My Twilight obsession is about so much more than just Rob.
And as much as I adore the man, my husband just doesn’t ‘get it’ when I tell him that fact. Somehow I need to find a way to convince him. I need to paint him a picture of why I’ve allowed this fandom, this phenomenon as pop media is so enamored with calling it, to become such an integral part of my day-to-day life.
Hubs goes through the motions of accepting my Twilight insanity ‘cause he says it makes me happy. And lucky for me, he’s a great guy and wants me to be happy. (Of course I suspect the real root of his begrudging acceptance may also be linked to the fact that fanfiction has *cough* had an impact on our sex life that he full endorses.)
But, in the back of his mind, I suspect he silently cheers when Twitter is over capacity and prays nightly that this ‘hobby’ of mine will die out long before the last installment of Breaking Dawn finally hits theatres 568 days and 11 hours from now.
A little over a month ago, he actually posted his own musing under the name ‘TwiWidow’ where he ranted a bit about the robporn folder on my harddrive and the lack of clean undies in his drawer since the day I first shed my goodgirl image and became the h00r better known as twopeas1pod. His posting was only up for 10 minutes – long enough for me to start crying and my besties to rapid fire RT me with a couple “OoO!”
The problem is hubs doesn’t see past the surface of the sparkle peen. You see he’s a lurker (wave hello @MisterPea) and all he focuses on are the UNF tweets over The Pretty. He thinks I’m just completely obsessed with Rob’s fuckhawtness and spend all day dreaming of him walking through our front door to whisk me away.
Ummmm. No.
Sadly, there are a few whack jobs in this fandom who really do have that notion, but I assure you I am not one of them. In fact, if were up to me we’d get a better bouncer to stand outside the entrance of this club and we’d throw their delusional asses right on out, along with anyone who has ever posted hate toward Kristen.
I have told MisterPea repeatedly I don’t want Rob whisking me away.
Not. At. All.
I want Rob to buy a front door to walk through with Kristen so he has a place to whisk her off to make some beautiful bronze haired, green eyed babies. I know many of you drink the same brand of Kool-Aid as me and understand this completely, but convincing hubs I feel this way is a challenge.
Don’t misunderstand me. Rob appeared in the tux on that big screen in WFE last Friday night and I wanted to jump up and shout, ‘Sweet Baby Jesus this man is hawt!’ I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t find him nice to gander at.
Daily. For hours on end.
But thruthfully, that alone is not why I’m here.
This whole thing is so much more than the sum of its parts. Yes, I adore Rob and all his adorkableness. Yes, I admire Kristen and all her nervous fierceness. Yes, I love Stephenie’s books and feel they relate to my own life experience. Those three things are what drew me to this fandom. But standing alone they are not what holds me here.
Daily. For hours on end.
At some point in-between watching biels’ Robsten vids, snot-crying while reading EP, planning a H00rTour with my besties and trying to find new abbreviations to squelch my wordiassness into 140 characters, I fell hard for this little family of ours. It completes me in strange ways that are just so hard to describe to ‘outsiders’.
I approach this, as many of you do, as a woman who walks through the world ‘wearing many hats’. I am mom. I am ‘honey’. I am a contributing member of my community. I am a daughter. I am head chef and chamber maid too. With the exception of that last one, I love all these roles I play. I have a happy, wonderfully blessed life. But at some point in the last 10 years, I started spending so much time changing my hats all damn day, I forgot perhaps the most crucial one in my wardrobe. Myself.
I’d become so many things to so many other people, I started to lose ‘me’.
And as corny and cliché as it sounds (queue the fucking Celine Dion music here), this fandom has helped me find out who I am again. And it’s a totally new and improved version. Version 2.0 is what hubs refers to me now… she knows LOTS more about life and living… and sex toys.
My twitter time is ‘me time’. And, while I feel tremendously guilty some days for wanting this ‘place’ to call my own, having it unlocks the happy inside me. People think we’re nutcases cause we adore this ‘crap’. To them ‘Twihards’ (Dear God I fucking HATE that name) are just the next crop of Trekkies. But it’s somehow so much more than that. It’s a connection to each other and to ourselves that was missing before. It’s ‘fun time’ that we lost somewhere between work and diaper changes and paying the bills.
I’ve tried before to describe twitter to my husband as one big ladies locker room. We can talk opening and honestly about anything. We talk Rob and Kristen and Twilight of course. But that is just the link that brought us all into the circle. Between our sqeees, virtual bewbie gropes, robporn exchanges and tweet-2-tweet battles with the Nonstens, we are sharing our lives and escaping our lives all at the same time.
Everyone needs an escape. Everyone. This Twilight fandom is mine.
My Timeline at any given moment is scientific proof of our eclectic hat collections:
Screencaps of Rob and Kristen; We are fangirls.
Jokes about our husbands or boyfriends; We are wives and significant others.
Celebrations over a lost tooth or a good grade on a spelling test; We are mothers.
Laments about our latest class assignment; We are students.
Giggles about sex toys because the last fanfiction we read inspired us; We are lovers.
Discussions about tragedies to which we should donate; We are benefactors
Complaints or compliments about bosses or co-workers; We are employees.
Love and empathy for one another; We are friends.
A friend of mine recently wrote a paper about Twitter relationships for her Master’s program. In it she ponders whether the relationships we build on Twitter are real. I think my husband and perhaps the rest of the free world, thinks they are not. When talking to one another we even use the expression ‘RL friends’ to talk about those with which we share ‘eye-to-eye’ relationships.
But I care about the people I know here. I enjoy their company. Isn’t that the definition of a friendship? (*Running to google it. Seriously, try it yourself. The Wikipedia definition of friendship made me actually want to go queue up that Celine Dion and happy-weep a little.*)
Perhaps my husband doesn’t get all this because I think women have a need for camaraderie with one another that men don’t seem to have. We need to feel that bond. We like being part of the group. For a long time I had lost that. I have a gaggle of those ‘RL friends’. Some of whom I’ve known since I was a child. But in recent years all our conversations have become sidetracked by all those damn hats.
We talk about our husbands and our kids and our jobs and our latest home improvement projects. We’ve stopped talking about ourselves. It’s like we all suddenly decided we had to be ‘grown ups’ and stop divulging our inner musings and goofy girlish dreams. I let myself think I was too old to have those things anymore. I missed that connection. But this fandom has brought it back to me.
What’s epically ironic is I actually think Rob might be the one man on this planet who gets all this.
Right around the time I morphed into twopeas, Oprah was busy asking the Holy Trinity why they think this ‘thing’ has taken hold of us all. Rob responded that he thinks we all like just spending time with one another doing ‘Twilight related things’. I remember him saying it – but at the time I didn’t understand it myself. Back then I thought, ‘Um, no Rob I just like the books and I think you and Kristen are adorable together.’
But, now it’s crystal clear to me what he was trying to say. And he’s right. Rob knows that this isn’t all about him. God bless his overly cerebral, down-to-earth ass for ‘getting it’ long before I did.
So Rob, honey, I know you’re a wee bit busy right now, but could you pop over and explain all this to my husband?
I don’t want you to whisk me away. I promise.
No comments:
Post a Comment