Oh No! 666 Views!

Okay, I just had to comment on that one when I saw it in my stats.  I remember once when I was buying a bagel, the cashier was all nervous and hiding the display of the cash register.  I can’t remember if the balance on my card was 6.66 or that was my total.  She thought I would freak if I saw it.  Little did she know, while I am religious, I don’t get all bent out of shape over a number, a love Halloween, and think of the number thirteen (and especially Friday the 13th) as lucky.

Anyway, like always, I’ve been procrastinating again.  That usually entails reading books or watching movies/TV shows I’ve seen/read a plethora of times.  Sorry, a million times is just too much of an exaggeration for my mind to grapple with at this moment.  I find my brain trying to calculate how long it would take me to read Breaking Dawn a million times.  

So, maybe it’s the perfectionist in me, but lately I’ve gotten to where I notice every little mistake in every previously loved book I reread.  Like when Bella is making Charlie pancakes for breakfast but moments later he’s eating out of a cereal bowl.  Or claiming Bella’s first kill was a “lion” easily four times her mass, when the average weight for a male mountain lion (the only type of “lion” in North America) is only about 130lb, she weights 110.  The highest recorded weight was roughly 300lb.  Or why someone would try to eliminate the pain of turning with morphine.  Seriously.  Morphine?  If it was me, I’d be hitting the general anesthetic, not an analgesic.  Analgesics relieve pain.  Anesthetics eliminate sensation entirely, i.e. eliminate pain.  Huh, I wonder which I would go for?

But I guess what really pushed my buttons was the slap in the face to genetics.  I mean any biological scientist or anyone working with animals knows 25 pairs of chromosomes from one parent plus 23 pairs from the other does not equal 24 pairs in the offspring.  Instead, you are left with 23 pairs in the sterile offspring and 2 unpaired chromosomes.  I mean, mules?  Hello?  Mules are almost exclusively sterile, and one of a few rare instances of successful interspecies matings.  A doctor would know that.  I mean, if she wasn’t going to do the research, the least she could say was, “Sorry, ignore my complete lack of factual accuracy.”  I’ve seen that before in a book.  I even read a book once that basically said, Yes, I did my research, then just decided to do whatever the hell I wanted to.  But it’s fantasy so, who cares?

Still, I think it’s probably still my favorite in the series.  And Breaking Dawn Part 1 was the best of the five movies, even if Part 2 was probably the worst of the five.  I never could understand completely eliminating some of the most vital portions of the plot, and adding in a fight seen that never existed in the first place.  It was the best scene in that stupid movie, and it had no part in the plot whatsoever.  Oh well, you’d think I’d learn.  Or should I say maybe Stephenie Meyer should learn to stick to writing, because clearly The Host was an absolute bomb as well (I waited for a Redbox coupon, just knew it was going to bomb — which usually means I like it better because my expectations are lower — but still thought it was mighty terrible).  I mean, what was with the main character’s complete lack of expressivity.  She has this blank expression through the entire movie, even when she should be scared, nervous, happy, cringing away expecting to get hit again.  And with the complete lack of expressions, she looks like the best liar alive, not the worst liar imaginable like she’s claimed to be.

And it’s funny, I have all her books, but I never reread the second one, New Moon.  I can’t stand it, specifically that part where she’s bawling her eyes out.  It doesn’t make sense.  None at all.  I can get her being devastated.  I’ve never been in love like that, but I’ve definitely had some instances where I felt like my world was falling apart (however deluded I might have been at the time), but I would never act like that (and I always loved the series because Stephenie Meyer portrays certain portions of my personality so well, parts that are never portrayed well in fiction).  The simple fact is, no matter how badly she was hurting, her inner martyr would have kicked into overdrive.  She would disappear for extended periods of time, go cry in the woods or something, but making her father worry like that?  Impossible.  I know.  I’ve been there.  I run and hide when I have to cry.  I can’t let people see.  I can’t let people fret over me like that.  And my complex is nowhere near as extreme as Bella’s.  Causing others pain would be equally intolerable to her with losing Edward.  She would force herself to eat, where extra makeup to hide her sleep deprivation, spend all night staring at the ceiling trying not to cry, but she would never in a million years let Charlie know something was wrong.  It just never made sense, and it was like listening to someone draw their fingernails across a blackboard for me.  Which was a pity because the rest of the book wasn’t that bad.

I wish she would write more, though.  She hasn’t released a book since 2008, unless you count the novella in 2010.  I wished she’d just stick to writing.  I’ve been waiting for something new from her for years but nothing.  I don’t even care what it’s about.  I don’t care if it’s aliens, vampires or even zombies (not that she’s made any comments about making zombie stories), and I’m not overly fond of zombie stories.  She just needs to stop making movies.  Please.

Photo credit: garycruz / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND