Damn you Stephenie Meyer!

For anyone living under a rock, (or probably just up here in the boonies) Stephenie Meyer is every little lovesick tween girl’s new best Mormon-pure friend. She writes about hopelessly beautiful men (who just happen to be vampires) and the angst, young mortal girl who falls in love with one of them. Every girl’s dream, right? He’s perfectly handsome, charming, wealthy, writes love songs on his piano for her, even protects her from the many less-good vampires that seem determined to kill her in every book of the Twilight series.

First of all, I feel completely foolish admitting that I have ever read these books because
1. Let’s admit, I’m not exactly the core demographic here
2. I cannot help but cringe and yell out loud due to the terrible content of some of these books
3. I have openly made fun of saga story readers my entire life (Ahem! Harry Potty!)

Most of my time spent reading these books, (sadly, right after the first was published and my mother mailed me a copy to Los Angeles) I hid them. People would glance at the black glossy cover in my hands and ask “Oh, that what’s that book you’re reading about?” I wasn’t sure quite how to answer... “Eeeerrr vampires?” “Lovesick teen girls?” or better yet “I’m getting really into this scene where the vampire and werewolf battle it out over the love of the mortal girl!” I usually managed to come up with something more along the lines of “it’s sort of like a modern Anne Rice sorta thing...”

Lies. These books are not even close to the dark loveliness and complexity of an Anne Rice novel, but somehow I was engrossed. Despite Miss Meyer’s repetitive linguistics and predictable story lines involving mythical creatures, I could not stop reading. Even as the last book made me squeal in pain at how terrible the plot had become, I felt it necessary to trudge on.

Quite simply, I cannot quite put my finger on what makes these books appealing to so many people, and perhaps that is why I am baffled by both their, and the film’s popularity. But somehow, Miss Meyer has managed to infiltrate our sex-laden society with a romance story contained to virginal kissing and her wholesome Mormon ideals... and this is appealing to young girls and their mothers alike. All I have to say is that Stephenie Meyer is a clever fucking beast, and that she is the queen of blue-balls teen writing, and somehow she had me hooked.

Shortly after completing the third book in the series, and realizing that there was still no steamy vampire sex to speak of, I heard that the first installment, Twilight, was being made into a movie. Dear God, I thought to myself. My horrible vampire secret is about to be revealed to the entire world, and all of my friends who I had explained the books to (in a much different manner) will know the truth!!! Fuck. That’s when the first billboards starting going up around North Hollywood. True to the story, a worried brunette girl with big brown eyes was plastered there, held tightly by a ghostly pale boy with an intensely square jaw and creepy golden eyes.

“That’s soooo not what Edward (the vampire boy) looks like!” I found myself saying aloud in the car one day.

“What?” my friend asked.

“I mean, the guy on the billboard’s kinda hot, but he looks a little old to be a teenager, no?” I snapped back, worried. I was going to be found out. Damn you, Stephenie Meyer!

I was forced to pass by those creepy golden eyes every day as I commuted to work, looking over the 101 and piercing into my silver Scion, telling me that soon everyone would know my dark cheesy vampire book-loving secret. And of course, those ads would start conversations among my friends and coworkers. “Isn’t that movie based on a book or something?” “I heard it’s supposed to be terrible. It’s got vampires and werewolves and crap like that.” I cringed, sitting quietly aside, waiting for the accusations to come...someone remembering the ridiculously fat book perched on my car seat, or the saga’s permanent resting place on my bedside table. Surprisingly only a few of my close friends ever made the connection, and they were strangely more curious than their usual sarcastic selves. Well, that is except for my darling roommate...

“Tell me what I am... VAMPIRE!” He would hiss the line from the trailer at me during quiet lulls in conversation. I couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous it sounded, but he promised me after weeks of humiliating torture that he would go with me to see the film adaptation of my deep, dark secret; the only rule being that we not see it the first couple weeks that it was in theaters, so as to miss the truly crazy (and mostly ten-year-old) Twilight fanatics.

As promised, we eventually saw the film, along with another friend of ours who ridiculed me to no end as we walked back to the car. Thank god we had decided to go against Miss Meyer’s wholesome ideals and throw back a few drinks before the 10:15 showing or my friends’ otherwise sharp tongues would have surely killed me.

The movie was better than expected, this adaptation somehow managed to be a little more grounded than the books (and Miss Meyer’s hokey imagination) will ever be and the film managed to only briefly touch upon the weird vampire world depicted in the books, instead focusing more on the character’s emotions and trying to make everything feel a little more “human.” However, as I recently finished the fourth and final book of the series and news came of the sequels already set to be filmed, I couldn’t help but laugh with a mix of excitement and horror. You may have gotten away with one decent film, Miss Meyer, and you might somehow manage to pull off the next two, but when it comes time for the fourth installment to be made into a film, you’d better believe that I will have advance tickets to that shit-show.

