National Blog Not-Posting Month: a Post in Two Parts.

National Blog Not-Posting Month: a Post in Two Parts.

It looks like I not only failed at NaBloPoMo, I pretty much boycotted it. !!. Julia loves a good boycott. But, why didn't I just hold out another week? Well, I am tired of trying to stay away from you, Bella.

Basically I have two major and unrelated things to post about. Instead of doing bullets when I am feeling all disjointed and incoherent, I am going to do separate subheadings like a good little recovering technical writer.

TTC
Yes, dear friends, there is an internet acronym for deciding to start or increase your family. "trying-to-conceive" just has way too many letters and that pesky i-before-e-except-after-c thing you would always have to remember. This way, we can most efficiently be all OMG ur TTC m2 EWCM! I'm not going to explain the last acronym because we're in mixed company and I'm too classy for that.

Erik and I decided to get serious about trying to get pregnant again this last month (do you see how much shorter that sentence could be if I could force myself to use "TTC" as a verb?). We really haven't been avoiding it for a while now, but we certainly weren't "trying." And, these things being as they are, this month also yielded the first disappointment, the first un-success. I had assumed that because I am in a much more relaxed and prepared headspace than when we were trying to get pregnant with Ollie, that the disappointment wouldn't sting as much. But I swear, it's like it picked up almost right where we left off. The only thing I'm missing is the underlying fear that I would never have any children. But, oh, the sting, tempered only with the slightly distracting dull ache of cramps, those little bitches.

I'm not charting at all (there is NO WAY the little morning person in our family would allow me to leisurely take my temperature every morning before getting out of bed), and we're not really doing anything special besides resuming all the herbal teas and tinctures that are supposed to do things like lengthen your luteal phase and balance your hormones. The only reason I paid any attention to the dates this month was because cycle day 1 happened to fall on November 1st. With Ollie, I got a faint faint positive line on a pregnancy test on cycle day 25, so with November 25th rolling through yesterday, I have to say I definitely had my hopes up, way up. A 25 day cycle is pretty average for me, maybe even a little long, but it means that the little hippie tricks I was doing to lengthen my luteal phase (the second half of your cycle, after ovulation) probably didn't work.

Before we started to try, we had thought a lot about child spacing, and I guess we had even given ourselves a year+ range that we would consider ideal, and even then, it's not like it wouldn't be completely awesome to have two children spaced out however long. We are a little behind in that year+ window, but there is still plenty of time. It could take us another six months, or it could be longer. Or it could be next month. I know that I'm 100% okay with any of these scenarios, but I don't know if I will ever be able to forget this feeling of disappointment and failure at the end of the cycle. It's as fresh today as it was almost three years ago. Typ. I can quickly forget how painful contractions are, but this I can't seem to shake?

Twilight
On that happy note, lets move on to something even worse. I have whispered about Twilight quite a bit on here, I'm sure, fully owning up to the fact that I indulged in the books, and now the movie. As I read the books, I was annoyed by the pathetic writing (unadventurous word choice, redundant word choice, and annoying word choice, to be specific), the cloying narrator, and the obvious author-proxy fantasy that involved someone whose tastes in literature were stuck in the 11th grade. (Note, I found the movie a huge improvement). BUT I still loved reading the stories. I thought it (it being Twilight, the first book in the series) had a great concept: girl meets vampire, girl loves vampire. Vampire meets girl, vampire wants to kill girl, vampire loves girl. Kind of Buffyish. Oh wait, exactly Buffy-ish. Stephenie Meyer claims to have never seen Buffy. That said, she kind of laughs in the face of traditional vampire legend, and does so so uninhibitedly that you assume she did it on purpose?

[Listen. I know the kind of writer I am, and when faced with the option of painstakingly researching centuries of legend and lore versus just making my own shit up however I want, I know which option I'd choose to make a quick buck or two.]

But, then I read more of the books. Concurrent to reading the rest of the books (this all took place over a 5 day period), I also started devouring some of the criticisms and, uh, mockeries, online. And it was at this point when the frightening, blood-curdling world of Twilight fans was revealed to me. Oh, mercy. Hold me.

One blog in particular completely defines my Twilight experience.

Everyone, meet Cleolinda. Here is her blog: http://cleolinda.livejournal.com BUT WAIT, don't go there yet. Start here, at a special Wiki table of contents thingy for her blog. !!. That should link you right to the "Twilight Book Discussion Entries." Make yourself a cup of tea, find a cozy corner, and watch yourself start to think in strikethrough font.

Next up is someone I discovered last night, who isn't as endearingly original as Cleolinda but maybe I wouldn't think that way had I stumbled upon this "LDS Sparkledammerung" series first. Okay, so back to the sparkledammerung. Whatever, we don't try to understand these things, we just pass on the facts. This person has gone through all of the books from a Mormon perspective. Nay, not just that, but they shed light on all of the parallels and symbols for LDS things and doctrines in the story. Here it begins: LDS Sparkledammerung. It starts off a little choppy but who am I to judge?

[Also, it turns out, somebody has written their masters thesis on Mormon tenants in the Twilight series. It's a PDF file, by the way. This is all good and well, but I kind of prefer to read about this stuff when they're not forced to use intelligent language and nice phrasings. I want someone to use bad words and photoshop to layer on some sparkles.]

All in all, I have learned a few Key Takeaways from my time with Twilight, but nothing more striking than this: NO, I am not underestimating the Youth of America by saying that they are smarter than this, that they are not going to eat this stuff up. The movie made $70 million its first weekend. SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS.

This is not going to be the end of my discussion about this. I am still trying to wrap my brain around this and decide how I really feel, because even though they were enjoyable books and an enjoyable movie: WTF, I say. What the fuck.

So that is all. TTC and sparklemotion.