Confession

Sometimes I wish I were selfish and amoral, because that seems to be what gets rewarded, but I don’t even know where to begin. That’s not humblebragging about how moral I am— I just don’t know how to switch off the part of my brain that always feels worried and guilty. I wonder, if I were to deliberately commit really minor crimes, say, shoplifting one single grape each time I went grocery shopping, I could build up a bit of brazenness?

I admit the paragraph above is sort of hypocritical, in that I don’t really have any qualms about watching pirated media. I suppose this is partly because doing so feels less like taking a physical object, or plagiarizing somebody’s work, and more like looking over somebody’s shoulder at the magazine they’re reading (especially when it’s one of the many movies where I don’t want to watch the whole thing, I want to fast-forward to see the one supporting-cast member I like get their ≤60 seconds of screen time*). The other part is that these days I almost feel less guilty about watching a bit-torrent site than subscribing to Amazon Prime or Disney Plus.

* Seriously, I already paid my dues back in the ‘nineties, tracking down, renting and sitting through tepid 1960s feature-films to see Buster Keaton in two scenes.