Got Vampire Sex? No.

Vampire Porn spoiler alert.

The Twilight books contain no sex. This is especially shocking because the books are essentially paragraph after paragraph of foreplay with a little blood letting mixed in for spice.

I'm only half way through book four but let me summarize the plot for those of you who are not drooling over the books between multiple viewing of High School Musical 3:

Angst. Mope. Oh Hottie. Ahh Vampire! Mmmmm Vampire! Love. Love. Love. Love. TRAGEDY. Depression. Doom. Whining. Angst. LOVE. Love. Maybe they'll get it on. Love. Love. Minor scary bit. Survived! Totally time for sex now. LOVE. Oh. I see we're going to be all chivalrous about the pootang. FINE. Wedding. Yawn. OK SEXY TIME IS NOW. Skinny dipping! HERE COMES THE BOOTY! Morning After. Wait.... let me go back a page. wtf? W? T? F? I WANT MY NAUGHTY VAMPIRE SMUT!

Now obviously I was super upset to find out that the books would be skipping over all of the good stuff, but mostly I was worried about the children. I know we usually give all of the hormone credit to teenage boys, but naughty girls need love too. And while the lads have Hustler and The Girls Next Door and looking up "fine art" in the encyclopedia, lassies are left with far fewer options for scratching the hormonal itch, so I think it's especially cruel for these books to be such a cunt tease.

I may be 30 years old, but I promise you that I am very in touch with the pulse of adolescence. A friend once even told me that I was perpetually 15 years old and, though this is the biggest insult ever and a curse worse than death, it makes me uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of teenage girls everywhere in the following letter to Stefanie Meyers, the author of the Twilight series:

Dear Stef,

I am 14 years old. My life already sucks A LOT. I have acne and braces and all of the boys in my school are losers. My parents have installed Net Nanny™ on the family computer. It will be at least 4 years until I go off to college where, god willing, no one will ever find out that my mom still only buys me Barbie panties because college boys are way too mature to pants someone in the lunch line. If they even have lunch lines in college which they probably do not because everyone is too busy drinking coffee and writing poetry to care about tater tots. Anyways. All I wanted. Nay, all I NEEDED to get me through high school was a little sweet vicarious vampire loving. Why must you deny me this you evil Mormon harpy?

Sincerly,
Every 14 Year Old Girl In America (except the slutty ones)

But this letter speaks not only for the girl next door but for the girl next door to 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. According to US Weekly, Barack is reading Twilight with his daughters. I'm going to ignore the fact that this is the single creepiest thing since Purity Balls and just say that I am 100% certain that Barack does not want to have to teach his little girl about the vampire loving and that he would be super happy if Ms. Meyer's would just do that for him. Unfortunately, she hates freedom.

Certain that there were some patriotic perverts out on the web, I did what any independent adult with unfettered access to the internet would do. I began searching for fan fiction. Surely someone had taken care of Meyer's oversight with a little vampire P in the human V short story action and perhaps my good deed of the millennium could be distributing this smut to junior high students nationwide. So I sorted through every Twilight themed entry on the Adult Fan Fic site (putting myself at great risk of spoiling the ending of book four I might note). There were werewolf on vampire stories, group vampire orgy stories, vampires as cowboy lover stories and even one vampire on Hogwarts entry. (I AM NOT KIDDING ). But apparently NO ONE has thought to write the most obvious and necessary of all perverted internet content: hot young virgin gets more than bitten.

And so I say, Internet Perverts, This is your big chance to do what Ms. Meyers could not! The Twilight movie comes out today, this shit is about to go VIRAL and you could ride its coat tails. Get to ye olde keyboard and start typing up that smut because I promise you that whomever can capture the passion of "Edward and Bella: Horizontal Feasting" will be the most famous creepy dude on the tubes. You might even get a cabinet post.

Candy Land

I have been avoiding reading Candy Freak for at least a year and a half out of fear that an entire book homage to chocolate and corn syrup might have calories embedded in the pages which would crawl into my body via the pores in my finger tips and cause me to gain roughly 250lbs by the time I reached page 73. Or (more likely) my will power would be no match for Steve Almond's passion and I'd have to set up a sleeping bag at the foot of the candy rack of my local 24 hour bodega. Either way the book seemed dangerous enough to put off digesting it until a recent trip had me stuck on an airplane and then locked away in the mountains at least 90 minutes from the nearest Hershey bar.

