An Open Letter to Stephanie Meyer

Dear Mrs. Meyer,

Let me begin by stating that the contents of this letter, though meant for the best intentions, may come across as partially insulting. I want to first and foremost explain that my singular opinion does not in any way diminish the empire you have built, no matter how much this empire needs to be killed with fire. I mean, it's pretty easy to get pre-teens to find something to be obsessed about. Heck, I was obsessed with N'Sync and Hanson at separate times in my life. I'm not knocking that. Actually, I rather respect your perfect storm of the pre-pubescent rage of hormones combined with a transparent moral message - none of which that are told or learned from the main character, mind you - but I admire it no less.

That isn't the point of this letter. You receive all kinds of fan mail, I assume. Some of that could be hate mail. Nothing says I'm standing up for literature more than sending a person you've never met, who very well may be a perfectly decent and kind person, a letter that threatens their very existence. This isn't that kind of letter either. Instead, I'm here to thank you.

Yes, thank you.

Mrs. Meyer, your books paved the way for a completely unforeseen path in my life. Sure, I spent a lot of time reading and writing on my own and you didn't inspire me to be a writer, not even in that sort of 'her writing was so awful, I'm going to single handedly save the modern novel by being a million times better than her' way. No, this was simply a change in my social life, believe it or not.

See, without your books, I wouldn't have read them and formed such painfully distinct opinions. Granted, I'm likely to read anything someone puts in front of me at least once just to find out why everyone is reading it. Then there's the fact that I really, truly enjoy bad literature. And bad television. And I love bad movies. (Hey! You got me twice by that list alone!) I find it more entertaining to read something bad than good. Your teen-emo-vampire series of books gave me reason to rage and complain and laugh until I wanted to throw up and that right there is the reason I read them all. Okay, the last one took a lot of convincing to finish it, but hey, you win some you lose some. I read The Host. I had a very less interesting opinion on that one. It was decent. So, when I was done reading it, I had nothing to talk about. All I could think was, well, her vocabulary improved and the plot style was better. It was all in one book and not stretched out into a poor excuse for a saga and it followed a theme. Okay, that's good enough for me.

I swear there's a point to this.

Because your, uh, 'saga' struck such a foul chord with me, I had something to talk about with an unsuspecting girl at a college group meeting. We'd never met before and for the life of me, I can't recall why we started up on your books, but we spent over an hour recounting every ridiculous situation in those first two books. I'm not sure the third had come out yet, now that I think about it. It created this bizarre bond between me and this girl and from that first conversation a friendship was born. In fact, we spent countless hours discussing, bashing, improving on and laughing over your books in the following meetings and later into other outings. That was the very foundation of our friendship. I swear, we've talked more about the idiocy of Bella, the emotionally challenged aspects of Edward and the seriously weird situational humor of Jacob more than any other subject. We drop references from your books in regular conversation, use the creepy pick-up lines/misguided romantic comments of Edward and come up with reasons to work in our favorite character; the shirtless-wolf-mob. (Oh, please, we can't be the only ones that think the entire pack of not-werewolves have absolutely no individual identity. When we watch the movies, I swear I've never seen any of their faces. I don't even notice if they have heads above their shoulders! I just see tanned, shirtless torsos and half-torn pants all moving together like a synchronized swimming team made out of bizarrely hairless Native American men like it's got it's own fetish.) 

...Where was I? 

Oh... so, we've become best friends since then and regularly remind ourselves of how our friendship began. Our mutual dislike for the butchering of vampire-lore had brought us together. I spent a lot of time before meeting her being relatively alone. Not because I couldn't find friends if I wanted to, but I really didn't want to. I have a low tolerance for idiocy and she filled all the requirements that I would have listed had I made a friend requirement list; not an idiot, likes to read, hates stupid vampire romance novels but reads them anyway. I'm sure there's other things that would have been important, but they aren't important now. 

In conclusion, Mrs. Meyer, you truly are an inspiration. Sure, it isn't in the way you hoped to be. I wasn't inspired by your love story (because it read more like a stalker's diary) and I wasn't inspired by your skill in creative writing (because I've read fanfiction that reads better than Twilight), but I was inspired to never, ever let myself be a writer like that and then found people who agreed with me. 

Thank you, Stephanie Meyer. Without you, I'd have never met my best friend. 

Sincerely, 

Alexandra

P.S. - Okay, I just have to get this out. How could you run us through all that ridiculous build-up through the entire fourth book the WHOLE time and then NOT give us a blood bath? HOW COULD YOU? C'mon! That was all right there for you. All the evil vampires and the good ones that randomly existed and the not-werewolves... my God, it was a perfect set up (even if the path in which they got there was boring and dull as hell). Good Lord, Stephanie, couldn't you have thrown us a bone of some kind?? Hey, I bought all of your books. I never returned one. I get to whine about how horrible that ending was. Not that this was the worst thing that happened in the books. There is terrible, terrible plot devices and planning on your part, but c'mon! This should have been a no brainer!

Occupy Wall Street... or something

So, I just recently heard about this Occupy Wall Street thing (re: no one will shut up about it). I guess its been going on for a bit (re: two freaking months) and I decided to do some research. I've learned a lot about the dissatisfied 20-somethings of my generation by this research and also discovered that this is apparently the deeper calling for all hipsters everywhere. I assume any excuse to be self-aware, dirty, one with nature, beardy (you, too, ladies), and completely pretentious should have them flocking to Wall Street like some other similie of things flocking to places. Regardless, what was weird, is that I can't really get a good grasp on why the hell they're doing this in the first place.

