Day Thirteen: Guilty Pleasure

You know those pudding sundae cup commercials, where an impossibly lithe and gorgeous woman leans in conspirationally towards the camera, offering her secret to staying fit while still indulging in her favorite guilty pleasures? And then her secret is to eat a 100 calorie cup of pudding?

Yeah, those commercials suck. The problem with those ads is that they are pretending to understand the art of a guilty pleasure, but there’s nothing fun about a pudding cup. Guilty pleasures should be mortifying, or full of empty calories. There’s no need for the sexy eyebrow raise and the come hither motion when endorsing a product that is also endorsed by this guy:

So, Lent!Blog! participants, what’s your guilty pleasure? Really now, make it embarrassing. Make it count.

My guilty pleasure is that I have, for about seven years now, had a huge love for Ashlee Simpson. That’s right, I love Jessica Simpson’s relatively talent-less younger sister. In 2004, Ashlee released “Autobiography,” an album I rocked out to almost exclusively the summer before freshman year of college. My girlfriends and I met weekly to watch her MTV reality show, and insisted on scream-singing “You make me wanna LA LA!” as we cruised around the lakes with our windows down. I thought she was kind of edgy. I've never claimed to be cool.

Pre-plasticized

It’d be one thing if I had outgrown Ashlee, but I haven’t. Six songs from “Autobiography” are still on my workout loop, and sometimes out of nowhere I find myself singing “I didn’t steal your boyfriend!” when lounging around my apartment. In the battle of Ashlee Simpson vs. Lohan for Wilmer Valderamma's love, I was always firmly on Team Ashley.

One of the things I like best about A Simp's songs is that I sound almost as good singing them as she does. Let me state for the record, that I am nearly tone-deaf and have not even a full octave range to work from some days. I get sick of having to drown out my own voice when belting out Dawes or The Swell Season, and it's sometimes nice to pretend that I have a tiny pool of musical talent pumping through my veins.

When I recently heard my girl Ash is working on a forthcoming folk album, I actually got excited. It’ll probably be the first album to be ½ folk vibe, ½ heavy auto-tune. I’m probably going to buy it the day it drops.

Hate me yet? Good. That's what guilty pleasures are for.