I’ve spent a lot of my life—or maybe it just seems that way—feeling like I have to justify my various guilty pleasures. One example: television. I love it. I have a weakness not only for really good shows, like Friday Night Lights, Modern Family and 30 Rock, but also for morning TV (I’m a Good Morning America junkie) and just about every franchise of the Real Housewives on Bravo. And don’t even get me started on America’s Next Top Model and Jersey Shore. (Really: I could go on for DAYS.) For a long time, I felt like I had to keep all of this quiet, since Real Writers and Serious People only watch PBS, if they even have a TV at all. They are certainly not on the treadmill, talking back to some woman in Orange County who is all blinged out, driving her Range Rover. But what I have learned, over time, is that life is short. If something makes you happy, don’t question it: just be glad it’s there and soak it up. This same thinking allowed me to finally expose my iTunes music library, which I had always hidden from my music hipster friends when they came over. “Is that Barry Manilow?” they say, and while I used to die a little inside, now I proudly nod and crank up “I Write the Songs” even louder.
Sarah Dessen’s 5 Do’s and a Do-Over | Chick Lit Is Not Dead (via apsies)

(via apsies)

My college roommate and I listened to this album over and over our senior year.  Half to make fun of it, and half to enjoy it.  When we had taken our choir trip to Europe, this video had been on constant rotation on Italy’s MTV, so we had jokingly fallen for it.  But now listening to this album with K is one of my favorite memories of college. 

maura:

The only bad thing about the NKOTBSB medley was how it dispensed with the key change in “I Want It That Way,” because that part of the song is THE MOST CRUCIAL PART OF THE SONG.