Admit-Its: 30 Guilty Pleasures and Stressors

You’re not alone and you’re not weird. Well, not alone, anyway

By Ed Goldman

1. You get elated when you remember this is the week you don’t have to separate your garbage from your recyclables and will just dump everything into the same can.
2. You hate, hate, hate Hallmark Holiday specials, rant about how emotionally manipulative they are but, if forced to watch even five minutes of one, weep inconsolably.
3. Doubly so if in those five minutes a puppy or kitty makes an appearance. Triply if someone is using a crutch.
4. The clothes in your closet didn’t shrink over the holidays.

5. Your biggest fear isn’t public speaking or being exposed as an idiot. It’s finding out you went through an entire evening of socializing with a tiny shard of spinach obscuring one of your front teeth.
6. Doubly so if you also had something dangling from one if your nostrils.
7. You floss for the first time in six months 30 minutes before you visit your dentist.
8. You’ve called your partner by another name in an intimate moment.

9. Triply so if it was at the altar.
10. You really didn’t come in fifth in the California Marathon. You get exhausted even riding 26.219 miles. And even if someone else is driving.
11. You’ve never been to Hawaii, Las Vegas or Disney World. 
12. You sometimes over-share about your life (see #’s 1-7 and #11 above). 

13. You have no idea what they do when they Martinize your clothes or Simonize your car.
14. Rather than the aroma of a new car’s interior, one of your favorite scents is diesel bus exhaust.
15. You think awards are infantile and insulting but would like to win a few more before you die, all of which you’ll ridicule as infantile and insulting.
16. You think John Wayne was a better actor than Al Pacino. (John Wayne: Listens to everyone else onscreen, rarely yells. Pacino: Doesn’t listen to anyone else. Always screams.)

17. You liked Brussels Sprouts before they were cool and sweetbreads before they horrified people who found out what they were.
18. Doubly so foie gras.
19. You rarely crave hamburgers or ice cream and you think beer smells like horse piss.
20. You once thought “hospice” is what Bonanza’s Dan Blocker was asked for a sample of by a nurse at his medical exams.

21. Until corrected in front of a group of infuencers, you thought the great advocate for California farm workers was Chavez Ravine.
22. You think gap-toothed Dr. Cornel West would make a better U.S. president than gap-toothed David Letterman, even though they both clearly failed to floss 30 minutes before visiting their dentists.
23. You maintain that Toto and Benji were better film actors than—despite his late-in-life accolades—Bruce Dern.
24. You have listened to perhaps two podcasts in your entire life, eaten only one s’more, and neither snorted coke nor saw “Avatar.”

25. Despite helping to adapt a four-hour TV movie about Avery Brundage, the controversial president of the International Olympics, you have never watched more than an hour of the actual Olympics, both summer and winter.
26. You played frisbee exactly once as a young man and pickleball for about 15 minutes as a no-longer-young man. 
27. You watch Bill Maher religiously even though he’d hate that adverb.
28. You think Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon are the most talented comic actors to ever host late-night talk shows but Jimmy Fallon still aggravates you.