The blanket explanation is vague enough that pretty much anyone could fall under it. They are disgruntled tax payers expecting more from their government. Sure, I can get behind that. Taxes suck. The government should do something about it...? I mean, I guess the government can only do what it can with what it's got, so if we pay them less taxes then they can't function as well when it comes to integrating with our civilian desires to have them hand us things for when life gets tough. Doesn't that mean that the government can't do their job when we want them to because we are asking them to lower taxes which does exactly the opposite of what we want the outcome to be? Just... what? No, what am I talking about?! This is America! We're Americans! Give me shit for nothing, I've got some Kardashians to watch go down in a fiery ball of money saturated glory.

Diving deeper into the meaning of this Occupy protests, I realized that none of these people have a single coherent cause. None of them. Sure, you get a pocket of them trying to say that 'The Man' is bring them down. The rich are being rich and that's offensive. Okay, I get it. College is expensive. So is gas. (Though I can't for the life of me figure out why this group cares about that. They all ride their one-speed vintage Schwinns anyway.) And war! We're spending money on war! We should stop spending money on our troops and start giving it to people who can't get a job because the economy sucks. I'm not seeing how that is productive in any way at all because that just means we're sacrificing one group of employed people for another.

Wait, let me skip all this. I can accept that they have reasons, even if they are horribly thought out, incoherent reasons. Or maybe to them they're good reasons. I can accept that, too. Let's discuss the actual act of protesting. When the grocers union goes on strike, the workers all stand out front of the market, ya know, protesting. It forces the store to hire short term laborers, usually for more than what they were paying the union workers and also it discourages customers from crossing the picket line. This negatively effects the market. It forces a negotiation. Do we all understand what a protest does now? Good.

Then can someone explain to me what the hell camping in a park on Wall Street is going to accomplish then? Wall Street has absolutely no impact on tax law. None. Hell, at this point they are hoping for an inception of protesters so that all those Wall Street workers will go protest outside Congress to get them to do something about the hipsters stinking up their park. There's passive aggressive and then there's this, which is so beyond ridiculous I can't even come up with a good word for it. Besides the fact that if these people are all part of some group that has school loans to pay and no jobs, therefore no money to spend, they are really making the same impact on the economy as they were before. It's not like their camping out is effecting anyone anywhere but themselves. They may be the 99%—of what, I'm not exactly sure—but they are a pretty small chunk of it. I'm poor, managed to get a job and pay my taxes. I figure that's simply the state of the times and we'll keep moving through it.

Look, it isn't important what I think. These people can protest all they want. They can throw a temper tantrum instead of rolling with it. To each their own. I really only have one question for them. When the economy picks up again, like it inevitably will, and you do finally get an interview again how exactly to you think it is going to reflect on your character when they ask what you had been doing while you were unemployed and you have to say, "Well, I was standing outside Wall Street in my $70 t-shirt that looks like I picked it out of a dumpster and a completely age inappropriate mustache, telling authority that I thought they were doing it all wrong, because I have no work ethic. Someone should just give me stuff."

Yeah, good luck getting hired.

Adventures in Online Dating

Yes, I have tried online dating. Yes, it was something that I thought was a good idea for a very brief period of time. Shamefully, I payed for it both literally and emotionally. No, not because I was so scarred by the experience, but more because my better judgement decided to shut the hell up and watch me do something stupid, probably for it's own pure entertainment. Yeah, my subconscious is mean like that.

What happens is I decide that somewhere in the craziness that is my over-acheiving mind I get the insane idea that I should be active in my dating life. That isn't to say that I shouldn't be or that you shouldn't be either, but more that I have no freaking clue what I'm doing. See, I spend all my time thinking about how if only I was skinnier or didn't have a tendency to blurt out whatever is happening in my head at the moment regardless of the continuity with the current discussion, I would actually be happily married with 2.5 children. (I'd like to note now that I'm not even sure how I feel about children, but that is not the point, Hopes and Dreams.)

In reality what happens is I get some wild hair that says, 'go forth and be sexy,' as if that's all it takes. There's various problems with this school of thought, but I will leave it up to your imagination why this doesn't work for me. (Hint: I don't know what sexy means.)

Alas, I find myself trying to match myself with handsome--actually not--strangers over the internet. This of course, supplies us with another issue. There's two sides to my personality; the one that is far too intimidating for the average man that I meet in daily life and that side that is way too meek to actually make a move. Now, you would think that just going with the side of me that is meek and figure that the internet is a hotbed of easy to access men with the same problem, but you'd be wrong. My cynicism gets in the way. These men are immediately judged based on their ability to answer simple questions. When eFindaMate asks for things you 'can't live without' they don't mean food and water. When it asks what you are passionate about, if you say life, I will come through the tubes and punch you in the mouth. The sheer amount of generic answers there are out there can all be narrowed down to this one phrase; I am passionate about living life to the fullest.

I swear to you, none of these men have anything better to say. Sure that's a great thing to feel about life, but at what point is that going to tell me that I should pick you over the rest of them? Am I likely to be reading these profiles and see that phrase and say, "Oh good, a man who likes living and isn't looking for a train to throw himself in front. That's the man I'm looking for." At this point, I'm looking for a set of busy train tracks myself, because dammit, traffic wouldn't be poetic enough.

In conclusion, I'm closing my account and writing this instead. I decided that if I am too lazy to even go online and try and find some guy to take up my spare time, I could probably come up with a cheaper hobby. Online man shopping only goes so far. Besides the fact that I'm pretty sure Chris Hemsworth and Clay Matthews are both not on a dating site. I mean c'mon, those are the only men I'm looking for anyway.