My first paying job was at a public library, and I worked that job for almost four years. In that time, I had a lot of exposure to the Twilight books, mostly via people asking me where they were.* Initially, my instinct was to dislike the books just because I was sick of hearing about them, but after I read the series, and the icky feeling wore off, I kind of fell in love with them. This wasn’t because of the writing, which is horrendously purple, or the characters, who (with a few notable exceptions) are abhorrent, or the underlying themes, which make me want to watch Skins just to be contrary. I enjoy the Twilight books with the kind of glee that can only come from reading something ovary-crushingly fucked up (see Cleolinda Jones’ recap of Breaking Dawn for a near-perfect example).

When I ask a lot of guys I know (not all, but a lot of them) why they Don’t Like Twilight, they don’t explain that they find the prose awful, or the characters unlikeable, or the message detestable. They say it’s because “the vampires sparkle.”

Now, there are no hard and fast rules about what makes a vampire a vampire, aside from the blood-drinking thing (and that’s not really necessary either—the vampires from Peter Watts’ Blindsight are cannibals). Even the “No Sunlight” rule is a 20th century invention. Any writer who chooses to introduce vampires into their story is going to have to pick and choose what traits they want for “their” vampires. So if Stephenie Meyer really, really wants to make her vampires sparkle, she can go right ahead. Edward the Sparklepire’s meebling about what a monster he is becomes doubly hilarious when he’s wearing the kind of body glitter most women (and a lot of gay men) would kill for.

I explain all this to the guy friends, and they adamantly reply, “vampires do not sparkle.”

See, in modern pop culture, the classic vampire is a masculine power symbol. The vampire is sexually potent. He has mesmerizing power over people (especially women). He easily, and happily, disobeys the laws and breaks the taboos of humanity because they are weak and he is not. His interaction with these weak humans he has power over is penetrative: fangs into the neck. He doesn’t require your love, only your deference.

(The same rules apply to female vampires. Vampire lesbians!)

So when men see this masculine power symbol being in any way feminized (by, say, sparkling), their reaction is immediate and vehement. All of us, men and women, are still ruled by the principles taught to us in elementary school. Tattling, sucking up to the teachers, and being into “girly stuff” will get your ass kicked. When girls get their gross girl cooties all over a masculine idol, it’s diminished in the eyes of those who revered it.

That’s not to say that all men think this way. MovieBob, a male critic, did an excellent review on the unpleasant implications of the Twilight series’ approach to sex, and a significant amount of guys read into the books and movies on the same level. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Stephenie Meyer’s work, excellent reasons. But “the vampires sparkle” is the most superficial and telling of them.

*Incidentally, the answer to that question was never, “on the shelf,” because the queue in our hold system was so mind-bogglingly long that no book with “Stephenie Meyer” on the spine ever stayed in one branch for more than an hour.

The Tuesday before I left for Palm Springs I went wandering around the city with one of the few friends I kept from high school, Teddy.

This is Teddy.

We brought cameras.

Teddy and I started out in downtown Edmonton. We eventually ended up at the Muttart Conservatory (“How did we get here?” “I was following you.” “I was following you!“). So we decided to just cross the river again and go to my house.

There’s this footbridge near my house.

This is the footbridge.

The bridge has been there for ages. When I was a kid, we’d watch the Canada Day fireworks from this bridge.* If you wanted to, you could play the theme from “Hockey Night in Canada” – the proper one – on its floorboards. And, of course, there’s the graffiti.

This is the graffiti.

Generation upon generation of shitheads have carved their names into this bridge. Anyone of any age who says they haven’t, at some point in their lives, scratched something into the rails is either not from around here or a damn dirty liar. I saw “Michaelangelo wuz here” chiseled into a bench once.

It’s pretty much the best bridge ever.

*I really should go back to watching the fireworks from the bridge. Every time I go to the Legislature grounds on Canada Day I run into the same guy who used to go to my high school, drunk off his ass and making a nuisance of himself. I don’t know how they keep finding me.

