Day 12, Day ((14-1) (I'm superstitious, not religious))

What are you admitting defeat about? Is it really too late to turn it around?

Starting center for the Minnesota Lynx. 10 years of tryout rejections signals that it's probably time to hang up the ole gym shorts and call it a day.

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

I was going to write a post about how my guilty pleasure is reading Chuck Klosterman essays. Especially Chuck Klosterman essays about how it's wrong to label guilty pleasures as "guilty pleasures," but I thought that too meta for a Lent! Blog! Challenge, so I abstained. But Gina, take a gander at the Klosterman essay -- it seems as though you two share a love, be it guilty or not, of Ashlee Simpson...

I actually think Klosterman can be kind of annoying, so I decided to throw my latent hipster aside and embrace the fun definition of guilty pleasure, sans ironic detachment.

So I thought about name-dropping some early- to mid-80's movies that are cited as "MOVIES YOU HAVE TO WATCH BEFORE YOU DIE/GUILTY PLEASURES," in bars across the country among twenty-somethings in the know. But I was such a shut-in, cable-less turd growing up that my movie touchstones are the not-yet-cool blockbusters that still need to age a decade or two before I feel comfortable naming them as definitive cultural moments of my childhood. Sorry Independence Day, Armageddon, Cool Runnings, Little Giants, Rookie of the Year, Twister, Men in Black  -- your time has not yet come.

Then I thought about what's most embarrassing but gives me the most pleasure in life. And then it struck me like a hard-hitting Andy Cohen (of Watch What Happens: Live!) Real Housewives of New York (Bethanny v. Kelly) Fight Reenactment (starts at 4:00) --  I love watching Bravo!. I used to explain it away as, "Just the channel Top Chef happens to be on, so I reluctantly watch it," when my roommate questioned my manhood upon finding the channel switched to the network that brings you the Rachel Zoe Project ("ah-mah-zing") when all he wanted was to get his Sports Center on. After a few months of this humiliation, I decided to bite the bullet for the other 5 straight guys who watch non-Top Chef fare on Bravo! and admitted that I do, from time to time, tune in to see Jackie's trainers go crazy on Workout, or Patti talk about how the "Picker Picks" (it's true) on Millionaire Matchmaker, or watch Jeff Lewis, well, flip out on Flipping Out. What can I say? Watching Bravo! lets me turn my brain off for a sec and live a life I'll (thankfully) never live. And isn't that what guilty pleasures are all about? 30Rock seems to think so...