10 Things I Hate To Love

There are many things in life that I love to enjoy and I am totally proud of it. I love hiking. I love photography. I love writing. I love spending time with my family. I love traveling to new places, seeing live theatre performances and basking in the sunshine after a long season filled with fog. I have no shame about loving any of these things. But then there are those things that I love that I don’t go announcing to other people. They are the things that I have a bit of a guilty love for. I love them but I hate the fact that I love them. I love them but I know that they’re “bad for me” or I think that I’m too smart, too cultured, too old, too whatever and that I probably “shouldn’t” love them. I’m sure that you have things like this that you enjoy too, the things that you don’t admit to loving or don’t admit to doing very often.

I’ve been thinking about these things lately. And I’ve been thinking that it’s time that these things come out of the closet. None of them are truly bad. They don’t harm anyone else or show off some side of me that should be an embarrassment. In the interest of liberating these secret passions from their places of shame, I’ll admit to them online. And what I hope will happen is that you, too, will share the things that you hate to love because we should embrace all of the silly things about ourselves that make us who we are.

Here are ten things I hate to love but do love a little bit anyway:

1. Cheesy, campy music. Whenever I get in a rental car the first station that I turn the radio to is the cheesiest country music station that I can find. I happen to think that easy-to-sing-along-with song that have simple silly lyrics are the best types of country music songs there are. I also happen to like songs from Broadway musicals, songs sung by bold drag queens on stage and even the occasional karaoke performance. This is considered by most people to be “bad” music but it makes me laugh. I love it.

2. Desperate Housewives. There are a lot of shows that I watch that I have no shame about loving. Desperate Housewives, however, just doesn’t seem like a show that I should adore as much as I do. I don’t live in the suburbs, don’t have kids, am not the same age as the characters and don’t consider the show particularly smart. And yet, I turn it on every week. I love it for no good reason and I love it quite a bit.

3. My terrible little not-so-smart-phone. I do love fun tech stuff and have played with smartphones that I enjoyed using. I am interested in what’s happening with mobile phone development particularly in the areas of new Android phones, solar and wind-powered phones and the use of flexible AMOLED screens. However the phone that I actually use is a little flip phone that can’t do anything besides make calls and text. It was free with my contract and wouldn’t be loved by most people (which is probably why it was free with my contract). But it’s durable, it’s small enough to fit in my pocket and it’s a cute red color. There’s no reason to love it really but I do quite like it anyway.

4. Hamburger Helper. I would say that I generally eat really healthy. I mostly like fresh fruit and vegetables although I also have a fondness for breads and cheeses. For the most part, though, I really don’t enjoy junk food. However there are some foods that I quite like even though I am a little bit embarrassed to admit that I like them. Hamburger Helper is probably the “worst” of those foods. You aren’t “supposed to” love this stuff. You aren’t even really supposed to eat them according to a lot of people. But I do like Hamburger Helper whenever I have a reason to eat it. Other foods that I love a bit guiltily are Hot and Spicy Ramen, hot dogs with ketchup on white buns and Deep Fried Twinkies.

5. Crayons. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying making art even though you aren’t necessarily an “artist”. However most adults that do this use somewhat “adult” art supplies like scrapbooking stuff, charcoal pencils and big sketchbooks. I use those things sometimes but I also have a soft spot in my heart for crayons, coloring books and construction paper. I don’t do these crafts with kids so it feels a mite silly to use them at all but boy do I love whiling away the hours with a coloring book and the big box of Crayolas.

6. Staying home. I’m not a hermit. I’m not opposed to travel. In fact, I quite love going out, trekking around, spending time with people. Despite the fact that I love that, there’s a big part of me that loves just staying home and doing nothing. I like early Friday nights in bed with a book, skipping a vacation to stay at home and cuddle and coming home at the end of a trip to just be by myself in my apartment. I like my space enough not to move from it even though I can’t exactly afford it and not to share it even though doing so might make more sense. Why do I hate to love this? I guess I feel like an adventurous person prefers making her way around the country more often than staying home and an interesting person goes out more nights of the week than not. I guess I feel like there’s something honorable about being able to throw your belongings into a backpack and to move at a moment’s notice. But that’s not me. I’m an adventurous person who is a bit of a homebody at heart.

7. Typos. Truth be told I don’t really hate to love typos. I kind of love to love them. I think that they often reveal funny little things about the writer who made the errors. However I know that most people don’t like typos and writers aren’t “supposed” to like typos so I’m throwing it on the list as something that I ought not to love but totally do.

8. Naked people in public places. San Francisco is a good city for regularly seeing naked people in public. They show up at quite a few of the street fairs, protests and stage events that take place around the city. I feel like I shouldn’t love this. Either I should think “ew, that’s not someone I want to see naked” or be so used to it by now that it’s passé. But I don’t feel that way about it at all. I do sometimes think that I didn’t really need to see what I just saw but I always kind of think it brings this fun little bit of shock to the world even when it shouldn’t necessarily be shocking. I don’t do it myself but I love that there are people out there who do.

9. Cheap dessert wine. I wish I could be a more sophisticated wine drinker. I wish I could love the dark, rich red wines. I wish I could order the right wines with the right dishes. Truth be told though I’m a huge fan of dessert wines and am just as happy with the $4 bottle as I am with the $10 glass. I’m so not fancy in that way!

10. Quitting things I’ve started. I quit almost everything. I start classes, get bored of them and quit them. I quit multiple schools over the years. I have quit more jobs than I can remember quitting. There’s a part of me that hates this part of me. I wish that I could be someone who sets a goal, strives to achieve it and meets that goal or even exceeds it. But the truth is that I love to quit things. I like learning what is and isn’t right for me accepting what isn’t and moving on. I love starting new things, love walking away, love letting go. There’s so much potential when things have ended and it’s about time for new things to take their place.

So tell me – what do you hate to love? And can you learn to love that you love those things?