First-class tickets on the Guilt Trip Express

I don't know if it's the heat, the humidity, or the midsummer hedonism, but something has compelled the ghosts of my Puritan forebears to come bubbling like a noisome miasma into my psyche and drag me off on a quick trip through the swamp of guilt.

I don't feel guilty about buying a car when my old car was still, technically, capable of running, and I don't feel guilty about buying it at a dealership two hours away just so I could get the color I wanted, and I don't even feel guilty about buying a beautiful car--but I feel guilty for caring so deeply about that beauty. Every time I confess to a colleague or friend that I have purchased a beautiful car, I whisper as if I'm admitting a penchant for kicking puppies. 

And I don't feel guilty about how little research I'm doing this summer, but I feel guilty about not feeling guilty about how little research I'm doing. I've always promised myself that I wouldn't become that old fogey who gives up on learning anything new the minute she's promoted to full professor, but here I sit not making any measurable progress on my current research projects, and I'm not at all bothered by that. Why doesn't my lack of progress inspire sleepless nights and anguished days? How can I be so complacent about my stagnating research agenda?

And I don't feel guilty about all the great books I've been reading this summer or the occasional mediocre books or even the not at all good but tremendously fun books (I'm looking at you, Carl Hiaasen, and your bad little monkey too!), but I feel guilty that I'm putting all those books away without writing any reviews of them, not even single-paragraph reviews encapsulating the book's irreducible essence. I LOVE encapsulating a book's irreducible essence, but somehow this summer I can't be bothered, and that bothers me. 

I say it's time for the guilt trip to end. Stuff all the ghosts of my Puritan forebears back into the bottle, put a cork in the top, and toss it out to sea to bob merrily on the waves for eternity. Let the little sourpusses pound on the glass and scream their little heads off--I'm not listening. 

Not today, anyway.