If you take away the hideous purple prose and appalling implications regarding female sexuality, one of the Twilight series’ major failings is that its main cast is a parade of equally unlikeable people. Your female lead is so vacant that if you looked in her ear you’d see daylight, your male love interest is an emotionally uninvested non-character who needs to match his foundation more closely to his actual skin tone, and all the other vampires and werewolves are defined by singular character traits (“Compassionate!”, “Maternal!”, “Muscle-y!”, “Wears pants!”, etcetera).

Less the case with the book version but more the case with the movie version: I find myself more emotionally invested in the lives of the peripheral characters, Bella the Reader Proxy’s classmates, than I am in the central love story (also Charlie, who is a total badass and made of moustache). This is not a good thing. If you’re spending 400 pages/2 hours fixating on the least interesting part of the story, you’re taking the exact wrong approach with the plot.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Twilight would have been a much better book if written from a plural first person perspective, the collective “We” of the student body, bewildered and fascinated as they observe these two self-created social outcasts, Bella and Edward, drawn together by sex and hate and obsession, orbiting each other, spinning faster and tighter until they’re both found dead in a meadow, eternally bound together through a mutual suicide pact. End with a description of the memorial shrine outside the couple’s lockers at school.

Sadly, the publishing world has yet to take my advice on what makes good fiction and keeps on churning out vampire novels instead while Stephenie Meyer rakes in metric shit-tonnes of cash. Such is the universe.

From an English paper I wrote last year on the similarities between Beowulf and Superman:

Since his inception in 1938, Superman has become a cultural icon, especially in the United States; the only thing more American than an obscenely powerful yet restrained superhuman in a red and blue suit would be a statue of Ty Cobb made of hot dogs and apple pie.

PHOTOSHOP CONTEST

(I slapped this together as a minor assignment for my Creative Nonfiction class. The prompt was “the worst idea you ever had.”)

My brother Mac and I were born eleven months apart.

Please hold all comments on the biological implications of that fact until the Q&A portion of the evening.

Because we grew up so close in age, there was very little one of us did that the other didn’t. There was also very little one of us could do that the other couldn’t, except that Mac could throw a ball farther and I could lift a chair while bent perpendicular from the waist and then stand up still holding the chair because I’d been watching “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and decided to cheat using physiology.

It was with this “Anything He Can Do, I Can Do Better” attitude that I joined Mac’s U-10 mixed junior soccer team.

This was a terrible idea.

I became increasingly aware of this idea’s terribleness over the next few weeks as I learned that I didn’t like running unless something was chasing me (this is still the case) and that nobody was impressed by my chair trick and broad repertoire of veterinarian jokes (also still the case). As our first game loomed ever closer, in my desperation I asked to be put in goal since the position didn’t require any running or knowledge of game strategy (what little there was when the median age of the team was nine years old).

I considered this a fantastic idea until the opposing team scored their first goal. Through my leg. Not through my legs, as is the case with many goalies; the ball literally knocked my leg out from under me. Our team scored the next goal, but the scorer was eight years old so that goal was also scored on me. The next time the other team shot at the net it hit me square in the face. As I lay on the ground, to add injury to more injury, somebody stepped on my hand with their cleats.

I quit the team the next day. My parents were very understanding. They had been at the game.

Since then I have avoided team sports whenever possible, much to the dismay of a long line of junior high and high school gym teachers. My brother can now do many things I can’t, but he still can’t pull off the chair thing.

I got up at 6 this morning. I never get up at 6. I will tell you why it was so vital I get up at 6: we had two panels today. And while that is the laxest daily panel schedule we’ve had to date, they were the ones we were the most excited for: Doctor Who and Being Human/Torchwood.

And Doctor Who started at 10. Which means that in order to get in, and also to get decent seats, we had to start lining up at 8. Yes, we are that dedicated. Notice I use the word “dedicated,” not “obsessed.”

