It's a Beast

I gots to talk about this.

So, last week I was enjoying my typical Thursday evening which comes standard with a locked bedroom door, a dirty martini, and Vampire Diary on the TV, when I saw something disturbing. No, not the fact that Vamp Di will be playing re-runs until April 7th--though that caused me to be distraught enough to pull some hair from my head and let out a howling, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

Remember, Hollie loves her some Ian Somerhalder even though lately I've been all like, what, seriously, for real, why are you so good now Damon? Be bad. Be real bad. Go kill some people, will ya? Do vampy things and do them with your shirt off. And is anyone else getting sick of Stephan crying so much? Not into the super-sensitive vampire guy. Nope. Not really digging him. But, OMG I love Caroline now that she's a vampire and kicking some serious tail and I just knew that Elena's mom was coming back, I just knew it and gee whiz, wouldn't it be cool if Matt turned into a vampire? I could totally see that happening.

Anywho, the disturbing thing that I saw was a preview for Beastly, a new movie that supposedly follows the whole A Beauty and the Beast storyline. I am absolutely one-hundred percent NOT a feminist (I'm making banana bread right now for Pete's sake!), but I cannot stand this idea!

I mean, okay, this guy is like really, really shallow and stuff and he thinks that it's all like really, really super awesome to be hot and then he like totally gets punished for his shallow thoughts and stuff by a witch or something and then he's like really, really grotesquely ugly and he has to make someone love him so that he can see that beauty is like really only skin-deep, you know, and then he gets to be like really hot again.

So, the way this story works, this shallow guy falls in love with a beautiful woman and that is enough to redeem him????? Like that makes him remarkable. If anyone is remarkable in the story, it's Belle. She falls in love with a beast even though he's not her species! Why does this guy get rewarded for falling in love with a smart, beautiful, kind, interesting girl? Is it really so hard to fall in love with someone like her? What did he learn? I fell in love with a beautiful woman, beauty means nothing?

Yeah, right.

It's the same reason I can't stand all these shows and movies where the nerdy guy gets the super awesome swimsuit model and he stays nerdy. This never happens in reverse. Sometimes the plain girl gets a makeover and then she gets the hot guy, but you never see the hot guy-plain girl combo. I wonder if it's because of the geek factor that naturally comes with being a writer (I've been to writer's conferences, trust me, I know what I'm talking about) and these script-writer-guys are trying to live out their nerdy boy gets beautiful woman fantasies on the big screen.

Give me Shallow Hal any day. Plus, it's got Gwynth Paltrow in a fat suit sans flaxseed oil. You gotta love that.

Vampires . . . We Gotta Talk about It

Everyone has some pretty interesting things about them. I'm sure. Most everyone. Well, some people. That crazy guy at the YMCA who sings along with his ipod quite loudly while lifting weights, most definitely. Well, I'm no different from him . . . that is, I have a few interesting things about me. Like . . . I've never lived in one place for longer than five years (and the one place that I did live in for five years was hell and made me never want to try it again, excuse me very much Anderson, South Carolina), I lived in Alaska as a child, I was directly across the street when the bomb went off at the Atlanta Olympics, I had three kids in four years, my third kid weighed 10.1 and was birthed by VBAC (if you don't know what that means then google it 'cause I'm not discussing that here), and I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever eaten a Big Mac (or a Whopper for you Burger King fans) ever. But the one thing that most people find most interesting about me is that I don't have cable and haven't had it for years.

What I do have is a digital antenna, a nifty piece of equipment that gives you hi-def channels for, F-R-E-E! I love that word! What's also great about this device is that you can turn it away from the signal or stand right in front of it during the Ryder Cup and drive your husband completely crazy with minimal effort. Fun!

As you have probably gathered from the fact that I don't have cable, I therefore am not a huge fan of the television and were it not for an elongated ball covered with pigskin and Ian Somerhalder, I would be quite content with no TV at all in my house.

But . . . there are some things that I know to be true.

1. I do have a TV in my house
   
2. Ian Somerhalder has quite the nice physique and smoldering (yes, I said it—smoldering) eyes
   
3. I heart Vampire Diaries
   
4. I am blogging about Vampire Diaries
   

I gotta admit that when I first heard of Vamp Di, I was quite the skeptic. I mean, seriously, aren't we trying a little too hard to ride the vampire bandwagon, people? But, one mere episode and I was hooked like a starving fish on twenty pound line. Though I admit that the abs and eyes were probably (okay, definitely) what drew me in, I gotta say that what is keeping me are the amazing characters and stellar storylines that are so unpredictable that they have me shouting, "OMG!"

I think I've come to understand that what I love more than anything is a sympathetic villain. I mean the good guys who always make the right decisions get very tedious in a very short period of time. And the bad guys who are always trying to create evil and chaos make me feel all dirty inside. But someone who messes up and sometimes messes up big, but still shows that he can be compassionate and kind, that's someone who looks kind of familiar to me—because, really, in true life, the lines between good and evil are blurry and shifting.

But let's talk about this whole vampire thing, shall we? What exactly is the appeal, mainly, for women? Do we want someone to love us so much that he literally wants to drink our blood? Is it just the age-old desire for the bad boy and, let's face it, our desire to make him turn his life around for us? Is it merely the escape from reality, the idea that a whole other world can exist right before our eyes? Maybe it's a combination of all of these. All I know is that I don't think the fang phenom is going away anytime soon and as long as the vamps all look like Ian Somerhalder, I don't really want it to.