Unlike Almond, I have no right to blog about chocolate candy, we all know that were I to drown my sorrows in sugar and fat you'd find my bloated body bobbing in a lake of half melted Ben and Jerry's. As a kid I often claimed to hate chocolate -- unsurprisingly this was an exaggeration (something I've been prone to since well before the inception of this blog) as I was perfectly capable of wolfing down handful of See's caramels and thin mint cookies both of which were enrobed in my supposed arch nemesis. I do however, remember bemoaning the over abundance of chips in chocolate chip cookies and wondering why no one made a chipless version. Luckily, I've gotten over this ridiculousness and now keep an emergency supply of chocolate in my desk at work and the pantry cupboard at home. As is the case with most of my paranoid stock piles of emergency food much of the chocolate goes to waste waiting for a rainy day downpour that never comes but I'm comforted by its presence.

Almond would likely scoff at my candy bar snobbery -- virtually everything I buy is European and dark and occasionally (when my liberal guilt is boiling over) organic and fair trade. My go to candy is Ritter Sport bars in hazelnut, corn flake or biscuit (note to Ritter Sport president who totally reads my blog: make the biscuit and the corn flake versions in dark chocolate please) but if forced into a mass market candy bar decision I'll usually go Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Twix or KitKat. I eat all of these from top to bottom, first peeling away the chocolate top soil to reveal the candy strata beneath. KitKats are the most satisfying to eat, on a good day I can peel away each layers of waffer and scratch off the chocolate goo with my front teeth until I have just the final bottom coat of chocolate melting in my hand.

I love to taste new things so Almond's chapters devoted to small regional candy companies had me salivating and making plans for a gluttonous cross country candy feast. I must try the GooGoo Clusters (Steve didn't mention there was peanut butter version -- I may need to schedule a trip to the south for tomorrow afternoon) and the snob in me can't believe she's lived this long without experiencing Five Star Bars. In the spirit of this book I've decided to bestow upon you, dear readers, a couple of candy reviews of my own.

First up is the Yorkie which I bought mostly because it was taunting me with its tag line, "Not for Girls," what self respecting feminist could resist? I have to assume that the Yorkie has a secret ingredient that reacts with testosterone to create a taste that would not be described as "waxy," "kind of off" and "gross." which are the words this estrogen machine immediately turned to upon first bite. Upon further reflection on the plain gritty low quality milk chocolate I was forced to consider the possibility that the Yorkie contains actual Yorkies.

While the Yorkie called to me as a challenge the Reese's Peanut Butter and Banana Creme (aka the Elvis) spoke directly to my pallet. I have always loved Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with their shockingly sweet jolt of peanutty goodness and in many moments of midnight snacking I have been known to spread peanut butter directly onto a banana and moan orgasmically so the limited edition candy seemed like a brilliant and much overdue idea. The modified peanut butter cups tasted exactly as billed -- the banana flavoring was authentic enough to make it easy to pretend that an actual banana has been hurt in the making of this candy and the flavor melded nicely with the peanut and chocolate. But... I kind of wanted my regular Reese's back. This taste test made it clear that my love for peanut butter cups is more about nostalgia then taste. As much as I thrive on new taste sensations in my heart I am still American and like the majority of Hershey's customer base, and like Steve Almond, I crave the candy that comforted me as a child and my tongue is ready to rebel against any veering from the expected Reese's path.

So I cannot recommend either of the new candy bars I tried but I heartily recommend Candy Freak. In addition to being a fascinating walk through our collective candy history it's also a touching glimpse into Steve Almond's particular kind of freak. I suspect that many readers may be annoyed by his tangents into noncandy related personal antidote but I was charmed. Steve, when you read this please don't be overwhelmed by my fame, leave a comment, fly to New York, no need to bring clothing.

