Cheap, nasty pudding

A few evenings ago Abby came downstairs looking for me.  She found me reading in my room.  She asked me if I would be interested in some “cheap, nasty pudding”.  Naturally I answered affirmatively to the invitation, albeit mostly because I desired the social interaction.  When it came time to partake of said pudding, which I understand to have been of the off-brand Kroger variety, costing approximately 50 cents (which I’d dare say was overpriced at that), it was, as she described, cheap and nasty.  I’m really not sure of the flavor, but it wasn’t particularly good.  And it was lumpy and hadn’t set up entirely.  I believe there was some verbal interchange associated with the snack.  In essence it followed this pattern:

“This isn’t very good pudding (bite and swallow)”

“No, it’s definitely cheap and nasty (another spoonful)”

“Yeah, it’s really kind of gross” (gulp)

And the bowls were soon clean.  After I had finished consuming the contents of my pudding bowl I turned to Abby and said “Well, time for me to return to my literary cheap, nasty pudding”.  And I did.  I returned to private isolation of my room in the basement and resumed reading Twilight.

Much like cheap, nasty pudding, I found Twilight to be unsatisfying, devoid of substance, cheap, shallow and yet inexplicably compelling to complete.  I loathed myself for reading it, and yet at the end of each chapter I felt drawn to begin the next.  It felt like some sort of undesired addiction in which I new better and didn’t want it there, but engaged in the behavior against my nobler desires and better judgment.  And it yielded a sense of shame.  Oh the shame!

I only read it because I was guilted into it by a friend who accused me of being proud and then force-lent me her copy of the book while she is on her mission.  And now I have read it.  It took me two days.  And as much as it proved to be in some ways a guilty pleasure while I was reading it, I can think of nothing praiseworthy to say about it.  It was shallow.  I couldn’t relate to any major characters, nor would I want to.  Any attempt to draw meaning from it, or to seek for gospel parallels (let’s be honest, that’s how I roll) proved heinously ineffective.  Furthermore, I was repulsed by the message it communicates about what love is and what invites it.

Oh, and it has sentences like: “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.”  Seriously?!  Really?!  Far too much of the book is dedicated to descriptions of some sort of impossible perfection.  And as I understood it, Bella’s alleged love for Edward sprang from lust, which came as a result of an overpowering attraction to his looks, smell and voice.  His alleged love for her sprang from an inability to read her mind combined with pride.  I consider it an insult to the English language for it to have been employed to describe some fictional 17-year-old’s descriptions of a model-like 90+ year-old vampire in such excess.  It’s ridiculous.

And so am I for having read it…and for having plans to watch the movie with a friend this afternoon.  If you were to look at my calendar, you would find: “9:00 code; 12:30 shame”.