The panel itself? Let’s put it this way. When I clap my hands, my right pinkie bangs against the jade ring I have on my left middle finger. By the end of the Doctor Who panel, my pinkie was swollen and bruised from the impact. I won’t go into too much detail about the announcements made during the panel, since I’m sure you could easily find those elsewhere on the internet, but I will say that David Tennant’s sparkly Stormtrooper t-shirt was awesome but I wonder if he ever wears shirts that don’t ride up when he lifts his arms. Amber wasn’t complaining about the view, though.

Doctor Who ended at 11, and Torchwood wasn’t until 2:15, so Amber and I popped down to the convention floor and I picked up a copy of Nick Simmons’ Incarnate for a coworker who’s nuts about him. I read the thing myself while waiting for Torchwood to start, and I have mixed feelings about the thing. Incarnate has some pretty good ideas behind it, and the comic had a few moments of win (“Quit being dramatic, I only shot you once”), but the artwork is a little too anime-styled for my liking and the panel layout is a bit clumsy. Also the dialogue can get very clunky in spots, especially since conveying maniacal laughter is so difficult in a soundless medium, and Nick Simmons commits the cardinal sin of overwritten first-person narrative, which is the reason I can’t watch Dexter. With a little more polish and some time to establish itself, it could be a really good comic. If not nurtured and edited properly, it could become one of those comics that’s all concept, no execution.

To make sure we had good seats for Torchwood, Amber and I sat in on three short movie panels: Paper Heart, Mystery Team, and Alien Trespass. I already knew about Mystery Team, and had failed to get into a screening, and I’d distantly heard of Paper Heart, but Alien Trespass was new. I want to see it so very much now, it looks beautiful and hilarious and awesome.

The Torchwood panel was a composite of itself and a panel on Being Human, which I watched back in January via slightly illegal means and enjoyed thoroughly. There was nothing new in the panel, since they were previewing it for the BBC America crowd, but Russell Tovey was adorable nonetheless. Poor guy.

You can also probably find out more about the Torchwood panel elsewhere on the internet quite easily, but my pinkie finger got even more bruised and my throat is sore from the shouting. Seriously, I sound like a pack-a-day smoker right now, Amber won’t stop making fun of me. John Barrowman’s shirt was quite hideous, too. Not in an awesome way. A bad way. It’s a shame, he’s always dressed himself so well in the past. Barrowman was trying really hard to be good this year, but Torchwood fans find innuendo in everything so really he was trying to bail out a submarine made of Tulle with a Pepto Bismol cap.

The Torchwood panel ended pretty close to closing time for the convention centre, so after it ended it was down to the floor to grab some merchandise. I prefer to do all my convention shopping on the last day, since vendors want to move product more than anything else and I can pick up plenty of goodies on the cheap. I’ve now got a 10-piece Doctor Who action figure set from series one, the Dalek of which will be a gift to my boss so she’ll stop playing with mine at work. Also I grabbed the Optimus Prime Mighty Muggs figure and won an auction for a wonderful painting by Michael McCaslin. Pictures forthcoming (I forgot my camera charger at home).

After we got kicked out it was dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory (again), where Amber and I lamented the fact that the convention was over while simultaneously agreeing that if it were even one day longer we would probably collapse from exhaustion.

Now I have to pack, which I don’t like at all. It’s like I’m admitting defeat. But tomorrow I will be home and will be telling stories about this trip for six months, at least. Really, just tune me out if I start going.

I hope I arrive in decent condition. I do not fly well.

There are few words as magical to a sleep-deprived convention-goer far from home than, “we don’t have any panels until tomorrow afternoon, we should sleep in.” Oh my god. I didn’t know only sleeping until 9:00 could be so rewarding. I feel more refreshed than I’ve been in a long time, and that’s at the end of the day.

So I and Amber, Friend of Cancerbaby, got to the convention wonderfully late after breakfast at Cafe 222. A word of advice for eating there: the menu says that the stack of pancakes is only three high, but don’t let that fool you. The pancakes are huge. I was starving and I only got about a third of the way through. Also you can get leftover pancakes boxed up, but they do not travel well and people look at you funny if you take them out in the middle of a panel for a quick nibble.

