how I got sucked into this supermassive black hole

So, I know I am getting on this "Twilight" bandwagon really late. But, since the entertainment powers that be seem to be greenlighting the movie adaptation of the whole franchise, the Twilight mania will last well into 2010, so I figured it wasn't too late to start a blog about it.

It's funny because I was still living (expatriated) in Hong Kong when Twilight the movie came out in November 2008, and all throughout college I had never heard of the Twilight books for some reason. (I am a recent college grad.)
And even when I came back to America in late November 2008 I still had never heard of Twilight. I guess I was living under a rock??

For me, it actually started with something completely unrelated: The Chronicles of Narnia 2: Prince Caspian. I rented this as a curiosity during Christmas break, watched it at home, LOVED Ben Barnes (the actor who plays Caspian). He is so hot!!! So of course I IMDB'd and Google Imaged him, and then wrote to my friends on an email list I'm on, "OMG new crush Ben Barnes!!!!"
Then, someone replied, "Yeah Ben Barnes is cute but Rob Pattinson is hot!!"
And someone else replied, "Yeah have you guys seen Twilight?"
And then I was like...Rob WHO?

So I continued on my Ben Barnes adoration spree and Youtubed fanvids of Ben Barnes picture montages. Along my Youtubing I came across fanvids of Ben Barnes AND Rob Pattinson montages! So, I watched them, but the whole time I was thinking, "OK who is this pasty femmed out thick-lipped skinny guy??? He is so not that hot...Let's get to Ben Barnes!"



Since Ben Barnes shares a lot of the same fanbase as Rob Pattinson (henceforth referred to as Rpatz), it eventually got through my thick skull (usually I am very perceptive to pop culture, so this was weird!! Maybe I am some kind of "Bella" with my thick skull, hahaha!) that Twilight was a major, major chick lit/tween/pop culture force to be reckoned with. So in late January I tried to watch a bootleg version off alluc.org (great website BTW), but it took too long to load so I gave up. (In the end, I'm glad it happened this way!!)

Then in mid-February, I went into the city for a dental appointment and it was a major buzzkill (an extra-deep cleaning, since I was a bad girl and have not seen the dentist in so long). My gums got a major beating and were shot full of anesthetics; plus my lips were really swollen. I had a few hours to kill before meeting a friend for dinner, plus I didn't feel like hanging out in public, so I walked into a bookstore and thought I would browse for a while. I walked into a display of "Twilight" books, picked up Twilight, and started reading, intending to just put it down after a few pages and move on.

I didn't move on. I didn't even move. I stood in the middle of the aisle for four hours and just read continuously. I only stopped to adjust the strap of my messenger bag when I noticed around page 300 that my shoulder was somehow extremely sore. When I left the bookstore I even considered paying the $10 or whatever to buy the book so that I would be able to read it again on the way home (very atypical of me to buy a new book!).

And then when I got home I went on alluc.org and finally watched a streaming version of Twilight. And then all I could think about for the next week was Edward/Bella and Rob Pattinson. (Unfortunately for Ben, Rpatz took up a huge chunk of the space Ben had occupied.) And I kept thinking about the next time I would be able to get to a bookstore so I could know what happened to Edward and Bella and the Cullens! All the Twilight books were checked out and waitlisted for weeks at my library--devastating! Then I had a thought--Hey, all of these books are probably pirated in full text online!!! (I know it's wrong but I didn't want to be right.)

So, I went and found and read ALL of the rest of the Twilight books!!! New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn--I gobbled them up (in bootleg plaintext fashion, which is too bad cuz I do kind of like the "Twilight" fonts, I'm a font junkie) over the course of 3 weeknights. And these were days I had work! (I work part-time in a public school.)
I would literally read till 4am, go to bed for a fitful, shallow, feverish sleep of a mere 3 hours, then wake up at 7am and continue reading. I live in New England and we basically don't use the heater to save money, and it was FREEZING cold in my basement, so cold I wore gloves to use the mouse to keep clicking and scrolling down down down to keep reading the fucking Twilight books and see what fucking happens to Edward and Bella.
Sometimes when I was reading these online books I would look at the scrolling bar on the right to see how far down I was on the web page, and I enjoyed reading them so much that I would perversely wish the scrolling bar were not so far down, so that I could keep reading about Edward and Bella! (Mostly wanting to read about Edward, ha.) Of course these web pages are so fucking long that the scrolling bar is the tiny tiny kind that barely moves from frame to frame anyway...haha.
While I was reading, I would sometimes laugh out loud at the absurdity of the prose, and the sometimes utterly banal diction, or the overuse of "grimace"--I could go on with these Smeyer gems. But I just HAD to keep going. This is the most addictive series I've read since Dragonlance.
And when Breaking Dawn finally ended, I browsed the online Twilight forums (which I had previously avoided to not run into spoilers) and heard about Midnight Sun. There went another would-be constructive afternoon.

Then, I had to relive parts of the movie, because knowing Rpatz is Edward is just...so divine. Then I started looking at the Youtube fanvids...I downloaded the soundtrack...I listened to the score (who listens to a score, for crying out loud?! unless it's James Horner or some shiz)...I looked at the fan sites, the Facebook pages, the magazine spreads, the photo shoots, the promo event photo ops, the Perez Hilton posts, the E! online and MTV.com "news" articles...I am basically now familiar with all of the visual media and blogosphere documenting the Twilight nuclear fallout. I've spent time downloading pictures of Rpatz onto my phone so that he can be my cell phone wallpaper. It's kind of out of control--no, not my sanity. The fact that I have downloaded so many Rpatz pix/Twilight screencaps that I need to come up with a real file-naming convention, cuz "edward0102" and "rpatz in raybans" isn't cutting it anymore. LUCKILY I am only part-time employed right now. In any case, it would be EMBARRASSING to admit how many hours Twilight has sucked from my life.
This might have something to do with the fact that this tween behavior coincided with me moving back in with my parents. Some regression is to be expected, right?

So, here I am and it's mid-March and New Moon is about to start filming! So jealous of anyone living in Vancouver... ;) And now I've decided that if I'm going to be obsessed, at least I'm going to contribute something (hopefully) intelligent and/or funny/constructive to this world.

Cheers to the inner tween in all of us!

(I swear no blog posts will be this long in the future.)