The Obligatory Twilight Post

If there's a fail safe way to drum up hits on your blog, it's to talk about Twilight, right?

I would like to preface all of this by mentioning my qualifications as an expert critic. I was awarded scholarships to some fancy pants arts schools; I've studied creative writing in college at both the University of Colorado and Louisiana State University; I have friends who are successful, published authors; my personal motto is "show, don't tell" -- I know what good literature is, okay? I promise. (See how I did that? Motto is show don't tell, but all I did right there was tell you a bunch of stuff? That's what we call irony).

Here is a picture of me with glasses on, looking full of wisdom:

If that doesn't convince you that I'm brilliant, I don't know what will.

And yet I am drawn to the Twilight series like Prince Charles to Camilla -- secretly, and with great shame. I first heard of the books roughly a year ago, when references to this Edward Cullen fellow began cropping up all over Facebook. Not since Harry Potter have I seen such an outpouring of appreciation for a book or series of books, and these crazy tweens claim to not only enjoy the books, but literally love Edward. As if he were a real boy.

Once I saw the teaser trailer for the movie, I decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. As I've mentioned before, I have a lot of downtime at work, so that's generally when I get things like recreational reading done. I didn't want to look like the total loser that I am, perched at the front desk devouring the paperback edition of what I fully expected to be teenage trash, so I got the audiobooks and listened to them on my iPod. (More and more I am coming to believe that audiobooks are the best way to enjoy books. I love being read to). Ilyana Kadushin's breathy narration fit the silliness of the dialogue well; I think if I had read the books myself I would have put them down out of disgust, but it was highly entertaining to giggle at the out-loud version of so many "Oh, EDWAAAAAAARD"s and "Belllllalooove"s.

I would like to tell you that I read all 4 books out of morbid curiosity, or because I just wanted a good laugh. But that would not be true. I read all 4 books because I enjoyed them.

I'm still not sure exactly what attracts me to this series. I realize how badly written the books are. I detect hints of racism, and the (semi-spoiler alert!) "grown men-wolves imprinting on baby girls" thing is creepy, no matter how you justify it. I don't like the glamorization of abstinence, and I think Edward comes off as a controlling asshole.

But kids, I cannot tear myself away. I listened to the audiobooks in the car, at work, at home, and I even stayed up late when I was sleepy to listen to them -- if I'm tired, I don't stay up late for ANYTHING.

I went to see the movie by myself. Then I made my boyfriend go see it with me again. Then I rented it for 24 hours on my cable box and watched it 4 times in a row -- that's roughly 8 hours. A week later I bought the DVD, and I'm embarrassed to say that it STAYS in our DVD player, and I watch it whenever Andy isn't home, often just to have on in the background while I do other things. If my DVD player had a "repeat" setting, I can guarantee you I would have Twilight on a loop.

And the movie's not very good, either. I really liked Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen, but Twilight is a mess. And I KNOW HOW BAD IT IS. I can see that. (Except for Kristen Stewart, who is generally a terrific actress. Not to mention my giant, throbbing girl crush on her. She's just so cute and angsty!)

But I just can't tear myself away. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I think maybe I'm the extreme example of the "mom" type who reads it as escapism. Particularly since I've been in and out of college the past 4 years, I've been reading mostly highly literary fiction, and some feminist theory and philosophy. Twilight is very nearly the opposite of all those things. It's got clunky dialogue, a pinch of misogyny, and a few cliched symbols thrown in for good measure. It embodies everything I dislike.

With everything I've been dealing with the past year -- uncertainty about the welfare of my parents; terminally ill grandparents; trying to balance housekeeping, work, and bringing my gpa up (from a -.5, did you know that you can have a negative GPA? Well you can.) and not flunk out of school [again]; etc. -- my poor little brain probably just couldn't handle much more. It needed a vacation from amazing, brilliant literature. I needed to not be blown away by insightful portraits of realistic people and real life. I'd had enough real life for a while.

I needed Twilight. I needed symbols so obvious they smack you over the head, characters so cliche they make you gag, and unreasonable, frustrating plots. It just made things a little more bearable to forget for a while that my family might soon be homeless, my grandfather wasn't going to see me get married, and my house was a wreck. I just needed to escape.

And I guess I still do. I still watch the movie at least once a week, and I troll around the internet looking for news and gossip about New Moon. If there were other books, I'd be reading them. And I'm okay with that. There is room on my bookshelf for both Nabokov and Meyer. I am lame, lame, lame, and it beats the hell out of being wound up and stressed out.


Next blog will be coming to you from sunny Arizona! I'll try to post some pictures of me sweating and looking impatient and pissed off (because that's what vacations are for, right?)

Revved Up Like a Deuce

Hi again.

Figured it was time to update you, my precious little blog. So here's what's happened to me over the past week:

• Went to West Monroe and shot more footage of my grandmother
• Hung out with my awesome cousin and his awesome girlfriend, and saw Star Trek for the second time
  
• Traced my genealogy back to the 1500's
• Searched (fruitlessly) for my grandmother's adopted sister's grandchildren on Facebook (cause I'm creepy like that)
• Started a new diet and lost 2 lbs.
• Began editing the footage from Mama Ne's wedding as well as the first interview with her

It's been a banner week for "getting stuff done", methinks. The video editing is going to be a slow, painstaking process from what I can tell. Right now, I'm mostly just marking the footage for beginning and ending of interviews, then clipping out Mama Ne's answers from my questions.