Panel number one of the day, at a luxurious 1:30 in the afternoon, was the “Bram Stoker: The Joss Whedon of His Day?” panel, which didn’t really discuss Joss Whedon all that much but laid out in no uncertain terms that vampires do not sparkle and that’s that. On the panel, among others, was Dacre Stoker, a man with one of the most unlikely names I have ever heard. Also Tony Lee is awesome.

After that, in the same room, was “Spotlight on June Foray.” Oh my god, June Foray. One of the people who shaped my childhood; my Dad raised me on Rocky & Bullwinkle and Loony Tunes. What a wonderful, beautiful, amazing, vibrant woman. And she can still do Rocket J. Squirrel perfectly. I hope the special Rocky & Bullwinkle audioplay they did gets YouTubed, because my father (and everybody else) needs to hear it.

There’s a certain genius to the writing of Rocky & Bullwinkle, in that they can get an entire room howling with stupid puns and silly punchlines far easier than the best social commentary or pop-culture jokes ever could. I think the same goes for a lot of comedy from that era, especially animated comedy, and it’s something I think modern comedy is lacking. I hope it makes a comeback someday.

While still gushing to each other about June Foray, Amber and I popped over to “We Control the Vertical: Writing and Producing for Television,” which was a lot less informative than I’d hoped it would be, and inevitably had a few “pitchers” in the questions queue. You know the type: the ones who ask in a long, rambling, roundabout sort of way about whether the panelists would be interested in this idea they’ve got. I hate these guys, they’re almost as bad as the ones who show up at writer interviews and ask for tips. Anyone who does either of these things: this may come as a shock, but we do not care about you. Chances are, neither do the writers or panelists. I fully appreciate that you need an ego to get into the writing business, but to truly succeed you need to learn when to shut the hell up.

But I digress.

In order to be able to get anywhere near the Mythbusters panel Amber and I had to wait in the line and watch the pilot for The Vampire Diaries. Think Twilight but trying to be “edgy” and made for the CW and you’ll get the idea. Also Boone from Lost is in it.

My hands hurt so much from clapping, and my throat is still burning from cheering when the Mythbusters showed up. I don’t think Discovery knew when they started the show six years ago that a bunch of SFX guys would have so much rock star quality. I’m fairly certain we out-screamed the Twitards. SCIENCE!

Also I had no idea Kari Byron was pregnant. Huh.

For once we’ve got an early night. We’ve got to show up early tomorrow if we want any chance of getting into the Doctor Who panel. I’m not sure if I’m going to have another freakout like I did around Neil Gaiman. I guess we’ll find out.

One last thing: as I was writing this and Amber was reheating some food, we found out that our microwave goes “ding”. Hooray!

A young lady we passed on the way to the trolley station this morning asked Amber if she wanted a copy of Watchtower. Amber. Amber with the dark eye makeup and black lace gauntlets. Amber in the demonic schoolgirl getup. That Amber. Yeah.

We made sure to show up early this time round, especially since we wanted to get into the Coraline panel. Anime fantards ruined everything yet again, with three rejects from the Viz Media panel next door sitting directly in front of us, one with a burlap Domo costume head on. There were stern talkings-to before the panel started.

I don’t think Henry Selick opened his eyes once for the whole Coraline panel. I bet backstage he boasted that he could do the panel with his eyes closed.

The Flashforward panel was in the same room, so all we had to do was hang around and move up to better seats once people cleared out. I’m mostly interested in the series because Rob Sawyer is a Canadian science fiction GOD who graciously visits Edmonton on book tours unlike every other author in the universe, and thus anything he’s touched even tangentially deserves a few minutes of my time at least. I don’t mean to fangirl, but the guy is damn cool. The series makes a lot of changes from the book, but that’s to be expected if it’s going to appeal to a television audience, although the change in perception shift from 21 years to six months means that one of my favourite bits (Dimitrios’ “you killed us all” speech) is going to be cut (BAWWW).

