The following esteemed AW colleagues have already shared their guilty pleasures for the January Blog Chain. Give ’em a read please. There’s some great stuff there.
Claire Crossdale
Fresh Hell
shethinkstoomuch
lostwanderer5
Lindzy1954
RavenCorrinnCarluk
Forbidden Snowflake
It’s now my turn to present my confessions, my guilty pleasures, my Scarlet Letters of shame. Mine fall into three categories: WOT’s (Wastes of Time), WOC’s (Wastes of Calories) and WOM’s (Wastes of Money).
Starting with my WOT’s, I can goof off for hours at a time with any of the following activities:
Not only has Amazon made owning books more convenient, they’ve made whim-like acquisition dangerously easy and nearly tripled my to-be-read queue. Am I naughty for going into my local Barnes & Noble or Target and browsing through all the books, looking for a good one, then returning to my car to make my purchases on my Kindle? Amazon doesn’t think so and neither do I. I LOVE my Kindle. I also love to have my Kindle read aloud novels that I wrote, though sometimes the electronic voice pronounces the names wrong and gets the accents and emphases all wonky. It makes me snicker though, so I can overlook it most of the time.
While reading is not a vice, normally, when it distracts from other priorities it becomes a guilty pleasure. The Kindle fits easily in a file folder, allowing me to tuck my Kindle out of sight at work. While my computer program chugs along, I open the folder, and sneak in a chapter of whatever book I’m reading. To the casual observer, I appear to be totally engrossed in my “work”. I know, I know. I’m very naughty.
This horribly addictive game is guaranteed to aggravate your carpal tunnel syndrome.
iTunes is especially voracious of my time on Tuesdays when they have a lot of free offerings. My husband also nabs the free download cards from Starbucks whenever they have them as well. In addition, the 30 second teasers can keep me enthralled for long stretches of time, especially if you find where others have put songs you like into published playlists. You then have to check out all the other “if you like this, you may also like this..” tunes.
Firm YaYa’s / YaYa Friends
I can’t provide a link because both message boards are by invitation only. They are Yuku fitness and friends forums. I’ve been a member since the twentieth century and have a post count of over 15,000. Since finding Absolute Write, however, my post rate at those boards has dropped like a stone. Still, I’m good for several posts a week at either of the YaYa sites. YaYa Friends is a spin off of Firm YaYa’s. It was a politically motivated thing. Don’t ask.
Survivor Sucks / Television Without Pity
Not so much lately, but in my not so distant, excessive television watching past, I spent quite a bit of time at the above online forums scouring for spoilers. Survivor Sucks actually covers more than just Survivor. It also has forums for Big Brother and The Amazing Race. I don’t post so much, however, because posters there often draw blood…but are extremely funny and entertaining.
Now for the WOC’s–wastes of calories, to which I guiltily succumb:
Sweets and Snacks
Oy, where to begin. I’ll be concise and simply say that if it has sugar, chocolate, lots of butter or other fats, coconut, frosting, streusel, nuts, or peanut butter in it, I’ll probably eat it. If it’s salty and crunchy, I’ll probably eat it. I cannot be trusted around Cheez-its, macadamia nuts, Wheat Thins, Triscuits, Tortilla chips, Cheetos, Ritz, pistachio nuts, buttered popcorn or Fritos, to mention just a wretched few.
Then there are the WOM’s–wastes of money:
Magazines
Ever buy a magazine more than once and not until the halfway point of the second read through do you get that deja vu feeling? It’s not until I take out the accumulated stacks of magazines to the recycle bin that I discover, to my horror, that I purchased two copies of the same darned magazine. Even worse are the magazines I purchase that get lost in the shuffle and never read.
Makeup and Other Beauty Products
Suffice to say I’m still looking for the magic elixirs of youth and/or sex appeal. Sephora and Ulta are like Sirens to me; I cannot resist their calls. I never give up searching though. I just know that product XYZ that the YaYa’s raved about (see WOT above) is going to work just as well for me.
To all of these things I plead guilty. Would that I could recover the time, calories and money I’ve frittered away on the above. But then again, what fun would life be without them?
Next up in the chain are:
DavidZahir
Charlotte49ers
Fokker Aeroplanbau
laharrison
Collectonian
Capes&Corsets
Vfury
Bsolah
JackieA
LadyCat
AimeeLaine
Frodo
Claire Gillian 
I confess, I love my kindle too. the strange voice is a little annoying though (I have the kindle read to me while I am in the tub. . . that’s the epitome of laziness!)
I am a techno laggard so I will probably go to my grave without a Kindle but, I used to read TWoP all the time. I do so love Survivor and their snarky rundowns made me love it even more.
sweets and snacks … guilty here too.
No kindle for me though, I am sticking to my paper books.
Oh I so want a Kindle! 🙂 Chocolate seems to be a theme … can’t imagine why. 😉 I did the double buy on a book a few times. Guess I know what I like to read! 😉 Great guilty pleasures!!
Argh! You posted an active link to Bubble shooter! Just when I thought the addiction was over . . . I used to play this for hours when I worked a midnight shift in a call centre. 🙂
I used to have the same problem with magazines so I had to force myself to quit buying them. But it’s amazing how many of them you can access on-line.
Ah! I love magazines. Especially foreign fashion magazines. Love them.
I’m guilty of nearly all those pleasures even if I believe Makeup and Other Beauty Products more a necessity and that magazines are the source for what’s hot and current in makeup.
I really dig your list.
I don’t like the Kindle, I need to have a real book in my hands or I go crazy, can’t read books on a screen. I’m apparently unable to adapt to our time and I’m only 26, I’m a bit worried about that (this coming from an iPhone, iMac, HD camera, DSLR, Playstation 3, PSP, Beamer, iPod owning person).
I’m with you on the magazines, has happened to me before. I’m also with you on sweets and snacks!
Oh my, one person’s guilty secret ends up as another’s guilty wish! Kindle? wasn’t too bothered about the idea until you told us it has audio. – Thant makes all the difference. LOL
Swap doubling up on the magazines for books and you beging to understand why I have so many piles of them cluttering my floor.
Thanks for sharing your awesome list. You made me laugh 🙂
Ooo, I want a Kindle so badly! Great list…very relatable. lol
My main problem with iTunes (there are other minor grumbles) is the quality of the audio. MP3 is an inferior format, and every time I try to understand the logic of spending money on something in a lossy format I come away thinking that I’m missing something. It degrades over time, just like jpeg files… and have you looked at image files you saved in that format five or six years ago – horrible to behold.
When Ogg Vodis becomes the industry standard I’ll take downloaded audio seriously, but until then there is no way I can justify the expense. There are nicer copies of tracks out there, though it’s probably the fact that the files are very, very large which stops people from listening to music as it is meant to be listened to.
Thanks for the reads and comments, everyone!
And Carol, I hadn’t played Bubbleshooter in a while either but remembered how addicted to it I had been in the past. I found the link for the blog post and darned if I haven’t started playing it again. I need a Bubbleshooter intervention!