From what I can tell, the narrative that I hope to achieve won't be visible until we're nearly through with filming. Obviously, the frame is my grandmother's life, but I want there to be another narrative thread (a more prominent one, actually) or at least a theme that ties it all together and makes it interesting to watch. Of course, her accounts of stories from her childhood/life before I was born are interesting to me, but I doubt they will interest many other people outside of my family (and even my family, from what I can tell, is not nearly as interested as I am in what her prom dress looked like, what songs were played at her first wedding, how she wore her hair in 1963, things like that).

Which leads us back to the overwhelming theme or story that I want to tell. I want there to be exposition, conflict, and resolution. Just not sure how to show those things. I'm better with writing; images and other people's words are a very new medium for me to manipulate.

Mama Ne mentioned in our first interview that a book of genealogy was written on her father's family. My dad just so happened to have a copy of the book, which I examined yesterday afternoon during my down time at work. That sort of thing is very interesting to me, because really, I'm an old lady at heart. I used genealogy.com's free family tree maker to create a pretty thorough family tree, if I do say so myself, dating all the way back to Thomas and Iwerner Bowers, my oldest relatives traced in the book my dad let me borrow.

Then, as I mentioned in my sexy bulleted list, I used the information from that book to search Facebook for my younger cousins whom I've never met, because their grandmother (Mama Ne's younger sister) was adopted. Not much luck. Thanks to the relative commonness of their names and Facebook's impeccable privacy settings, I wasn't able to find many promising leads. It was exciting to know the names of this family that I've never met, people who most likely don't know I exist, but it was equally disappointing to find that I really have no way of contacting them, and even if I did, they probably wouldn't care to know me.

As for the diet, I am HUNGRY. But it's not so bad. All the fruit and veggies my little tummy can handle. Additionally, it's one of those you-buy-our-food deals, and you're suppost to eat two of the prepackaged meals each day. I've only found one that I like, so we're going to need to order some more of that (Chicken Pasta Parmasean) asap, because we're already out and I've essentially only eaten fruit + liquid the past 2 days. Ah yes, the liquids! The diet also includes at least 2 shakes a day, blended from either a vanilla or chocolate mix. The shakes are pretty delicious, but sadly we're out of the vanilla blend, which is best for fruity shakes.

The only problem with this diet that we've noticed so far is that it's EXPENSIVE. Fruit and veggies (even canned and frozen ones) suck up $$ quickly when you're eating at least 5 servings a day, plus adding them in shakes. This is one of those times when I really wish I was a homeowner and could have a little pea patch of my own. Or better yet, a gazillionaire, and a pineapple plantation of my own.

Even though I have more to talk about, I get the feeling this blog post has gone on long enough. If you've made it all the way down here to the bottom without having an attack of ADD, congratulations! If I had prize-awarding capabilities, you would win something.

'Allo, poppets!

Welcome to le blog de Sara (that's SpanFrenglish for Sara's Blog)! I've been meaning to do this for a while, and now I have a couple different reasons to: I'll be writing for the LSU newspaper, The Reveille, and they "recommend" that I blog; and I'm starting on this giant project for my grandmother, and I want to keep family/friends updated. Other than that, I assume that people are rabidly interested in my life and dying to hear my mundane observations.

Now, I decided to throw my hat into the blog game roughly five minutes ago, but I'm hoping my super-smart-techy-teriffic-handsome boyfriend, Andy, might help me out a little with the design aspects. I knooooooooow he'd be so good at making this blog look neat *hint, hint* -- but we'll see, since a) He knows nothing about this yet, and b) He has a job and he tries to have a life outside of catering to my every whim (though he generally fails at that last part -- adorably). Anyway, all I'm saying is, don't get your hopes up about this becoming some visually beautiful piece of internet pie -- but do feel free to email Andy and beg him to make it so. :)

Some notes on the project for my grandmother: I'll be working on a "documentary," filled with 1st-person stories from her and her family about her life. We (Andy and I) just shot the first footage and interviews this weekend, and we'll be spending the rest of the summer (if not longer) getting interviews, doing detective work, and editing all these elements together to try to make an interesting, accurate, coherant narrative representation of her life story.

Here are some words that DON'T describe me: ambitious, follower-througher, motivated, time-manager. So this will essentially be the biggest, most serious thing I've ever done in my entire life, if it actually happens. Wish me luck, ya'll.

Aside from my project with my grandmother, I'll be probably be posting possible Reveille columns/ideas as well as day-to-day musings/observations...so hopefully this blog will be full of variety and novelty.

So, those are my great aspirations for this, my little baby blog. Now, sit back and watch as I do one of two things: fail miserably (what I do best), or succed WILDLY, like LOLcats or The Daily Kos.

Speaking of LOLcats, here's something precious to round out my first blog: