The Twilight Saga: So. Much. FAIL.

Okay, first let it be known that Robert Pattinson is the wind beneath my wings, the thing that keeps me going in a world full of chaos, etc..  And there is a reason for that (and it predates Twilight).  I wish that I could invite that kid over to dinner, spread towels over all my furniture so that he wouldn’t destroy it with his BO, and then listen to him ramble while he smoked a bowl.  But since that is unlikely to happen, I am glad that Twilight brings him steady employment.  Because that means that I get all the cracked-out, greasy interviews my heart desires.

But.

BUT.

Omigod, y’all.  I read the first 200 pages of Twilight.  I saw the first movie.  I know what happens in Breaking Dawn.  I knew that there was no way in hell that New Moon was going to be a good movie, but I had no idea it could possibly be THAT BAD.

See, thing about Twilight is, it’s awful but it’s tolerable because it’s ALL awful.  Bella is a black hole where characterization should be, Edward is a pedophile stalker, and everyone else gets so little screen time that you kind of wonder why they bothered to cast secondary characters at all.  THINK OF THE SAVINGS!  But I digress.  Anyway, it’s so flat and cardboard and ridiculous that it passes back into being enjoyable because you’re all, “Seriously?  SERIOUSLY?

New Moon, on the other hand, is awful because it has exactly one compelling character:  Jacob.  Jacob is like, actually funny and an actual person with actual interests!  Also, Taylor Lautner has probably destroyed any chance he might have had at having biological children because of all the steroids he took in order to keep this role, but MY GOD, THE DEFINITION ON THAT KID.  I don’t usually say this about people who are young enough that I could have babysat them, but YOWZA.  Guys, he is even cute in his godawful stereotypical wig.  I can’t handle it.  Jacob is adorable and nice and appropriately tortured about the direction his life is taking–he’s upset about being a werewolf because there’s a girl on the reservation who almost had HALF HER FACE RIPPED OFF by her boyfriend when he got a little testy.  And Jacob’s all, “Yeah, you know, it would be nice to not have to worry about that shit, I’m just saying.”  But he’s still funny and innately cheerful because he is a well-rounded character with actual emotions unlike a certain rock-hard marble pedophile we could name.

But he gets totally boned because Bella is in looooooooooooooooove with Edward!  For…no reason in particular!  Even leaving that aside, though, he gets totally boned because he’s the only real person in the main cast, and it’s just like, even if Bella got some sense and decided to forget about her sparklepire, where would that leave Jacob?  With the most boring, personality-lacking girlfriend ever, that’s where.  Seriously, he only likes her because the script demands it–in real life, he would have found someone with interests outside of writing “Mrs. Edward Cullen” dozens of times inside her trapper-keeper.

In conclusion, I just feel bad for the kid, because he gets to spend two more books mired in this shit, and in the end he falls in love with Bella’s growth-accelerated vampire baby.  STEPHENIE MEYER, WHAT DID THE NATIVE AMERICANS EVER DO TO YOU TO DESERVE SUCH TREATMENT?

PS:  Did I mention that all of this is really racist anyway?  Because it’s really racist.  Seriously. 

PPS:  Have I mentioned that listening to poor Taylor Lautner trying to speak a made-up indigenous language to Bella “lovingly” is possibly one of the most hilariously awkward things EVAR?  Because it was.  Bless his heart.

‘Tis the Season 2

Via Atlasien:

The Rainbow Program

The Rainbow Program is a subset program of the Independent Living Program that transitions teenagers from homelessness into self-sufficient adulthood. Youth live in apartments and receive counseling, vocational and educational training, and life skills development. Each teen must be working or enrolled in appropriate educational programs for a minimum of 20 hours per week. Teens have individualized service plans that outline goals and objectives for independence. Staff works with each teen to accomplish their individual goals. This program targets outreach to homeless youth and teens identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning (GLBTQ). At CHRIS Kids these youth find a place to live where they can learn self acceptance and be open about who they are without fear or retribution.

