Why Edward Is Edward

I understand women. In fact, I understand women better than most women understand themselves or their own motivations. I'm fascinated by what makes people come together in relationships, and it is this knowledge that actually keeps me from wanting to be in one. People are too neurotic.

Naturally, given a love story, I have to decode it. I have to deconstruct it to see if it makes sense, and yes, despite the fantasy elements, and in some ways, because of them, the attraction does in fact seem to be appropriate, which I think is actually unintentional on Stephanie Meyer's part.

There's an old saying that "people always want what they can't have". However, "people always despise what they have," is probably a little closer to the truth.. Women are notorious for that, since it is usually the females, in our social structure, that are on the defensive in courtship situations. They are the ones approached at bars; they are the ones asked out on dates. It is simply a situation where even mediocre looking women have to sift through their potential suitors in order to find the one who is most suitable to live indefinitely with. Understanding this, you realize that women are most amorous of people outside of their grasp, or at least outside of their immediate grasp. A guy who is just as hot as Brad Pitt might hit on her at a bar, but she'll turn him away, only to swoon over the real thing. Why? Brad Pitt has money, fame, and a beautiful wife. Between the physical barrier of distance, and the more existential barriers of class and marital status, it is safe for a woman to swoon over this icon, because it is a fantasy.

Let's deconstruct Mike in Bella's eyes: he's not described as being homely, nor is he viewed as being particularly attractive. However, he is sought after by other women. He must have something attractive about his personality. In the movie he is personified with a little bit more of an energetic personality than is conveyed in the books. All in all, he is exceptional by the class standards, and stands out to Jessica, but to Bella, who regards the entire class as a sort of backwards, small-town type of people: he is unremarkable. On top of this, being one of the first people that Bella meets in Forks, he is associated with all of the negative memories that her image of Forks brings. In a way, he represents Forks to her, and thus is sort of backwards and drab.

However Edward from the get-go is an outsider. He is not a part of the world of Forks, neither physically nor socially. His physical distance represents a sort of condemnation that Bella can get behind, and an impenitrable distance through which Bella cannot immediately see. Really, if he was just a pale, attractive kid from New York City, the same effect would have been reached. He is a sort of kindred spirit in that way. Humanity, particularly in Americans, revel in challenges. Telling us that something is unattainable, or forbidden makes us want something more. We want to experience it. We want to know precisely why it is bad. Like the fruit of knowledge, we don't know what we don't know, and by the same token, we assume that it is pleasure, and not pain, from which we are being spared.

Josephine, lover of Napoleon, was known to write letters to him during the war, at first cursing his absence, then next professing her undying love. This coquettishness is an attributing factor to his downfall at Waterloo. It catches us off guard, and is a power gaining trick. The reason why it works is because at the surface level it is completely illogical: there is no reason why someone could possibly be hot, then cold when no physical decision was made in the intermediary period. It makes one question oneself, and then try to find some meaning deep down. The accused person, Bella in this case, tries to rationally come up with some reason for the changes. It eventually makes her play her hand, when in actuality it is decidedly lacking. Of course, we recognize this in other people's relationships, and could easily label it as manipulation, but in the heat of the moment, most of the time we forget what this looks like when it happens to us. Of course, there is the other interpretation where the lover's actions are just veiled in some guise of mystery where they just seem aloof and troubled, which activates the female's inborn desire to want to be the force in someone's life that heals them: cures them of all their demons.

Bella doesn't know all of this. She is a seventeen year old girl who has never been in a relationship. She doesn't realize that she is dealing with a hunter, both in the vampiric sense, and also the male sense. Here is a man who has spent lifetimes among people analyzing, calculating, learning. Even if he didn't prey on humans, he watched how they interacted: how they lied to one another: how they loved each other. He is aware.

