twilight

i jumped on the junior high bandwagon: i'm about halfway through twilight and i'm obsessed -- caught somewhere between a teenage crush and a perverse fascination.

while poor little hal gurgled and cooed through his formula this morning, i propped him in my elbow and held the novel in my other hand, racing through sentences and paragraphs to see how many times bella would brush against edward. it's ridiculous, isn't it? a few breaths into a novel and i already feel like i'm sitting in the bay of windows next to my junior high locker again. waiting with my little maroon padded trapper-keeper on my lap, hoping to see derek. wanting him to sit next to me ... really close. wanting him to touch me, even by accident. wanting him to talk to me about algebra, about our teacher in his white lab coat, about steel edged rulers, about anything -- just so long as he was talking to me. [unfortunately, i haven't exactly been able to stir up the same amount of attention for my husband when he talks about teeth and root canals and amalgam fillings.]

there is nothing more intoxicating than a high school crush. and stephenie meyer got it perfectly right, in a fantastic tongue-in-cheek, yet entirely serious: "i noticed that he wore no jacket himself, just a light gray knit V-neck shirt with long sleeves. again, the fabric clung to his perfectly muscled chest. it was a colossal tribute to his face that it kept my eyes away from his body." sheesh ... i'm shivering, aren't you?

this book is going to consume the rest of my weekend. meyer has captured the essence of high school and that little twinge inside all girls -- we all want to believe that we are the most beautiful and we don't know it -- we all want to believe that the most intriguing and handsome man in the class is staring at us -- we all want to believe that there is someone hovering just outside our peripheral vision, waiting to save us -- we all want to date vampires.