Twi-lizzle

This post is not really about Twilight. Sami made me promise not to comment on the series (which I refer to as the longest "Goosebumps" ever) and her obsession with it. But, I can't help myself. Here goes...

I can honestly say that I never really believed that we were coming to Korea until our plane landed. This mostly had to do with the fact that I was barely involved in the application process other than signing my name where I was told and answering a few questions over the phone from a thickly accented Korean man (something like: "Do you like kimchi?" and "When would you like to start?"). Throw in the fact that I was heading an understaffed, non-stop fundraising effort at MDA and preparing for our July wedding, and perhaps you can see why it didn't feel 100 percent real.

Reality hit when we were met by the thickly accented Korean man holding up a sign that mistakenly read: "Joe Hayden" (I guess when your wife does all the gruntwork, the least you can do is take her name right?).

After a 2 hour car ride through neoned Seoul we arrived at our towering 20 story high rise apartment and were welcomed by representatives from our schools. We found our apartment empty and spacious, and the air inside mimicked the air outside- dense and warm with a faint smell of sweet garbage.

Many words were passed back and forth in rapid Korean between thickly-accented man and school reps. To the uninitiated, Korean conversation does not carry a friendly or inviting tone. Our internal monologues pondered the alien situation playing out in front of us: Hopefully nothing is wrong and, Oh my God I am tired.

We stood by and smiled, looking happy to be there.

Eventually everything is resolved. Delivery men would bring furniture in a few days and someone will install a new key-pad lock on our door the next. The big piece of news is that we would not be teaching for an entire week. We need to be quarantined- this being the time of the swine-flu scare.

So here we are with no furniture, no friends, no tv, no internet, no phone, no ability to speak the language and no way for the two of us to explore outside- at least until the locksmith does his thing.

What we do have is books.

At the time, I am finishing up Roth's "American Pastoral" (one of my favorites for sure) and will be moving on to a book on the BTK Strangler in Wichita and one my dad got me that inspired the movie: 21: Bringing Down the House.

Sami has Twilight. All four of them. Which I think she has already read once or twice back in the U.S.

In the week that we were quarantined, I am pretty sure that she read through each of them another two times and has since plowed through seven or eight readings.

When the new movie came out, Twilight was everywhere. I read about a group of 40+ year old women who start some sort of Twilight cult and Conan O'Brien hilariously mocked the fad on the Tonight Show (anyone remember Cody the vampire/assistant?). This was too much, I had to find out firsthand what all the hullabaloo was about (that's right. I said hullabaloo).

I started to read the first book and when I put it down in (what felt like) an hour later I was on page 380. It read amazingly fast, which may explain why the kids like it so much and why my wife can bust through New Moon and Eclipse in a day. Yes, I thought it was cheesy and I did roll my eyes a few times (especially when what's her name gushes about Edward every other paragraph), but I kept reading. I was a little disappointed by the ending of the first book- kind of random and hard to follow, but that didn't stop me from starting the second.

I found the second better than the first especially now that Edward was gone (I was digging the whole Jacob story line and at the time declared myself "Team Jacob" which infuriated Sami who is staunchly "Team Edward." Hilariously, I came up with the idea for a "Team Mike Newton" t-shirt. Sami was not impressed). However, I could only get through 100 or so pages of the third book and have no plans to finish it or the fourth. I guess I just lost interest and I suppose Twilight wasn't intended for 27 year old dudes- only high-schoolers, 40 year-old cougars, and my wife.