Also Dominic Monaghan is going to be in it after all, surprising absolutely fucking nobody.

We were going to go to other panels that afternoon, and the Mighty Boosh panel in the evening, but the need for food and preparations for the Amanda Palmer concert meant that we had to miss them. Good thing the concert was so wonderful.

We got to the Women’s Club fairly early (or, if the sign is to be believed, the Woman’s Club, making me wonder who the Woman is). Amber and I met LeeVi, who is quite possibly the most enthusiastic Palmer fan I have ever met and who owns a wonderful embroidered blue bra that we happened to see by accident. Or not-so-accident, I’m not sure.

Hair Machine opened, simultaneously giving us the worst rendition and the best performance of “Final Countdown” I have ever seen. One day they will make it through a whole song. Today was not that day.

I have resolved to listen to more Vermillion Lies after seeing their performance tonight. I’m always a sucker for narrative songwriting, just because first-person love songs have so saturated the market and I crave something different. I would have bought their CD except that I didn’t want to go near the merch table for reasons I will explain later.

I downed about half a bottle of water in 30 seconds after Vermillion Lies finished, but I was back inside for Amanda Palmer’s first song. The power of music always amazes me; the club wasn’t absolutely packed, but it was pretty full. No amount of noise control could have got that room to shut up, but a woman singing softly while plucking away at a ukelele was enough to make the place dead silent. Maybe it shouldn’t be “speak softly and carry a big stick,” but “speak softly and spend 10 minutes trying to tune a $19 ukelele”.

After the concert ended the following exchange took place:

AMBER: Look, there’s Neil Gaiman!
CANCERBABY: OH CHRIST NO
AMBER: I’m gonna go get my picture taken with him, you coming?
CANCERBABY: NO I CANNOT MEET HIM THAT WOULD RUIN EVERYTHING

Yes, I’m a neurotic basket case. I also take that “never meet your idols” advice very seriously.

AMBER: Hey look, there’s Henry Selick!
CANCERBABY: WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE I ACCIDENTALLY MEET SOMEONE

Yeah.

Ever wonder what a line 100 000 people long looks like? I don’t. I don’t have to. I’ve seen it.

I wasn’t even supposed to be in the registration line today, but Amber, Friend of Cancerbaby, has no 4-day pass and has to get each of her badges individually. Of course, to get in line we had to get in the line to get into the line. Curse my amicable nature and inherent loyalty.

(For the curious, the line not only led out the door of the convention center, but all along the length of the building, round the corner and all along the length of the back of the building, through the Marriott Hotel loading area, all around the marina and ending on the other side of the harbor. Apparently the escalators broke. Let this be a sign of what will happen to society once the Apocalypse comes.)

Of course to be a geek, and Canadian, is to be inherently tolerant of standing in line. I have no problem with queuing up in return for some kind of reward, but no payoff equals grumpy Cancerbaby. Standing in front of five of the most annoying Anime fantards in all of the Pacific Rim also equals grumpy Cancerbaby.

The line eventually got moving and once everyone was mobile we were inside the building pretty fast (and ditched the fantards even faster). We missed the archetypes panel I wanted to go to, but we made it into “World of Warcraft Epic Loot” fairly easily. Not much new or exciting, except that Chris Metzen is looking increasingly like a Hell’s Angel. Jesus Christ. I feel like I should be begging him not to beat me up or take my lunch money.

We had a bit of time before the next panel, and thanks to the inevitable pull of my childhood we ended up at the LEGO pavilion. Specifically, the Bionicle area. I was hoping for something on the new movie, but no such luck. At least the carpets were nice and thick.

An aside, here. The best advice at this point that I can give anyone wanting to attend SDCC or any other huge comic convention in the future is this: invest in nice shoes. Something with arch support, maybe even insoles. Your feet will thank you.

Anyway. After our wanderlust was slaked we headed up to the “Women in Pop Culture” panel. Surprisingly, a lot of men were in attendance. Like, 60% of the crowd. I’m not sure if this is a statement on spec fiction fans’ willingness to embrace gender equality or a statement on spec fiction fans’ willingness to bone Zoe Saldana. Also, Sigourney Weaver has a portrait in her attic, hand to God.