You may have sold us on the virginal vampire concept and Native American werewolf clans, but I will pay good money to see how a film adaptation of a demon vampire baby chewing itself out of its teen mother’s womb and a twisted romance developing between said demon baby and an adult werewolf can still seem so touching and “human.”

Oh Stephenie Meyer, revenge is a bitch.

Gotta Light?

Every smoker has a dream. Either keep smoking until the day that they die and somehow manage to be stricken down by some illness not caused by their most vile habit, or eventually quit. I am now of the latter.

Moving to Los Angeles changed a lot of things about me. It changed the way I view people, the world, social norms, everything. And somewhere in this process I fell victim to the diabolical bliss that is the cigarette. Ah ciggies... you gotta love ‘em.

The feeling of your first liberated inhale after getting out of work, sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night and lighting up while looking up at the night sky or huddling over a lighter with a few of your friends (or complete strangers) trying to get one lit in the dark night in front of some noisy, crowded bar. Just writing this is giving me a phantom feeling in my hand that is still so incomplete.

I was never the chain smoker type. But there was something about cigarettes that kept me coming back for more... Maybe it was the nicotine, maybe it was the comradery of finding that fellow smoker at a party and even though you didn’t know each other, somehow you had something in common. You’d sneak off and start a conversation while letting the smoke fill your lungs, and end up giving each other the “cheers” as soon as the paper had finished burning. That was all.

Maybe it’s silly but I went out the other night and saw some fun-looking kids out front all puffing away on their cigs and wishing I could join in, simply by asking for a light. When you’re dealing with an addiction, it seems natural that the first thing you might say to someone is asking for assistance.

“Gotta Light?”

And most people are glad to help. Sometimes you’ll have two or three people fumble about in their purses and pockets until one finally triumphs and produces a lighter. Someone would usually crack a smile and the ice would have been broken. Conversation is light and easy, since you’ve got your poisonous crutch to fall back on and you can watch the cigarettes dwindle, knowing its okay to excuse yourself back inside once the last ashes have fallen.

Come to think of it now, many of my good friends have been made through the simple act of puffing on that little tube of tobacco. I can remember bonding with new friends on the smoking patio in college, using our fifteen minutes of freedom to drag away and discuss our totally bizarre professors... we’d laugh and smoke, knowing that we were all completely different and came from all corners of the world, but were united in our terrible, but socially-accepted (at least in fashion school) addiction.

I’d even sit down and have a smoke with some of my favorite professors and discuss the lesson in more depth as I realized they were just as flawed with their vice as I. Mind you, these were the very same professors that revealed their three year acid trips to me and inserted single frames of animal sex into the class slide shows to make sure that you were indeed paying attention, but somehow that ciggie in their hand made me feel like we could relate.

I remember moving into an apartment building downtown after I had just briefly quit smoking and found myself starting up again so that I could wile away my hours in the stairwell a few floors up with some totally cool designer girls upstairs. They’d come down to my apartment, pound on my door until I slunk away from my school work and we’d race up the emergency stairwell, which no one used, wheezing a little until we landed on their floor where the walls were covered in our graffiti and the floor covered in our ashes. We’d even made a point to tear the no smoking sign from the wall in case our motives were ever questioned. (Which they were on several occasions by the prestigious community servicemen) We’d sit on the concrete stairs with our sketch books and paints, smoking away and tossing our cigarette butts into old bottles or coffee cups.

We were an odd group to say the least, but it made sense at the time. We were all looking for our little escape, our afternoon moments where we’d joke and laugh and smoke and nothing else really seemed to matter except our little concrete stairwell.

Forget looking cool or that other shit you’ve heard about smoking... what I miss most about cigarettes are my little chance encounters. The people you meet curbside who are more than willing to offer a light and jabber away for those 3-5 minutes. The easy transition from total stranger to comrade. It might sound ridiculous, but that’s how it was for me as a smoker. Sure, smoking probably was a social crutch for me, but I liked it. So don’t blame me if you chance to see me light one up again outside a crowded bar or with a group of strangers, I haven’t fallen off the wagon or gone back to my pack-a-day habit or anything like that, I’m just visiting an old friend.

Of Goats and Satellites

Today is a fine day to be a citizen of the Upper Fairfax community, for as heaven’s light shone through the mass of grey clouds and onto our very square of the forest, God’s messenger of light, (AKA the Hughes satellite internet man) brought his gift unto the world.

