This post is likely to do several things:
1. Get all sorts of clicks from people on the fringe searching for p0rn of the decidedly strange variety.
2. Convince you that I'm way more weird than you initially suspected.
3. Renew your interest in my blog on the off chance I find more ways to string together unlikely phrases like the one in this title.
4. Embarrass the hell out of me on several counts.
Shall we proceed?
Let me start by saying that I blame this entire post fully on my two best friends for passing along the (embarrassing) sickness that is the Twilight series. Yep. All on them.
I watched my friends succumb to these books one by one, their circles of conversation growing at each Mom's Night to include more and more nodding heads until, finally, I was left alone, frowning on the fringes and rolling my eyes until they damned near hurt.
C'mon, folks! It's teenaged vampire fiction! Junior high girls are forming camps dedicated to promoting one made-up boy over another! You can't possibly be serious.
Surely, you know where this is going.
In a moment of weakness, while using my friend's home library as a personal book store (what? you would, too.) I took the first book home with me. The writing wasn't great, but the plot was decent. I read through it in an average amount of time, but I couldn't really see what the whole huge fuss was about. Still, I asked for the next book.
In many ways, it was like Todd's first experience with sushi. One of the first times he'd ever met my mom, we went for sushi. Todd had never tried it and only caved agreed after my mom made a handful of disparaging comments about his manliness for refusing to eat it. "It was okay," he concluded, "but it's not like I'll be craving it." A few short months later, sushi topped Todd's list as his all-time favorite food choice.
I read the second book in four days time, all while maintaining my work and childcare duties. You'll notice household duties weren't mentioned. Begrudgingly, I admitted that I was into the characters. I still found room to make fun of her repetitive use of language, but the plot had me hooked.
More to the point, the infuriatingly never-consumated soft-core make-out action had me hooked. "COME ON!" I'd yell in my head, "just DO IT already!!" (Hey, I never claimed to be the poster child for chastity or self-constraint.)
"But he might kill her if they did!" my friends would argue. "Whatever." was my clever retort.
And here's where it gets really embarrassing. I solicited the third book (there are four, for those of you bright enough to steer clear, and each is longer than the previous) and read it in four days as well - all 700 pages. But it wasn't until half way through the third book that a huge question popped into my head that I couldn't swat away.
Now, I don't claim to be a medical doctor or a vampire expert, and I realize that this is all purely fiction. But I do fancy myself passingly familiar with basic biology and how the male, um, apparatus functions. So, while reading a particularly steamy scene in the book, two thoughts collided:
1. Vampires' hearts don't beat.
2. I'm relatively sure that strong blood flow is essential for an erection.
Am I wrong? Do vampires have some other physiology that allows this particular... function? All muscle? Magic? Mind-over-body?
Then there was a third thought:
3. How horribly weird and wrong am I for thinking these thoughts and then following them through... all the way to a blog post?!
Perhaps the fourth book explains it all. I'll have to see. But from where I stand right now, I remain thoroughly confused, both by the facts and my apparent willingness to discuss them with you.
