Excerpt

"That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would died, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents."

-Joseph Heller

At my wedding, I shall serve human blood

Pretty.

I bet we have more sparkly skin.

Yes this is baseball.

You are the best, most venomous boyfriend I've ever had.

I finally gave in. I finally sat down and watched Twilight.

For many moons my sister and past roommate tried to convince me that this was good literature. "Hannah, you like books. You would love this." That really is the main thing that angers me about the whole ordeal. It's not good by any means. It's entertaining, sure. Fun, sure. And I'd even say creative. But it is so ridiculous and, well, hilarious, that I can't take any of it seriously.

I love when I ask Elle a question about it (Why doesn't she just become a vampire too? When a werewolf imprints someone does everyone know? Do humans have soul mates too? Why does Edward suck out the venom and not Carlisle?), she delights in her explanation, as if this is the truth and no one can really argue it.

"You see, Hannah, the only way to kill a vampire is...No, werewolves aren't bad. Vampires are the bad ones...He does that because he wants to eat her but he can't because he loves her so much...His skin sparkles because he's the most beautiful thing ever...Yeah, his hair is long because he's an Indian."

I read about 50 pages of the first book just to prove I could put it down quite easily, a feat that most girls claim impossible. But I wanted to watch the movie because, let's be honest, that red-lipped guy and the main girl are pretty good looking.

I, like any American, enjoy watching beautiful people on screen, because while they might be gorgeous in person, they are even more so after all the hoopla and make-up and those white floppy things that reflect light to eliminate blemishes. The Edward boy is charming and the Bella girl lovely. I want to be their friends in real life.

The scenery behind the people was also appealing. It made me want to move back to the Pacific Northwest.

And I liked the music. (I hear the music for New Moon is even better.)

And I like how it was a bit edgy. The director, who also directed the maximum edgy Thirteen, certainly loves her diagonal angles.

But all of those factors do not erase the fact that this movie is so outlandish that I am sad for the screaming girls for they know not what they do. Twilight almost convinced me that is what love is like. And my very sensible sister even yelled out during the scene where they jump from tree to tree, "I want a vampire boyfriend!" I swear she's much more logical and down-to-earth than I, and yet apparently she has been persuaded that a super strong, super fast, cold as ice, sparkly glowy boy with pale skin is the only option. (For the record, she is happily married to a tall, pale mustached man who is fairly strong for a human.)

I applaud Meyer for her success, but every time I witness the obsession that has become her saga, I want to shake those koo-koo girls and tell them not to wait around for a sparkling soul mate. The catch-22 that forces Bella and Edward to practice abstinence does not exist. If this were real, Bella and Edward would do it, get pregnant, have a changeling child, and break up because Bella would be bitter toward Eddy because he took her virginity and because he can't pay child support because he's only 17 and will remain 17 forever, forever, forever ever, forever ever.

I'm sorry Miss Jackson. This is for real.

(Elle did enlighten me that Bella and Ed get married, have violent, passionate sex, get pregnant, and have a mixed child; and to give birth to her they have to perform some sort of brutal, vampire C-section because the baby is breaking Bella's bones. At least Meyer threw in a healthy dose of convoluted reality: her version of a sex-ed video reminding kids about the harshness of forgetting protection. A writer for Vanity Fair called this wait-till-wedlock theme a perfect helping for the parents of the swooning daughters and also for Meyer's mormon friends.)

In the end, I was already tired of the battle of unquenched love between the couple. Not because it's not riveting, my god, no. But because it's absurd.

I wish I could write this week's editorial on this. But I'm not sure these opinions are worthy for print.

P.S. The baseball scene was weird.

Boo

Do you have that one image in your mind that is possibly recurring and definitely terrifying?

I mentioned earlier that I get scared pretty easily. (Example: I watched the preview, not the movie but the preview, of Hollowman and couldn't be alone for weeks. And even still, every time I see something that looks like footprints in my carpet I run away.) Normally I will have watched a frightening movie (Hide and Seek), just told some scary stories (demon stories always get me), read a scary book (made the mistake of reading Carrie all by myself last year), or, recently, read a scary play (I couldn't sleep the other night because we just read Macbeth for class and had discussed the meanings of the three witches and apparitions).

But what has become a daily routine of mine is to get frightened whenever I wash my face at night.

I have only seen one X-Files episode in my life and I will never see another one again. I don't exactly remember the plot. All I remember is an Indian guy without legs rolling himself around on a skateboard-type thing. He was so creepy and menacing. He would just roll around and attack people I guess, for no reason other than his understandable angst against full-functioning bipedal humans.