What teenage girls don't understand is how little they understand, particularly about relationships. Bella is a key example of this: willing at first to give it all away to be with some handsome guy she met at school, but this isn't surprising. She's young and foolish and infatuous. In a way, so are all of the fans of Edward: they have all fallen for his charms and what he seems to represent: eternal youth and beauty. After all, isn't that what everyone wants?

Don't Die In Florida Pt 1

Travel. It is supposed to be one of the most glorious things about living life in the modern era. Of course, the person who said that failed to account for 9/11

I hate to be the sort of guy who blames the world's problems on 9/11, but this one is legitmate. I even accept that the TSA guys were and are just doing their jobs, but I always use at least three of those little trays every time I go through the security checkpoints: one for my shoes and the contents of my pockets, one for my laptop, and one for my messengerbag proper. Sometimes they make me put my jacket in one too. There is no dignified way to collect all of your belongings after such a diaspora of personal goods.

It seems that with travel, air travel especially, that something always goes wrong, which is maybe a factor of how many things CAN go wrong, between tickets, luggage, security thinking your candy bar is a loaded magazine for a .45, shuttles taking you to the wrong terminal, screaming kids, engine failure, fat women whose fat envelops the arm rest, angry bitches who accuse you of taking their seats, old men who smell of rotting wood, "Fool's Gold" being the in-flight movie, condescending foreigners speaking condescendingly about you in languages they think you don't understand, talktive middle aged family-men who want to tell you about their vacation, talkative middle aged family-men who want to talk to you about YOUR vacation, etc.

None of this keeps me from travelling, it just causes me to occasionally go on a veteran tirade: "My buddies died face down in the sand/swamp/snow/etc...". It's our right to be both resistant to change that inconveniences us, as well as to call the changers out on it taken as a personal affront to our patriotism. To think, a small investment of 12 years of my life gave me all of this. I'm speaking deliberately in the future tense. I will have invested. I am investing. Whatever, I'm doing more than you are.

The Road - And My Nightmares

Cormac McCarthy manages to do it. He manages to play upon innate human fear in a way that is more than a little unnerving. It isn't just abject horror. It isn't merely ghosts popping up and saying "boo". It is a cerebral horror. It is a horror of knowing. Not unlike McCarthy's other novel, "No Country For Old Men", and the scene where Llewellyn has to evade a psychopath who is hunting him down through a tiny bed and breakfast, and down the streets of a city at night, the Man in "The Road" has to face a sort of brooding, terrible threat of mortality.

"He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame over the darkness like an offering... On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt... Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us." (110)

I can't speak for others, but somewhere deep in my subconscious, I am innately afraid of the night, and the dark. So much so, that this strikes the very essence of a nightmare: you have a light, but the darkness is so impenetrable that no form can pierce it. What is more frightening is not what you discover in the light, but rather the details that exist right outside of it.

This device is infrequently used in horror. It is a shame then, that most horror movies would rely on the scares of monsters popping out at you, or perhaps merely just being more gory than the others. However, I recently had the good fortune to play the second installment of the "F.E.A.R." game series, a game about a Paranormal Paramilitary unit investigating a psychic disturbance which levels half of the city in a Veidt-like explosion. Trapped in the basement of a school made for the breeding of psychics, you have to turn on the backup generator, which involves you going down to the basement, alone. Very, very alone. Your flashlight suddenly isn't enough and where it might be enough to illuminate the sector of the room, the darkness is so thick that your tiny circle of light is the only knowledge you have.

This is what McCarthy accomplishes.

It changes the pace as well, and makes it distinctively darker. Survival took on a new aspect. You didn't have to worry about just the dangers of the fallout, or starvation, or raiders, but also cannibals. They were very real, and very close. In fact, close enough that you could walk up to them with no warning.

These then are all of the dangers of the human psyche, living just outside of the light that we like to pretend we have with the torch of civilization, an inconsistant, flickering flame that doesn't destroy the darkness, but merely makes us retreat out of its sight. This is the terrible, bloody reality of humanity that exist and invade all of us.