The high population of “Women in Pop Culture” meant that we weren’t able to get to the “Myth and the Superhero” panel, which I wanted to go to simply because that was the basis of my English thesis. I suppose the gloating rights will have to wait another year.

Our next panel wasn’t until 4:00, so Amber and I went for lunch in the Gaslamp district. We ended up at the Old Spaghetti Factory, because I have about as much desire for culinary exploration as an 80-year-old English war vet. I won’t bother mentioning what we ordered, I’ll let your imagination run wild.

The 4:00 panel was “Tipping Point for LGBT Portrayals in Comics,” which we arrived to late. By the time we did arrive, it was painfully apparent that Patty Jeres wasn’t making any friends tonight. By the end of the panel the conclusion had been reached that we were at a turning point concerning sexual identity in comics, and that comics fans were more ready than most to accept gay characters, which was interesting since the whole panel had been crammed into one of the smallest rooms at the convention with no video equipment and sound engineering that was dodgy at best. Draw your own conclusions.

“Physics of Hollywood” was already full, so we killed some time at the Art Show before showing up at the Zeros 2 Heroes panel out of general principle. Some poor artist actually mentioned that he couldn’t find any writers to work with. I hope he’s got someplace to keep all the business cards. I said “hi” to Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin of Z2H while I was there, who has even more names now than she did at the last panel I saw her in at PureSpec. Seriously, this woman acquires surnames like I acquire neuroses. Morgan Jeske took a picture of me in which I will probably look stoned, because all photos of me turn out like that.

Amber and I had vouchers to see Mystery Team at Horton Plaza, but we were at the ass-end of the line and weren’t able to get in, so it was over to the Nordstrom to get Amber some nail polish (the makeup counter girl was very understanding when Amber had to empty her whole Comic-Con bag onto the counter to find her wallet) and then back to the hotel.

Called Mother to make sure she didn’t leave any more frantic messages on my cell phone, the hotel phone, my disposable cell phone, my e-mail, or my Twitter feed. She’s getting better at this.

First of all, Google Maps is a fucking liar. The establishment that it had repeatedly and confidently told us was a Best Buy turned out to be, in fact, a Circle K. I don’t know how they fucked that one up, either. The good news is, they had disposable phones, which is what we wanted from the Best Buy, plus Amber got a mug. Crisis averted.

When we got back to the hotel we had to wait several hours for the phones to charge, which is even less interesting than it sounds. Amber’s charged first, naturally. The universe hates me.

We made our first trip downtown this afternoon. The San Diego Convention Center is one of the largest buildings I have seen in my life, and keep in mind I live in the same city as the West Edmonton Mall. Granted, the convention center probably has fewer armed druggie teenagers living in the walls. The crowds were also pretty huge, although at 3:00 in the afternoon not massive. Then again, I didn’t spend much time inside but got my badge and swag and got the hell outta dodge. Partly this was due to a lack of desire to attend any preview night events but mostly because Amber, Friend of Cancerbaby, was waiting outside and wasn’t wearing any sunscreen.

Side Note: The biggest indicator, for me, that I’m no longer at home is the smell. Different cities smell different. Sometimes this can be a pleasant experience, such as the refreshing smell of surf as I exited the San Diego airport, or sometimes it can be less than pleasant (“Oh Christ, what’s that smell?” “That’s Windsor.”)

After I got my registration all sorted out Amber and I headed over to the Horton Plaza mall for overpriced ice cream. As I intently circled certain events on my schedule with a big red pen, we met up with Matt, Friend of Amber, and took in a film. Well, Transformers 2, which is a film in the technical sense of the word but is as close to winning an Academy Award as I am to winning the New York Drag Queen of the Year award.

Arrived back at the hotel to several increasingly frantic messages from my mother as to my whereabouts. I’m starting to detect a pattern here.