Okay, so maybe I’m making this a little dramatic and the mass of biblical references is probably unnecessary, but jokes aside, today was a magical day. No longer will I be forced to unplug the brown plastic 70s phone from the wall. No longer will I have to uncoil the phone cord from the computer and pull it gently over the floor as if I were laying an explosives fuse across the living room. No longer will I have to listen to that god-awful dial-up noise... (Oh yes, reach into your memories of yore, you remember...)

Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop
eeeeeeeeee-eerrrrrrrrr-eeeeee-yeeeeeeooooooowwwwwww-eeeeerrrrrrreeeeeewwwww
(insert terrible screeching sound here)
static.........
Connected!

My coil of wires has been replaced with a shining beacon of hope, a beautiful white glowing box that sits on the desk, flashing blue and signaling that there is a connection (lasting longer than 20 sustained minutes and moving at a pace faster than that of a Greek foot messenger) to the outside world. A little less beautiful is the abomination that the Hughes internet man decided to erect in our yard. Instead of your standard “let’s just screw this to the side of your house” operation, he deemed it necessary for a free-standing pole to be set into place, complete with a demonstration of his heaving, flabby man-muscles, concrete and a hole drilled through the floor of our house.

Now I’m not complaining. Don’t get me wrong, if this guy were in a little better shape and were to put up some resistance for the services he were about to provide, I would have happily become bikini clad in seconds, pouring the concrete myself in sub-zero conditions. I might have even gone so far as to bring in an ice chest of beer out and dance around for his amusement while he hooked up the magical little box. Thank god it didn’t come to that, because well, let’s be honest... my pasty, scantily-clad body dancing awkwardly about in the snow probably wouldn’t have helped the situation much. (Great visual picture though) But hell, had it seemed appropriate, I would have happily offered.

With all of this exciting commotion taking place in our hippie bungalow high among the trees, I couldn’t help but notice something a bit odd. Well, not so odd in the eyes of my endearing and perfectly naiive, animal-doting mother and her fiancé mountain-man, but a bit weird to everyone else taking in the situation. (That would be just me and the puffy Hughes Net guy) You see, before the glorious rumble of Hughes man’s diesel engine had awaken me from my bear-like slumber, my mum and mountain-man had been up to their usual flower child antics. The goats were running freely about the yard as usual, dropping tiny balls of shit anywhere that I might mistakenly place a rogue stiletto heel and destroying everything they can get their little hooves and mouths around.


However, when it came time for Hughes man to go about his satellite obelisk building adventures, the goats got a little too excited. Mountain-man came to Hughes man’s aide as the task became more rugged and therefore more to mountain-man’s interest, and his goat companion, Zeus, could not be kept at bay any longer. He began fiercely head-butting Hughes man and dropping little love pellets all around the work area in sheer delight for someone (other than me) to unleash his wrath upon. My mother finally came to the wise consensus that the goat was impeding construction efforts and was forced to tether him to a stake in the yard.

This was not something that Zeus had ever been subjected to, nor was it of his liking and so he proceeded to run in circles about the tether, crying and shitting everywhere, before finally mangling himself in the line, falling down and collapsing into submission. Now had an avid PETA member been present, they probably would have thought this was horrid, but knowing the complete asshole that this goat is, I thought it was absolutely hilarious. He would look up at mountain man every now and then and let out a pathetic shriek of despair, but there he was, tethered to his little stake in a pile of his own little poo pellets.

It was not long before the whiny goat was released from his tethered prison and let free to harass everyone at will once more, but for fifteen minutes my stiletto collection and I had our revenge. And now that I have satellite internet to do my bidding, I can sit happily inside and watch him shake his angry goat head at me while I take care of more important things, like watch Joaquin Phoenix freak the fuck out on David Letterman.

However, with great internet speed comes an enormous amount of amusing, meaningless shit that I have been unable to view for the past three months. Youtube links that were sent to me in January have just been viewed and gaffed over...dolphins blowing bubbles, REALLY??? My myspace totally got a facelift... because yes, I am still that juvenile and well, there were still references of me owning a Vespa and being in LA pasted around my page and I was honestly starting to wonder if a club had been created for bizarre, bloated indie boys with Vespas that had tracked me down as that scooter-cruising side kick of their dreams.


Alas, now my page is a little more boring and allows me to be free of friend requests from 30-something Angelenos with shaved heads and sleeves and promise to put me in their top four if we could “really just get together sometime.” Vomit. On the other hand, this will present an interesting flip-side as I will now get to evaluate my new friend requests from the furthest reaches of rural Washington. I’m hoping John Deere hat, gun, truck and dog all in one dazzling profile picture. Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? Oooooh, or better yet, maybe Hughes man will find me...the puffy satellite installation technician of my dreams... this one goes out to you, tiger. Grooooooowwwwwwllllll.