Twilight, or how to warp young girls...

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas! It was 80 degrees when I left my mom’s house on Saturday. If that’s not Christmas weather, then I don’t know what is! There are so many things skittering around in my brain that I don’t even know what to write about. But since I’ve been reading so much lately, and I’ve seen several recent blog posts about books…well, here we go!

My most recent reading binge started with The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I was enjoying it, and we had a Books a Million gift card that was about to start being charged due to lack of use, so TM went out and bought me Twilight.

At this point, I had no idea what Twilight was all about (except something vaguely about vampires), or any of the hoopla surrounding it, or even that they were making a movie! (The rock I live under, it is nice and big and shelters me from lots of pop culture crap!) So I read Twilight. I have to admit, it sucked me in a bit at first. Though the plot was thin (among other issues), I liked some of the characters and I thought some of the premises were interesting (i.e. what could be bad about sparkliness??). Lots of things, especially about Edward and Bella’s relationship, bothered me, but I read the book so fast that I didn’t really get bogged down thinking too much about all the things that disturbed me about it.

And then I read the second book. Seriously? SERIOUSLY??? The whole book was just a disgusting whine-fest. Boys and girls, this is what happens when you have seriously unhealthy relationships.

Honestly, I’m still just kind of dumbfounded by the whole series. And deeply disturbed. I freely admit that I am obsessive. But I am so completely disturbed by the obsession that young girls and even adults have with this series. It makes me sick, and I don’t know what I can do about it.

Come on girls! Go find a heroine that’s not seriously nuts! Ugh!

On the flip side, this whole thing has made for some absolutely hysterical snark. Check out this…I especially enjoy the summaries of the books. I thought I was going to die laughing. Fursplode is now officially a part of my lexicon. And yes, I do giggle every time I say it.

(As an aside, I totally agree with what Abbie has said about the Sookie Stackhouse series. It was nice after coming off Twilight to see a chick stand up for herself. Sheesh!)

Hm

Now that my cold is really waning and I'm really starting to feel good for the first time in over a month, I thought I could be super productive. I thought I would feel like doing all kinds of experiments and blogging and catching up on sciencey reading. Then my friend Jennifer came by. And left me with this:

How am I supposed to accomplish anything with that sitting in my living room???

Yeah!

This! Almost exactly this, in fact.