So whenever I wash my face, right when I have soap in my eyes, I think that man is next to me at my ankles, staring up at me. Even as I write this I'm getting a little fidgety. He's scary.

(Actually, I just read a scary story in People magazine and couldn't go to sleep right away. And since blogging always helps me fall asleep, (not that you're boring) I figured I'd vent about it. Unfortunately I chose the wrong topic to write on since I'm scaring myself as I type.)

My mother and I got into an argument about my sensitivities today on our way to Thanksgiving dinner. When I was little, I watched a version of Wizard of Oz I bet no one has ever seen. My mother took the liberty of ridding me of the pleasure of viewing the fantastic film with fresh eyes by taping it and omitting every part with the wicked witch and those monkeys. For years, I had no idea there was a bad witch at all, and to be honest I'm still confused about the monkeys.

I was arguing that had she not shielded me from the frightening images, I might have been a tougher human being. It's like an immune system. You have to let the kid play in the dirt a little so he can build up his white blood cells to fight against that cold so common and pig-like flu. Perhaps it is because of her constant veiling of reality (Like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse! Look how I bring in literature) that I am such a scaredy-cat. Luckily I have a really good friend that I call every time I can't sleep. He talks me out of my senselessness until I realize that Kevin Bacon has no beef with me.

This is one reason why my CIA obsession has helped me so much. I ask myself, "Would Sydney Bristow really go to her parents' room because of something she read in a play?"

Luckily I don't get graphic nightmares really. My last nightmare a couple nights ago was pretty scary though. I dreamed I was the photographer at my sister's wedding and my camera wasn't working and I could only get four pictures of her special day. She was pissed. If you know my sister, you know that was a nightmare.

Le Portrait--Charles Baudelaire

Le Portrait

La Maladie et la Mort font des cendres

De tout le feu qui pous nouse flamboya.

De ces grands yeux si fervents et si tendres,

De cette bouche où mon coeur se noya,

De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,

De ces transport plus vifs que des rayons,

Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, ô mon âme!

Rien qu'un dessin fort pâle, aux trois crayons,

Qui, comme moi, meurt dans la solitude,

Et que le Temps, injurieux vieillard,

Chaque jour frotte avec son aile rude...

Noir assassin de la Vie et de l'Art,

Tu ne tueras jamais dans ma mémoire

Celle qui fut mon plaisir et ma gloire!

I know Alias ended up sucking, but that's not the point

A mug Erin bought for me in D.C. The real deal.

I've always wanted to be in the CIA. Sorry, let me rephrase. It just sounded like a good lead, although not entirely accurate.

I've wanted to be in the CIA since I was 16 years old, and for some time I was actually working toward that goal in, I thought, very practical ways.

Erin and I went to Blockbuster to rent a TV series on DVD, something that would make us laugh and have a whole new carton of inside jokes. We had already watched a lot of Friends and Seinfeld and wanted something new, something none of our friends would know the quotes from.

We couldn't find anything.

Then we came across a small show that was currently in its 3rd of 4th season: J.J. Abram's Alias.

We rented the first two discs of the first season and were immediately attached. Sydney Bristow was not only a perfect aspiration, but our best friend.

We watched the both discs, which I believe was just four episodes, in one night and kept talking about it all week at school.

The next weekend, we were prepared. With only kettle corn and Arizona Iced Tea for sustenance, we sat on the couch for 21 hours straight and finished both the first and second seasons.

(A couple embarrassing side notes, although this whole post is probably embarrassing enough: Our only breaks were trips to the restroom. I made Erin accompany me most of the time because some of the scenes were quite terrifying. Also, at the end of the second season, after our marathon was other, the cliff hanger was so appalling that I actually cried for several minutes. Erin was either amused or annoyed.)

After becoming addicted to the show, we began to reveal that each of us was also interested in becoming a clandestine, intelligence seeking agent for our country. We began engaging in secret agent-type activities to prepare us for our future vocation.

