Twi-Hard

Over the weekend, one of our regular patrons came into the library, and I was trying hard not to stare at her. Usually, she has a full beard of facial hair, which she shaves, but apparently a trip to the library does not warrant the clean-shaven look, so she’s quite stubbly. There are a few women in town with beards. It makes me wonder what’s in the water. It also makes me drink more pop. However, this trip into the library, she changed things up a bit and shaved her facial hair into a goatee – hence, the staring. Some teeny-tiny little part of me said good for her for embracing her uniqueness, but the remaining 99.9% of me screamed, GOOD GOD WOMAN, do you want to cause palpitations in the general public? Even the more tolerant and open-minded members?

Egad.

She sat with another woman at a computer, quite closely, for a long time.

(Yes, I’m sure she’s a woman, despite the beard. Wait, whoa. I’m not THAT sure, but she definitely has the body of a woman, however unattractive that might be.)

As they were leaving, she stopped herself and walked back toward my desk, and I tried not to look shocked as she approached me.

Don’t look at the beard. Don’t look at the beard. Don’t look at the…

Her: Um, yeah, hi. I was wondering if you have, like, the Twilight books in.

Me: Oh no, sorry. Those are all checked out with a list of people waiting for them. Do you want me to put your name on the list?

Her: They’re all gone?

Me: Yeah, what with the movie premiering, they’ve picked up in popularity again.

Her: No then. I’ll just buy them.

Me: Okay.

It took a moment, but when she was gone I started to giggle. Twilight appeals to a certain crowd. Bearded women are among them, evidently, as well as insecure teens and folks who have no life. Perhaps I’m being redundant. I tried so hard to read that damn book. I didn’t get past the first chapter because being in the head of an extremely irritating and whiny teenage girl was too much torture for me to take. I never even knew about the glittery vampires (guffaw!) until the movie came out, which I refuse to watch.

After recovering from the encounter, I sent Briana an IM that said a bearded woman just requested the Twilight books, which I thought was a perfect statement about the content.

She shot back to me: Maybe she’s a werewolf.

I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Suddenly it all became clear.

When I got home from work, I was excited to tell my brother about the bearded Twilight fan, which he didn’t find nearly as funny, perhaps because he’d just forced himself to sit through the new movie and was in the mood to kill himself.

I asked him why on earth he would do something so heinous to himself. There are other solutions. One should never bottom out and watch a Twilight movie.

He said, having seen both flicks, the two could be summed up perfectly without the need to watch and waste your valuable time, so he offered it up to me to save me.

Plot summaries:

Twilight: I love you; I’ll never leave you.
New Moon: I have to leave; you can’t come with.

His advice is to ponder these statements and not bother with the movies.

Sage advice, I assume. Anything that steers people away is good to me.

Later, I was chatting with Leelu and told her about the exchange. Later than that, the conversation seemed to me to shift back, and we had the following conversation:

Leelu: Okay, this summation of a topic may not be as funny to you as it is to me, but I think it stands alone:

So wait, we've moved from how to shoot fictional creatures, to the theoretical rights of fictional creatures, to the right to theoretically shoot these fictional creatures.

Werewolves are srs bsns, yo.

Me: bsns?

Leelu: Business.
Leelu: Serious business.

Sometimes she has to be my translator. I’m dumb like that.

Me: Ahhh.
Me: Right .
Me: That's another Twilight reference? Or New Moon? Whatever.

Leelu: No, it was a discussion on the best way to kill werewolves in general.

Me: Ooooooooooooh.
Me: Can't you just dart them and relocate them?
Me: Put them in a refuge?

Leelu: Which is how the rights of werewolves were invoked.

Me: Like a werewolf reservation?
Me: Give them tax exempt status and their own license plates, let them run casinos, etc.?
Me: C'mon, there are better solutions to werewolves than killing them and giving them diseases from the non-shape-shifting community.
Me: They might help us one day and we'll have to invent a new holiday, whereby we celebrate what the werewolves gave us and how we survived because of them.
Me: Okay, did I take it too far?
Me: I do that.
Me: All the time.

Leelu: I enjoyed it.

Me: I should be on Family Guy.

Leelu: You should talk to Lummox more often. He does it all the time.

Marina had sent me this earlier, which I agree with 100%, and hallelujah that someone is bringing it up. Of course, it linked to something that linked to this, which is a whole lot of awesome too.

After reading that, Leelu asked, “Count Chocula?”

I replied that he was very seeeeeexxxxxxxy, and even Count von Count is hot.

She then linked me to this video, which has changed the very language Leelu and I converse in. It’s *counting* great!


So, if nothing good will ever come out of the Twilight series, at least the books led us here, to delightfully naughty muppet videos.