Flushing the Lines

Okay, everyone. I see that it has been almost a month since my last posting. I have no excuse. Thanks to the economy, my writing jobs all but dried up in the last thirty days. I have been wallowing in free time like a little piggy--a radiant little piggy like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web.



My mind is more of a jumbled mess than usual, so I'm just going to clear it out in this post, and then maybe I'll have something of value to share with you next time around.



Our friends Mark and Sumar and their two boys came to visit us a few weeks ago, right as the Twilight movie was being released.



Confession: I picked up a battered copy of Twilight at the used book store after discovering that it was all the girls in the youth group were talking about. The book is ridiculous, as are the three sequels, which I ordered online and devoured in rapid succession. I couldn't stop myself, like I was trapped in a tweener tractor beam. Even worse, I got Matt hooked on them. We preordered our copy of the Twilight movie on Amazon, but it wasn't delivered by the big release date.



Sumar coaxed me into driving out to Wal-Mart at 12:15 a.m. so we could buy her copy of the movie and then stay up ridiculously late to watch it. The Wal-Mart associates set out the new DVDs right at midnight. Since Corsicana is a small town, all the screaming girls and their screaming mothers had already cleared out by then, having devoured the Twilight themed cupcakes and scattered all the candy from the vampire pinata.

Last year as Matt and I were leaving for the theater to see Twilight, our babysitters warned us that we would be disappointed.

"They totally changed the plot,' said sitter A.

"Yeah, they did. And Edward is WAY better looking in the book," sitter B chimes in.

So we snuck into the theater with our dollar store candy and snickered through several scenes of the movie. It's funny how the things that have turned other people off--the super cheesy special effects, the endless brooding, and winners like "and so the Lion fell in love with the lamb" uttered with zero irony--just make us love it more. In fact, we like to remind folks who take this so seriously that the plot is based on the idea of "vegetarian vampires." It is what it is. Matt and I like it for the emphasis on chivalry and restraint. But since we're not, say, 13 year old girls, we try not to remember that, ummm... there's no such thing as vampires.

That being said, I feel I must inform you that not only was Edward better looking in the book (no human being could live up to the Meyer fantasy), but he was also more playful and more eloquent. He was also a much better composer.

Attention Twilight movie maker people: As a vampire who has been on the planet for almost a century and never sleeps, Edward has had nothing better to do with his time than attend high school, rack up graduate degrees, and practice the piano. Am I to believe that these 80 years of practice would produce a composer/pianist with the same musical stylings as John Tesh? Not Aaron Copeland or Leonard Bernstein or Richard Rodgers or John Williams. John Tesh, from Entertainment Tonight. It's preposterous.

Whew. Thanks for letting me clear that nonsense out of the old noggin.

Love,
Misha