We would dress in all black and coordinate fights for a camera sitting on my coffee table. We would run around her neighborhood jumping over fences and climbing up buildings in search of God knows what, again dressed in all black. We planned on putting ourselves through our own personal boot camp, complete with pull-ups, push-ups and doing some fancy footwork with tires on the ground, this time dressed in camo. That plan fell through, probably because I can't do a push up. We would go airsofting in the wilds of Mission Viejo, dressing in camo and surgical masks. We would make up word games and codes in case we got caught and had to transit an important rescue message, dressed in our normal clothes because we would do this in the middle of class or while driving around or while at a restaurant. The most elaborate of emulations involved the two of us plus another friend dressing up, in all black, for a fancy dinner party. Two of us were trapped. One had to decode a message to find the key. Then we shot each other in the backyard in the dark with our airsoft guns. After we realized we didn't have goggles and we could shoot an eye out, we came inside and wiggled around in this weird crawl space I found in my house. Came out from the crawl space because there were nails and spiders. Then went to the attic to find season three of Alias. It was one of the most fun nights in my life, even to this day.

Besides our CIA play, Erin and I actually researched how exactly to get into the Agency. I had the brains and Erin had the brawn. I really wasn't (am not) very athletic so I was jealous when Erin would climb up a tall platform and I would be left on the ground jumping off curbs to try and look as cool as possible. But then I was a little better at solving our codes. So it was all good.

But then I discovered, or at least concluded from certain websites, that you have to have military experience to get into the CIA. I knew I could never get into the military because I am legally blind in my left eye. This didn't really stop me, though.

I remember walking up to Erin who was in line to buy food at school and telling her when I wanted to stop working towards our goal. My youth pastor had just unexpectedly died and it was the first time I had ever experienced the reality of death.

For some reason, this incident was so shaking for me that I was convinced working toward such a goal was useless and a waste of time. I said that I wanted to think about things that really matter, even though I didn't really know what those things were and still don't have a proper inkling.

Even though I still have this weird, strong desire to go into combat and prove myself in challenging undercover situations, I am obviously not trying to be a CIA agent. I still have a lot of goals for myself, so many that they're in the double digits. But working as a Bristow-type agent is no longer one of them.

But I learned so much in this era of mine. I challenged myself physically more in that time than any other, even when I was a cheerleader. (That was said partly sarcastically, but I really did have challenges in conquering the thought of being thrown up in the air and trusting Jr. Highers to catch me.)

I learned how to face fears, as Tyra Banks as that sounds. (Remember when she faced dolphins?)

I used to be scared to be alone, of the dark, of jumping of high things, and of a lot of other things. But whenever I was in those situations I would honestly think to myself, "What would I do if I was in a real life-threatening situation?" and even cheesier, "What would Sydney Bristow do?"

I know this is ridiculous, but I was seriously changed by all this. Just hold a dumb airsoft gun and getting shot in the leg with a tiny plastic bullet made me tougher, I swear.

Because I'm not sure of the point of this post I'm going to encourage my handful of readers. Challenge yourself in some way. Even if it's completely silly.

People sit around so much doing just the bare minimum. You're capable of a lot more than flipping back to the last TV show just in time to escape the commercials.

Lately, Taekwondo has been a challenge. I'm pretty awful at it. But it's fun and so rewarding when I do something right.

And lately I've been running a lot, which I used to hate. I used to be able to run only half a mile. Now I'm running over three almost every day.

And this damn newspaper has certainly showed me what I'm capable of, if not only that I can pull all nighters every other weekend.

If you happened to read this whole post with getting bored, congratulations.

Now go jump off a roof.

Make sure you land in grass though. It hurts like hell to land on the cement.

Update

Padmé no longer has a bald spot on her ass, and she's looking as regal as ever.

I'm full of it, but at least I'm full of something

I hate when people constantly talk about how busy they are, as if their filled agendas and mile-long to-do lists give them some sort of edge and excuse to go crazy. But I am going to be that person. In fact, I've been that person this whole semester.

For example, one of the hooks that holds up my shower curtain somehow ended up on the floor and every time I look at it I think, "I don't have time to pick that up." And it's been there since last Friday.

That's about all I am going to say right now. I will complain later about my crazy non-schedule, just a blur of people to meet and interview, pages to write, pages to edit, dogs to run, and friends that make me sit down and have a real, normal-paced conversation.

But I secretly like it. It makes me feel important. And staying up late makes me feel important. And waking up early makes me feel important. This is one of the reasons I want to live on a fishing boat. I can go to bed late telling stories about my tattoos and scars, then wake up early to make a weird breakfast and cast my lines. While everyone is on land, I feel so entitled to float on the water catching fish and eating it and bringing some home for people I like. Except when I do live on a boat, it'll probably be as a cook for the fishermen, because I'm not strong enough to strangle nets.

Don't ask how I had time to make this post.