I am allowed to be happy with what gives me joy.

Permission is a strange thing to need for your own pleasures, and yet most people carry a private list of things they enjoy slightly apologetically. The band they would never mention at work. The show they have watched four times.

Somewhere along the way joy got graded. Some of it counts as cultured and some of it gets filed as a guilty pleasure, as though delight required a receipt.

The real test is not whether a thing is worthy. It is whether it actually lifts you — whether an hour of it leaves you steadier than an hour of something more respectable would have.

Do the unrespectable one this week, and skip the apology afterwards.