• National statistics suggest that up to 56% of homeless youth identify as GLBTQ.
• This program is one of few GLBTQ Independent Living Programs in the Southeast
• This program receives no federal support

I grew up in the South.  It is not a good place to be gay.  It is not a good place to be homeless (“What, we have homeless people here?”).  It is not even a particularly good place to be a teenager–the main forms of entertainment are tent revivals and cheap beer.  I cannot imagine what it must be like to be teenage, GLBTQ, and homeless in the SOUTH. 

Donate, donate, donate.

In Which My Prejudices Show

I spent most of my freshman year of college reading the classic literature of the ancient world (that is, Sumer and Greece), because that is just how they torture American college students:  with Gilgamesh.  Seriously, I couldn’t believe that shit.  It was like, “And then he took her back to his cave and [30 lines missing] He was in the city, purchasing goats [70 lines missing].”

What the hell?

I’m Too Tired to Post Anything Coherent

So here.  Have a picture of some cats I know:

Still Brief, But Not Dismissive

I am the worst person in the entire world to lend books to.  There.  I said it.  It’s not that I spill things or dog-ear pages or anything like that; no, it’s worse.  I KEEP THEM FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER.

And yet despite that known fact, my family keeps lending me books.  Weirdos.

Seriously, I have had my sister’s copy of The Skull Beneath the Skin since…last Christmas?  I think.  Anyway, it’s been a loooooooong time.  I’ve had my mom’s copy of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles for the same amount of time.  I have not read either of them.  YES I FAIL AT LIFE THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Anyway, I went to visit my parents for Columbus Day, and while I was there my mother forced Megan Whalen Turner’s Attolia books on me.  Never one to turn down YA fantasy/historical fiction, I stuffed them in my suitcase and promptly forgot about them.  Until my mother came up this past weekend and demanded them back.

No, not The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.  Not Lord Rochester’s Monkey, which I have also had for almost a calendar year.  She wanted me to return the books she’d lent me all of a MONTH before.

She graciously allowed me to read them while she was visiting, though, and now I get it.  I really do.

Thus far, the Attolia books consist of The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia.  They all star Gen, a (you guessed it) thief, and if I told you anything else about them it would totally ruin the plot of the first book.  ANYWAY.  They rock.  And do you want to know why they rock?  Because they contain the sickest, most twisted love story EVAR.

DUDE.  DOOOOOOOD.  The lady in question CUTS OFF HER LOVER’S HAND.  And that’s just the foreplay.  It doesn’t get more hardcore than that!

I gave them back to my mother with a pang, although honestly?  The only one I really wanted to keep was The Queen of Attolia.  Because that’s the one where the “romance” really heats up, and I am a sick, sick girl.

Recommended for:  Anyone who enjoys “The Masochism Tango.”

We Just Really Like S.E.X. Around Here…

So I decided to buy a couple of copies of Heather Corinna’s S.E.X.:  The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College. I’m going to donate them to some local libraries, but…well.  They’re just so popular around here!

Turns out that Oliver really, really likes S.E.X..  Not that that’s a surprise to anyone.

What was much more interesting, actually, was Mimi’s reaction:

Friday Morning Musings on White Privilege

I haven’t been called racial slurs very often in my life; when you’re a middle class white girl from the South, it’s just not something that happens on a regular basis.  The only time I distinctly remember being called a cracker, actually, was when I was in the fifth grade:  a little boy declared that I was a cracker and he was a black-eyed pea, and that made him better than me.  I recall being vaguely hurt by this, in the way that you tend to be vaguely hurt when someone you’ve just met takes an immediate dislike to you.  Mostly, though, I was just puzzled.  “Why did he say that to me?” I asked one of his friends after he’d run off.

“He has a bad home life,” she shrugged, and that was the end of that.  My great experience with racism ended with me playing with the kid’s friends while he went home and sulked.

I understand that not every white person has my experiences; I understand that there are, in fact, white people who grow up being the only white kid at school, and that that’s usually not much fun.  I’m not saying it’s okay when those white people ignore hundreds of years of American history and claim that they’re the ones who are really oppressed, but I get it.  I understand taking an extremely traumatic personal experience and making it into a universal one.  What I do not understand are the white people who grew up in situations like mine who try to claim that having individual black people dislike them or mistreat them is the same thing as being systematically oppressed.  And I have a really ugly reason for not understanding that.  Because my reaction has always been, “Why the fuck do you care if someone calls you a cracker?”

