I was hearing a lot about Twilight. I saw the books
displayed proudly in every single bookstore I went into. It looked like a load
of hogwash. After a visit back to the first place I would call home in Taiwan,
a small town called LinKou, I was walking to the bus stop and thought I would
wonder into the local bookstore for something to read on the bus ride back to
Taipei.
There were about three English books available, two of which
I had read. The only one that remained was Twilight. I thought why not, as I
wanted to see what all the fuss was about but more importantly I didn’t want to
be on a bus sans reading material. The queue for the bus was outrageous, it was
late and I was tired, so I decided to take a cab back to the city.
I got in the back, gave the cab driver my address and
removed the cellophane wrapping from the book. I read the first few pages and
did a mental WTF. By page 23 I was hooked. Even though I had work the next day,
I stayed up until 4am. I would have read more, but my eyes had decided
otherwise.
I woke up and all I could think about was Twilight. I went
to work and during each break I would wonder how the plot would unfold. Even
during my lunch break, when I would go and practice piano for half an hour each
day, I still had Twilight on my mind.
After work and on the MRT (subway) on my way to my evening
Chinese class, I loved the fact that a) I found a seat and b) that I could read
my book. I was rather embarrassed about the cover, but after five minutes I was
too engrossed in the story to care.
It took me two weeks to read all four books in the Twilight
series. I made the mistake of only purchasing the first book and at 2am I had
finished the book and did not have the sequel. This would not happen again! The
next day during lunch, I went to the bookstore and bought the rest of the
series. When I read the last page of the final book, I felt empty. Now what? My
literary meth extravaganza was over. The come down was not fun.
I needed more. Enter the movie. I watched it and immediately
afterwards downloaded the sheet music to learn that song that Edward plays for
Bella. I got the soundtrack and till this day most of those songs are still in
Most Played. Muse, a band I never even considered liking back in the day,
became my favourite band of the moment. I was Twilight whipped.
From that point on, Fi and I made it a tradition that we would watch the movie on the big screen. We enjoyed the second one, watched the third one when we were waiting for our all night 5 star bus trip to a beach town called Kenting. Eclipse is where Jacob and Edward decide to get shirtless so the movie was scattered with high pitch shrills from all of the teenage girls in the cinema. Fi was in Australia, so I went with another friend, Candice and that was a real hoot. She provides the best commentary.
For the final one Fi, my sibling and I headed off to the cinema and were surprised by the amount of children there. I mean some of those scenes are not kid friendly. We invited my sister's boyfriend but he thought the invite was a joke and declined. Edward would do it for Bella. My sister jokes that Twilight had ruined relationships for her. I mean how can anyone be like Edward?
So my final thoughts can be summed up in this conversation with my dear sibling:
"I watched Zookeeper, it really made me laugh out loud."
" And
you thought Twilight was lame…"