I heard you like to laugh. At my expense. Sounds like you're ready to take our friendship to the next level. You won't be disappointed. I swear on teeny, tiny baby chipmunks.
I was half-watching an episode of “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern earlier this week when something alarming happened. You know, it’s the show where the bald guy travels the globe eating the most disgusting looking-sounding-smelling foods known to man. Normally, it’s all light-hearted fun, and you can easily half-watch while you’re busy a) working on blogs, b) wrestling the dog for the frisbee, and/or c) drunk. On this episode, though, he suddenly had my full attention.
“I was homeless for a year,” Andrew Zimmern said, which, no matter in what context, is ALWAYS out of the blue.
My head snapped up and I stared at the T.V. Did the effeminate host in the pink button-down shirt holding a scorpion kebab just say he was HOMELESS? For a YEAR? (And is THAT why he’s willing to eat anything?)
Yeah, he did just say that.
Naturally, this got me thinking about conversation bombs. Those little one-liners people drop, mid-conversation, that bring the discussion to a screeching halt, while you, bug-eyed and cotton-mouthed, try to figure out a way to get things back on solid ground or run away without being noticed. I always thought one of my own conversation bombs was a real show-stopper:
“I didn’t go to high school. …I was home-schooled.”
But really, homeless bomb trumps home-schooled bomb any day. Don’t you think (vote below!)? Here are some of the more memorable conversation bombs I’ve ever heard, all said directly to me over the past fifteen years. Recognize any?
“I don’t really like music.”
“Well, you get married at 17 because there’s nothing else to do.”
You might be thinking this is the post where I finally talk about the fact that I own Season One of “Laguna Beach” on DVD and have watched it, in its entirety, on two separate occasions. Or maybe this is the one where I put up a picture of when I dressed as Doogie Howser for Halloween. There’s a good chance, you think, that I’m about to tell you how much I love guillotines.
You’re wrong.
While all of those things are indeed shameful guilty pleasures of mine, I have one that goes FAR BEYOND any I’ve just mentioned. In fact, I can’t believe I’m going to talk about it now, but, as promised… Let me start by telling you about something that happened last weekend.
Last Saturday night, my husband and I were, true to form, hanging out watching T.V. Somehow, the topic of Jonathan Taylor Thomas came up.
“Is he younger than you?” my husband asked, trying to imply that this was another one of my creepy obsessions with the Teen Beat contingent.
“No,” I promptly replied, adding, “He was born on September 8th, 1981!” I then quickly pulled up his profile on imdb.com, confirming my credibility.
I realized it had been a long time since I had thought about Mr. Taylor Thomas, or trolled (and possibly contributed to…) fan fiction sites about said star of yesteryear. Rest assured, this is not the mystery guilty pleasure of which I speak. The confession, while absolutely J.T.T.-related, is far more disturbing.
You see, when I was 13, like most 13-year-olds, I was a tad…boy crazy. Emphasis on the crazy. Because real-life boys never paid me any mind, I had to turn my focus toward the more famous variety. Any normal Jonathan Taylor Thomas fan might have been satisfied with plastering their bedroom walls with posters (oh, I did that, too), but not me. Even meeting him at a taping of “The View” wasn’t enough.
I decided to become a vegetarian.
Why, you rightly ask? For one reason, and one reason only. You guessed it. J.T.T. wouldn’t be caught dead gnawing on a turducken or snarfing down a White Castle sack of 10.
Do you understand what I’m saying here? I gave up McDonald’s french fries for this kid, because they were made with beef flavoring. And guess how long this nonsense lasted? 5 and a half years! My entire teenage life! That’s just…just… there are no words.
Now, please, I beg of you, post a comment sharing at least one of your most shameful guilty pleasures. I’ll be here in my closet, amongst the skeletons, not enjoying a Boca burger.
I realized something today, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. I’ve come to conclude that the more embarrassing something is for me, the more amusing it is to you, dear reader.
With that in mind, I’d like to talk about Parents. Don’t they just say the darndest things? (I know it’s a two-way street, Mom and Pop. Remember when I said I wanted to quit the flute? Or when I told you I wasn’t going to college because I was going to be a screenwriter?) More often than not, people claim that their parents are an ongoing source of shame. Usually, I disagree with these ungrateful little bastards.