And Now Let Me Be Brief and Dismissive

Tana French, The Likeness

You know what I hate?  When an author takes an otherwise blameless mystery novel and mucks it up with ill-advised attempts at profundity.  The Likeness is a good mystery, but Tana French wants it to be more–she wants it to be deep.  And you know, it could have been, if she hadn’t overwritten the crap out of it.

The Likeness is about an Irish detective named Cassie who infiltrates a houseful of postgrad English students when her doppelganger turns up dead–and wearing the ID of one of her old undercover identities .  Sounds fun, right?  And it is, when French isn’t musing about how being ”a good undercover” means there’s something wrong with Cassie.  Or whining about the “missing piece” that allowed Cassie’s doppelganger to assume the identity of others, or blah, blah, BLAH.  Yanno, All She Was Worth is a good mystery novel with an elusive identity thief at its center, and you know how Miyuki Miyabe managed that?  BY NOT OVERWRITING THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING.  Let the reader think for her goddamn self, yo. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST STOP WITH THE CONSTANT HAND-WRINGING AND PHILOSOPHISING.

Recommended for:  If you can stomach the pretentiousness, it really is an interesting puzzle.  If you can’t, skip it.

Crazy On You

During my junior year of college, I was snotty enough to take a seminar on Virginia Woolf.  I was a Women’s Studies major; it seemed to fit.  In an effort to get us closer to Virginia, my professor asked us to free write about our earliest memories—Woolf did this in her uncompleted autobiography, so why shouldn’t we?  I came up with something that probably scared the bejeesus out of my professor.  I remember getting my paper back a few classes later:  her comments were enthusiastic and engaged for the first few paragraphs, then trickled down to nothing near the end.

She never said anything to me about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was either A.) bored out of skull by what I’d written; or B.) convinced that she was reading about a half-buried memory of molestation.  Spoiler:  she wasn’t.

I remember very clearly what I wrote because it’s my first memory—not my official first memory, which is of sitting on a stump in my parents’ front yard at the age of two, but my real first memory.  The one I still have dreams about over two decades later.

I was probably about three or four; we were visiting my mother’s relatives in California.  I have a cousin, Jessica, who’s two years older than me and was, at the time, an only child (not to mention the only girl-baby my gramma and great-gramma saw on a regular basis).  In other words, she had LOTS of toys and costumes, and many of those dresses sort of kind of fit me.  So My First Memory is of walking down the street in my grandma’s neighborhood in Oakland wearing a Snow White costume that dragged on the ground behind me.

It would just be one of those moments that’s only memorable because you remember it:  my brother has one of those—he remembers talking about eating grapes with my parents when he was three, and that memory only stands out because it’s all he remembers about being three.  But this memory is different.  This memory is memorable because of the feeling attached to it:  the wrongness.  I tried to get at that feeling when I was writing about it for class, but I think I wound up sounding like I was trying not to remember the Bad Touch.

But what was wrong about that memory is that nothing was wrong:  nothing was wrong. I was wearing the coveted Snow White outfit (I had to practically rip it from Jess’ lonely-only hands), I was outside, it was a beautiful day, and I was being allowed to Think My Thoughts.  Even as a very small child, solitude was important to me.  And yet, I wasn’t happy.  I still felt this free-floating, pervasive anxiety that I could neither explain nor process.  And that’s why, twenty-one years later, I still remember being that little blond kid on a dusty street in a too-large Disney costume.

Because that’s my first memory of my illness.

Soooooooooooooul Mates

So some of you may be wondering, “What is with all this goopy relationship shit?  Where is the incisive literary commentary?  When will she finally post another Bayou entry?  Where is my goddamn sandwhich?”

To which I say—why were the stats on my last entry so low?  What, do you people hate charity?  And teenagers?  AND CONDOMS?

I think we’ve BOTH got a lot to answer for, really.