How It All Began

For a few years, my young tutoring students had been telling me stories of hiding under their covers at 2:00 a.m. with flashlights, reading Twilight secretly.  Sometimes their mothers would ask me if it were an appropriate series for young girls--4th to 6th grade or so.  I could only go on rumor.

The girls would tell me things like, "I skip the inappropriate parts," or, "Some of the stuff is awkward."  I figured this meant that there was some romance, some descriptions that made them tingle in their nether regions, like Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You" did when I was prepubescent.

So in November of 2010, I had to find out for myself.  I'd seen Twilight one late night on Shotime, and I'd gone to watch Eclipse in the theater to avoid a dinner with the mother-in-law, so I had an idea of the running plot and characters.  This was long after New Moon was out, and I wasn't really sure that I needed to see it.  Regardless, as we who love to read know, film and word are often disparate; therefore, in order to really get into the psyche of the Twilight lover, I had to read the books.

What blossomed--or spewed--from my opening of a beaten borrowed copy of Twilight is what now drives this blog, many of my jokes in class, and perhaps even some graduate research.  So with a Sunday snoring husband next to me on the couch, and a six-year-old PokePark player in front of me, I begin...