Except this one time.
"My mom let me leave the house like this, and now I'm one of the first things to pop up when you do a Google Image search for 'embarrassing.'"
Now, I’m not going to talk about the time they put my dog to sleep without telling me, or the many times they let me leave the house in white tights and boxer shorts. No, no. That would just be unenlightened.
I’m going to tell you about something you can probably relate to. I’m going to tell you about the time they told me I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. What the fudge, right? Why don’t we try lowering the bar a little, Babs and John? Some days I can barely remember how to tie my shoes. Yesterday, I asked my husband which side the heart is on*. In case it’s not already abundantly clear, I AM grown up, and I CAN’T be anything. In fact, the list of what I CAN be is getting shorter by the minute. I can’t even audition for American Idol anymore!
Before I sound like one of those ungrateful little bastards myself, I should pay tribute to all of the things I CAN do, thanks to my parents. So here, in no particular order, are my inherited skills:
I make a mean carrot cake.
I can paint a room without taping up the edges first.
I can play Chopsticks and Heart and Soul on the piano.
I can recite most of Dirty Dancing.
I can ABSOLUTELY recite every lyric to every John Denver song ever recorded.
I can use “merkin” in a number of ways during family Scategories without getting in trouble.
…Thanks, Mom and Pop.
*My husband would like you to know that I can’t really be faulted for asking this question, because I have a severe case of [self-diagnosed] selective dyslexia, whereby I usually cannot tell the difference between left and right. “Even when you’re looking RIGHT AT the GPS!” he is saying now. He is sweet, but I don’t need his pity.
"You'd better not laugh, you stupid b*tch." ...Wait, I don't think that's it.
If you don’t know what this post is going to be about, please go back and read the title. In fact, please make a point of always reading my titles. I have really good titles. Most times, I won’t repeat them in the post itself, so you should go back and read the title again after you’ve read the post, so you can truly appreciate how clever I am.
Now, where were we? Ah yes, Project Management Boot Camp. Did you know there was such a thing? I didn’t either, until I decided to look for a new position at my company and then they actually hired me. During the interview process, I was told that there was this incredible opportunity to attend a Project Management Boot Camp in Pennsylvania. Not wanting to spoil the interview, I grinned and nodded enthusiastically.
“That sounds perfect!” I said.
If everything worked out, I would attend the Boot Camp during my first week on the job.
“The timing couldn’t be better!” I said.
When I got the job, I asked,
“Who do I talk to to get signed up for this Boot Camp?”
I then found out that they weren’t calling it Boot Camp to be funny. You had to leave on a Sunday night and wouldn’t return until the following Friday night. “Evening activities should conclude by 10pm” the sample agenda read.
“It will be fine!” I told myself and registered.
On Sunday, March 6th, I drove the 45 miles southwest, trying to keep an open mind about both the Boot Camp and Pennsylvania. Now that I had bought my first home in rural New Jersey (yes, such a place DOES exist), I really needed to be more welcoming of my neighbors to the west, whose country music stations were starting to invade my radio frequency.
It was pouring rain and the two-lane highway kept abruptly turning left and right. This should have been my first clue. But no.
“I’m going to learn so much!” I thought.
I checked into my nice, but not as nice as my own bedroom, hotel room and hung up all of my outfits for the week, looking to see where the iron was, just in case. “I am a professional, wrinkle-free businesswoman now,” I said to myself.
If I hadn’t eaten before I’d left, I could have had complimentary room service.
“This is going to be like an all-expenses-paid vacation,” I mused.
At 7:30am the next morning, I filled my ice bucket so that I could tuck my vodka to bed for the day, like any good vodka sitter-slash-drinker. When I went to re-enter my room, a strange man opened the door.
“Oh, sorry, wrong room!” I said, realizing I was two doors away from my own room. I briefly recalled the time I went to the wrong house for a Christmas Eve party and stayed for 20 minutes before anyone realized it. Finally they pointed me next door. Snapping back to present day, I noticed this man had a notebook and added, “Although I think we’re headed to the same place!”
He gave me a strange look, but it didn’t dawn on me until much later that someone with a bucket of ice and someone with a notebook should NOT be going to the same place.
I recovered from the momentary embarrassment and reported downstairs to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. All five days were to start promptly at 8am. A few people were milling about, grabbing bagels and coffee, including the man I had just bumped into. “Maybe now he won’t think I’m crazy,” I thought, but watched as he took a seat at the opposite end of the restaurant.
Twenty minutes later, we gathered in the large, freezing conference room that was to be our home for the next five days. I had a panicky moment where I couldn’t find my name card, but there it was, in the far left corner, next to wrong-hotel-room guy.
“Whew! Imagine if they didn’t have me registered!”
I introduced myself and looked at all of the neat trinkets in front of me.
“I am going to get the royal treatment!” I thought, amused by the blue camouflage bandana and dog tags at my work station.
There were only 17 other people in the boot camp and I didn’t recognize anyone, even though they were all from my company. We were broken into two teams, blue and green, based on the color of our bandanas, and told that we had to wear our dog tags at all times or we’d have to buy the intructors a drink.
“What fun! My team is going to win everything!” I thought, glad I didn’t trade for a green bandana as soon as I sat down, like I had wanted to.
The two instructors both had Southern accents, which seemed to enhance the Boot Camp theme. I wondered if either one would snap during the week and tell us we were worthless little maggots. I kind of hoped they would.
“What happens in boot camp stays in boot camp,” they told us, and the first sense of foreboding came over me. I wondered how many more times people would say that stupid line before I died of boredom.
As they went over a disconcertingly vague verbal agenda for the week (they wanted some things to be a “surprise”), I quickly realized that the reason for such late nights was because we would be in lectures all day and in our teams all night, working on projects. If I thought I was going to get to watch Vampire Diaries and Glee, or ever see the light of day that week, I was sorely mistaken.
By Day 3, shortly after our team had to perform a dance number, to a song of the green team’s choosing (I would tell you more, but I’m afraid the instructors know where I live. I KNOW they know where I work), I hit a low place. A very low place. The kind of place where you think of the American Idol contestants during group week, or the poor bastards on The Real World, and for the first time ever, feel a genuine kinship. If someone brought me into a confession room just then, pointing a camera in my face, I’m not sure what I would have looked like, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. You would have been sitting at home, with your sweet dog and loving husband, judging me for binge drinking and sobbing during dinner “breaks.”
Project Management Boot Camp broke me, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look anyone in the eye when I returned to work. (I still can’t look at the CD of photos and video clips they sent us home with.) Luckily, I’m almost as good at (BIG, FAT) white lies as I am at blog titles.
“It was a fantastic learning experience!” I said to my new manager the following Monday, staring at the cracked leather on my left boot.
“I would definitely recommend it!” I wrote, when the training department sent around a survey two days later.
Written by Julie Davidoski, Certified Project Manager (CPM)
Let’s see. We’ve already covered the fact that I was an extra on “Dawson’s Creek,” am obsessed with Glee, Harry Potter and little miss pageants, and that I named my dog after a “Full House” character. You might be thinking this well’s about to dry up.
Nay, friends, I’ve only just begun. (It certainly helps that blogging about guilty pleasures is, in and of itself, a guilty pleasure. That shouldn’t be allowed. It’s like trying to stare at the sun.)
Here are a mere few of the things I plan to bring to your [rapt] attention over the coming weeks. (Please feel free to express your gratitude by subscribing. Or by sending pictures of animals dressed as other animals.)
1. What to expect if you see Daniel Radcliffe naked, live, as I have.
2. What NOT to say if someone asks if you want to attend a week-long Project Management Boot Camp in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.
3. 9021-Oh My God.
4. Robert Pattinson SINGS! (Holy sh*t, how have I not gotten to this yet!?)
5. My Plan to Save Mankind, a.k.a. The Power of Haikus
6. MY MOST SHAMEFUL GUILTY PLEASURE OF. ALL. TIME.
My husband has been trying to convince me of the power of farts for quite some time now. “They’re hilarious,” he says over and over again. I always lift my delicate nose high in the air and scoff.
Yesterday, though, something disturbing happened. I arrived at my friend’s house and she escorted me to the kitchen saying, “[My husband’s] cutting the cheese.” And I had to bite my tongue to keep from giggling!
Really, Julie, I thought to myself, you’re almost 29 years old. And that’s almost 30. It’s time to put the fart jokes behind you. Then I remembered my blog, the perfect place to embrace the inherent humor of farts! Everyone wins.