Ten Books (Really Just Nine)

Lisa tagged me on this a week ago but I’ve been putting it off. Despite feeling pretty passionate about books in general I’m having a ridiculously difficult time answering these questions. I think this is supposed to get at what my favorite books are but it doesn’t do that at all – I had nowhere to put Middlesex or Carter Beats the Devil or A Short History of Nearly Everything. The books I finally settled on listing here don’t really seem important enough for a stint on my blog (you’ll note that I usually write about very important stuff). I guess part of the problem is that I want my book selection to somehow explain who I am and so I feel like I have to make the best selections to show everyone just how awesome I am. That’s a tall order for a silly internet meme.

1. One book that changed your life?

See? How am I supposed to answer this? Changed my life? Do people often feel like books change their life? I mean I guess I was very affected by reading things like The Demon Haunted World and The Beauty Myth and A Revolution from Within but I have a hard time pinpointing something as life changing – it just seems like such a tall order.

2. One book you have read more than once?

I reread The Great Gatsby a year ago. My first reading had been junior year of high school and I hadn’t been that impressed. I got through it and didn’t actively hate the book (which is much more than can be said about The Scarlet Letter or Frankenstein) but it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. As a goody goody teen my only form of rebellion had been to roll my eyes at most assigned text, I loved to read but I hated almost every book that was forced upon me by a teachers. I’m older now and supposedly more open minded and every hipster in the city raves about their love for Gatsby so I thought I’d give it another go. My god are the people in that book shallow and annoying.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Like a true dork I immediately jumped to the survival guide answer but I think that’s probably antithetical to the purpose of this survey. Then I thought “well, ideally something really big that I haven’t yet read so it will at least get my mind off of things for the first few weeks.”

4. One book that made you laugh?

Man. I don't read a lot of funny books and the ones I do read are so cliche (I refuse to put a David Sederis book here, I am MUCH cooler than that.). I laughed a fair bit in the "you must be kidding!" way while reading Under the Banner of Heaven but probably that just makes me a huge jerk.

5. One book that made you cry?

God-Shaped Hole. I’m not even sure that I think this is a very good book but it’s very pretty and there’s love and death and it all feels very important. I read it when I need to cry (post break ups mostly) and it serves as a comfortable little trigger for the tears.

6. One book you wish you had written?

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowel. She does such an amazing job making serious topics (her father’s mortality, 9/11) hilariously funny. I wish my writing could hit that sweet spot more often but when I try to write about serious things they come out sad and I mostly don’t post them on my blog because I don’t want my readers worrying about me. I really just wish I could be Sarah Vowel, I’d gladly learn to live with the weird voice for a chance to be on This American Life.

7. One book you wish had never had been written?

My immediate thought was “The Bible" which is horribly cynical of me (I blame The End of Faith, which I just finished). I don’t actually think that eliminating the bible would change the world much – we’d still have plenty of silly religions to kill people over.

8. One book you are currently reading?

King Dork is a young adult novel written by Frank Portman, the lead singer for The Mr. T Experience. I’m about ¼ of the way in and so far I’m enjoying it – but probably not as much as I would be if I had been an awkward teenaged boy instead of an awkward teenaged girl. It reminds me of the book Youth in Revolt which I read the summer after college and which touched me more because I think it was the first time that I realized that boys had it tough too (I was a little slow).

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

The World is Flat which is right not taunting me from the bookshelf. “You are such a slacker,” it says, “I’ve sat here since January waiting to educate you about the new economy and instead you choose to gorge yourself on young adult fiction, loser – you deserve to have your job outsourced, Indian girls LOVE reading about global economics.”


10. Now tag five some other people...

See? this question is not about books, so really only 9 book questions in this meme -- silly title that can't count. I'm going to pass on tagging people -- which just means I'm going to spare Mike, because everyone else I know already filled this out.

Random Wants 2

While browsing at Barnes and Nobel yesterday I ran across this book and immediately fell in love with author Garth Sundem (aka the smartest man on earth). This book contains equations for determining all of the following and more:

• Do I have a snowballs chance in hell?
• Should I become intimate with a coworker?
• Should I call in sick to work?

Those of you lucky enough to hear me whine about my personal problems know that finding a mathematical equation to provide answers is my ultimate dream. Out of a desire not to appear to my shopping companion like the biggest dork ever (though he probably suspected this when I started heavily pushing the book on cod) I did not purchase this book yesterday but I have added it to my Amazon wishlist (hint hint ;)).