years, that I have recently come to feel quite guilty about, is my ridiculous obsession with Eastern Astrology. Before I explain this guilty pleasure, I feel it very important to make the distinction between Eastern and Western Astrology, because the two are about as different as the regular Snickers Bar and one of those new fangled Almond Snickers Bars; meaning that one is pure deliciousness, while the other is a blatant fraud that discredits the original. You see, Eastern Astrology is actually considered a science in many nations, an extremely old and trustworthy science, and it is considered to be such, in part, because it has to do with gravitational forces that affected your body’s composition at the time of your birth. Western Astrology, on the other hand, is basically a fat phony farce in which everyone alive is haphazardly oversimplified and then grouped into one of twelve categories. (What’s your sign, baby?)

So I consider Eastern astrology a guilty pleasure of mine because I used to believe, quite fervently, or as my father would put it, fanatically, in Eastern Astrology to the point where I was checking out my daily and weekly horoscopes the same way a diabetic checks their blood sugar level to make sure that their glucose levels are normal. It got to the point where when I was on vacation, without access to my daily Astrology reports, I felt like a little child without their mother; helpless and alone. I hate dependency more than almost anything else in life; be it on cigarettes, girlfriends, or parents, and so when I recently realized the dangerous dependency in which my self-esteem had attached itself to astrology, I decided to drop the habit like I dropped my high school physics class. I still think that Astrology is a viable science, and I will ascertain that it is more credible than that famous book that claims humanity began 6,000 years ago after some couple ate a forbidden apple, but that doesn’t change the fact that it in order to use astrology, you must take a leap of faith, and the only thing I want to have faith in these days is myself.

I’m positively tickled, however, by how quickly our Western culture is beginning to embrace Eastern values. Yoga is now as popular as MTV, a lot of my friends have actually heard of Aryurvedic Science, and when I tell most people that I meditate, they don’t laugh at me anymore. But I think that yoga, which I have yet to begin trying to do, is definitely a classifiable ‘guilty pleasure.’ I feel this way because whenever someone gets done doing yoga, they look like they’ve just had a pretty decent orgasm. Think about it; when someone comes out of a room, looking like they’ve just left pleasure heaven, after spending a lot of time in solitude, stretching and making the occasional grunting noises, how can you be sure that they’re not claiming to have just done yoga in order to shy away from the fact that they were really in their room getting off? I mean, it seems to me like the two are kind of related, what with the similar result of utter mental relaxation and a sense of inner peace. I think that Bill Clinton could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d told us that he and Monica were practicing Yoga in the Oval Office.

I kind of feel for Clinton, because I think that our society is insanely absurd in attaching stigma to normal human behavior; like sex and nose picking. And even with the freedom of the Internet, I’ve found that things aren’t getting much better. I’m not sure how many members of my readership are familiar with the website known as “MySpace.com,” but one of my guilty pleasures is looking up my friends’ pages on MySpace to see just how full of crap they are when it comes to describing themselves. Members of MySpace fill out a profile in which you list things like your hometown, favorite books, movies, and television shows, and then you describe your physical body and other vain details that are completely irrelevant to a stranger or friend unless they are interested in fornicating with you. But the column in which most people I know are dishonest in is the one that asks “Smoker/Drinker?” I guess a lot of users are either ashamed of their debauchery, or still haven’t told their parents about these guilty pleasures, but I’m surprised by how many of my friends will not admit that they smoke or drink in their profile. The only way to remove social stigma is to be honest about who you are, and what your habits are, so the more you lie and deceive the world about the things you actually do, the more you are imprisoning yourself in a disapproving culture. For more on this, read STBY # 20.

My favorite guilty pleasures are the ones that involve food. I’m a weird ‘word-that-rhymes-with-brother-trucker’ when it comes to my eating habits. For example, I love my food blackened, burnt, and crispy. I also prefer the shake that comes at the bottom of a bag of chips to the rest of the chips. I even go so far, sometimes, as to take the chips out of a bag and pour the shake at the bottom of the bag directly into my mouth. I also like stale foods, because of their interesting and unique textures. Even worse is my addiction to Salsa. While chips are great, and they go with salsa about as well as the laptop goes with the toilet, I actually prefer to eat salsa with only a spoon, and I like to eat it with the same zest that I imagine a starving Russian circa 1965 would attack his daily stipend of borscht. Ask anyone who has ever seen me around salsa, and they will vouch for the fact that one of my most disturbing and awful-to-witness traits is my insane addiction to salsa. If there is salsa in front of me, I will consume it until there is no more, regardless of how full I am. And if there aren’t any chips left, but I can spy a spoon, then watch out, because chips only slow me down, and I will spoon salsa from a dipping bowl with the same gusto that Lance Armstrong portrayed when winning all those Tour de France’s.

I have some more guilty pleasures, but they aren’t really that amusing, or worthy of a full fledge analysis or discussion. For example, I’m not too original in my love of gambling, or the fact that I cried for over ten minutes during the last episode of HBO’s Six Feet Under. I’m only mildly embarrassed by the fact that I own Pretty Woman on VHS and still enjoy the film from time to time. I’m also a huge not-so-in-the-closet-fan of the Jerry Springer show, as I used to fake illness in Junior High School to stay home and watch an episode every now and then. I think I’m pretty borderline-creepy-weirdo because of the fact that I enjoy the scents of toe jam, gasoline, skunks, asparagus urine, and belly button lint, but I justify these facts, and sleep alright at night, because I’m not like that Saturday Night Live character who intentionally inhaled her own foul odors—I just kind of like these scents when they happen to waft my way. But I do want to call out a large majority of Americans on one of THEIR guiltiest pleasures. This pleasure used to make people feel guilty, so I was all right with it, but now it’s actually celebrated and embraced by our society, and this change in social stigma makes me downright sick.

I am, course, referring to “Reality Television.” First of all, these shows are so unrealistic that they make The Jerry Springer Show, the king of fraudulent television, look like a Ken Burns’ documentary. Second of all, they are so morally and intellectually vapid that I actually fear that they are creating an entire generation of morally irresponsible, overly indulgent, and disgustingly narcissistic men and women. And last of all, I think it’s pretty sick that our society okays watching things like the heiress of a hotel magnate who gets paid to flaunt her wealth and lack of social awareness and compassion in the face of hard working Americans who will never have 1% of the money or opportunities that she has. (And just for the record, I am sure that it does not suck to be Paris Hilton, which is probably one of the reasons I despise people like her!) So, I was okay with Reality TV for a long time, but if society is going to continue to give me flack for the occasional nose picking in my car or for checking my email while I sit on Elvis’ favorite throne, then I think it’s time that I fight back! If you agree with me, then take a few minutes this week to ridicule someone at work for talking about “Dancing with the Stars,” or “American Idol,” and just when they look like they are about to cry, take your middle finger, extend it far into the air, and put it right up your nose, and be sure to pick a winner!