Farts are universal, and while nothing new, in today’s modern age we have access to some of the finest farts around. My husband will gladly show you his Fart app, which has over 100 unique farting noises.
Because I would never deny you instant gratification or the opportunity to GOGP, I present you with my top three favorite fart moments. Don’t forget to cast your vote!
P.S. – You haven’t really lived until you’ve tagged a blog about farts.
Fellow guilty pleasure enthusiasts, I think you’ll be proud. I’ve just spent the last two days Googling, Wikipedia-ing and generally cyber-stalking one Mr. Darren Criss. Isn’t technology grand?
If the name Darren Criss doesn’t sound familiar, fear not, I am here to enlighten you. (You might want to jot that name down, though, because I think this kid is going places.) 24-year-old Darren Criss’s shining face and golden voice have been wooing us for the past several months on “Glee,” where Criss plays Blaine, Kurt’s very first gay friend and co-crooner of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Not only does Criss fully commit to the preppy blue blazer and campy dance routines, he does a mean version of Katy Perry’s, “Teenage Dream.”
What really got my GOGP-meter firing on all cylinders was last week’s episode, when Blaine finally grasped his feelings for Kurt. He captured the moment of realization silently, brilliantly, in one of those magic scenes that makes me want to quit my day job and crash the set, so that I can witness firsthand the next ground-breaking episode. (I know it’s FOX, but when’s the last time you saw network television romanticize a same-sex relationship between high schoolers, during primetime, no less?)
I was sure that this Darren Criss fellow had to be drawing on personal experience to deliver the aforementioned performance, but am now convinced (thanks to an enlightening Vanity Fair article) that he is straight. Impressive. He was raised in San Francisco and graduated from the University of Michigan, where he studied drama, which explains his ambigious-seeming sexual orientation. He’s got a fairly robust resume and even released an EP on iTunes last year (check out “Not Alone“). He is featured in two music videos with Charlene Kaye, a fellow U. of Michigan alum, lest any of his vocal chops go to waste.
But here’s the real clincher – he and his U. of Michigan classmates founded Team StarKid, and in 2009 produced a play called “A Very Potter Musical,” which, to date, has nearly 5 million hits on YouTube. Criss portrays Harry and is credited as one of the primary songwriters on this and other StarKid productions.
Darren, you go girl. I mean, good lookin’ out, bro.
Leonardo DiCaprio is the bee’s knees. I own every movie he’s ever made (this includes a tape-recorded version of “Critters 3“), but… he’s always making me feel guilty. If you follow him on Twitter or Facebook (which I TOTALLY do), you know what I mean. Somehow between kicking thespian tail, selling watches and looking super-cute, he finds time to crusade for things like coral reefs and the ozone.
This year, it’s tigers.
If, like me, you’re feeling schmucky and want to feel a little less schmucky, click on Tony and donate:
Diets aren’t a guilty pleasure, but cheating on them certainly is. I’ve been cheating on my diet for 723 days now, and I’d like to let you in on my secrets. You’re welcome in advance.
Pop Tarts
They put two in every sleeve, meaning it is OBVIOUSLY appropriate to eat both. Try it.
Go Big or Go Bacon.
Preferably, both.
= 1 serving.
You probably already knew this one. I should have given you more credit. I’m sorry.
Elastic-waisted pants.
But don’t worry. You’re not gaining weight, they just shrunk in the wash.
It’s important to have a mantra. Charlie Sheen likes to think he’s bi-winning. I prefer “Rice Cakes are Evil.” Look at this woman. I’ve named her Carolyn. Carolyn doesn’t really want to eat that rice cake. The devil is making her do it. Fight the good fight, Carolyn!
I’ll give you a minute to grab a pen, because I’m about to share THE most important secret when it comes to [cheating on] your diet:
Will Power
When you find you’re craving fruit, water, or god forbid, tennis, take a moment, sit down and think, “Is this REALLY what I need right now?”
We had our breeder picked out before the puppies were born, and it was a long waiting process until at long last Uncle Jesse, our precious Australian Labradoodle, came to live with us.
When the puppies turned 7 weeks old, we were told which one would be ours, and I thought it only fitting to make a tribute video to occupy me until we could pick him up 1 week later.
Go Jules Go 
