A Southern Woman’s Guide to Guilty Pleasures

On sleep, Dateline, and the quiet shame we act like we don’t all feel.

I have a multitude of guilty pleasures. Sure, there’s the Real Housewives of Wherever. I secretly enjoy a good purse fight among the rich, but who doesn’t? I still watch Andy Griffith. What’s Barney up to now? I’ve watched Naked and Afraid and asked myself, Why are they naked? Would they be so afraid if they weren’t naked on television?

But my guiltiest of pleasures are too shameful to put to words, yet here I go.

The first is sleep—not the tidy, respectable kind of sleep where you tuck in at ten and rise at six with fresh breath, tussled hair, and a cute yawn-and-stretch.

No. I practice deep, hardcore, cross-training slumber.

If synchronized sleeping were an Olympic event, I proudly would compete under the flag of East Texas and bring home gold for Artistic Rotation Technique and Advanced Drooling.

There would be judges from Norway holding up scorecards while I perform a flawless Turn-Over-and-Snore. Someone would whisper, “My God… look at that form.”

And I do not go gently into that good night.

About an hour into a good REM, I start to rotate like a rotisserie chicken basted in exhaustion. My husband sleeps in fear of the spinning turbine next to him. I pivot in that bed with such frequency that the mattress dips like storm waves.

Can’t help it. It’s part of the Olympic training.

Sometimes I’m so hardcore into my routine that the CPAP pig nose slides up my face and shoots pressurized air into my eyeball. It’s like being pelted by a ghost.

Eyedrops, anyone?

Listen—this kind of sleep doesn’t come naturally. I practice this sport religiously in the afternoons—and on weekends, holidays, teacher in-service days, church, funerals, and occasionally while driving. Don’t worry. I’ve honed the art of keeping one eye open for a few minutes, then switching to the other eye, like a drowsy Cyclops.

I wake up in the morning, preparing for my afternoon nap. I stretch, do lunges, crack my knuckles. Then, I watch the clock. At noon, I army crawl into bed and nap so completely that my husband will pause in the doorway, squint, and reach out two fingers to check my pulse like a small-town coroner. He has woken me more than once just to confirm I am still among the living.

Alas, I do not drift off in silence like a saint. I go under like a body in a crime scene reenactment.

I have a Bluetooth eye mask—a contraption that seals out daylight and pumps Dateline directly into my skull like a drip-line of homicide lullabies.

Keith Morrison’s voice floats in, smooth and sinister: “She never saw it coming…”

And that’s all it takes. Out. Gone. Face slack. Arms pulled to my body like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Covers up to my chin with one foot left out in case I need a head start running.

There’s something about these murder podcasts that just lulls me into four thousand winks. I figure if anyone ever kills me, I want Keith Morrison to narrate my autopsy. His voice hits with all the calming force of nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office. Just before I drift off, I hear Keith say something about a woman named Carol who “seemed normal…until she wasn’t.”

I know this isn’t healthy. I also know I don’t care. Guilty pleasures were never meant to be righteous.

Which brings me to my second guilty pleasure—spoken now in hushed tones.

I do not enjoy saying the word. I hardly believe it should be printed.

My husband, ever the Southern gentleman, would faint if he heard it spoken aloud.

So I will spell out my foul guilty pleasure, and may the Lord forgive me of my sins.

I enjoy a good…

F-A-R-T.

There. It’s out now, like an uninvited spirit at a séance.

We are a house of manners, so any sudden disturbance of the air, the tiniest squeak as someone walks by, is met with one holy response:

“Dolly!”

“Good Lord, Dolly!”

“Take that dog outside!”

Dolly Parton, our beloved Maltipoo and my long-suffering co-writer, has been falsely accused so many times that she no longer acknowledges us when judgment comes. She simply rises, pauses in the doorway–giving us a side eye–and walks into the yard to reclaim her dignity in fresh country air.

Her memoir would be titled It Wasn’t Me: The Dolly Parton Story.

And still—we blame her.

Because we are Southern, polite, and pathologically dishonest about our own bodily functions.

So no, I do not wake to seize the day.

I sleep like it’s an Olympic sport.

I rotate like a seasoned bird on a spit.

I do not carpe diem. I carpe a long hiss of wind. (That’s Latin for “let it rip”). Just like everyone else on the planet who pretends this doesn’t make their bellies feel smaller, tighter, and relieved.

And when mercy comes—quiet and unannounced—I am comforted knowing that all over the world, folks will blame the dog and carry on.

May your naps be long, your Bluetooth murder-mask never lose signal, your CPAP hoses remain untangled, and may Saint Dolly Parton, Patron of the Wrongly Accused, forgive what she has endured under our roof.

—Carol

© 2025 Carol Countryman. All rights reserved.
This piece is part of Psalm of Lies and the ongoing series Tales from East Texas.
Please share the link, not the text. Reprints, excerpts, or readings by permission only: carolcountryman@gmail.com.