Well, gee, Governor, I'm a vampire.

WOW. I officially suck at blogging. It's been WAY too long since I updated...sorry!!

I had an interesting experience today that I thought I needed to write about. I have to give a bit of background information first.

Late this summer my friend Alison gushed to me about how she was in love with the Twilight Saga books by Stephenie Meyer. She insisted that I read them but I was hesitant for a few reasons:
1. I'm 25 years old. Not 15.
2. I hardly have time to read my Facebook wall posts (ha, you know it). Where was I going to find the time to read these 500+ page books (four books, to be exact) about vampires?
3. I'm 25 years old.
4. I had a few books on my "If I ever have time to read for fun these are the books I'd like to attempt to read" List that I wanted to read first...books I already spent money on.

As reluctant as I was, I told her I'd read them if she would loan the books to me because I didn't want to invest the money in four books that I thought I'd hate -- plus I'd heard it was impossible to stake claim to them at the library. She agreed that she would bring them to me next time she came to town.

Well, she didn't. She didn't forget to bring them... she couldn't bring them because each time she came to town the books were being read by a friend or family member...specifically, her mom and a friend she knew from UND Law School. The fact that her mom and a fellow married 20-something was reading these books made me more open to reading them myself.

A month or two passed with the occasional Twilight reference/rave but I still had not read any of the books. Eventually, a coworker-- who is in her twenties and has a baby-- finished reading the books and convinced me to read them. I took the first one, "Twilight," on a trip to Chicago one weekend. I couldn't find enough time to read. My husband and I were visiting family and I just wanted to ignore my in-laws all weekend and curl up and read. I even brought the book to a party/concert and read at the intermission to the dismay of others around me. I think I was getting glares because they were all jealous that they didn't have the brilliant idea to bring Twilight with them. Ha!

Thankfully, I had time on the plane to read and I quickly gobbled up the rest of the book and started the second as soon as I got my grubby hands on it-- I packed it with on the trip because I figured I'd finish the first. Good thinking!

I am currently about half-way through the third book. Commuting an hour to town and back each day makes reading trickier than I'd like... but it also means I get to "savor" each book a little longer. Yummy.

And this is where the "issues" come in. I've become obsessed with Twilight. And by obsessed, I mean I have started narrating my day like Bella does in print. I tried to convince my husband to do his hair like Edward's. I've seriously considered the possibility of real-life vampires and where I might find them. I've pushed the limits of my Toyota Camry on the highway and pretended that I had my own radar detector in my head (if you haven't read the books you probably won't get this). I actually had a conversation in the car one day with Edward. Seriously. We talked about Bella.

And now today, my mind has reached a new level of Twilight obsession. For those of you who don't know, I do PR for the NDDOT Fargo District and today we had a ribbon cutting ceremony for a project in West Fargo. The governor came for it and everything. When he arrived I greeted him and introduced myself. This is how the exchange happened:

Me: Hi, Governor. How was your trip?

Gov: Hi! It was good, thanks. Wow, your hands are so cold.

At this point any normal person would say something like, "Oh, I forgot my gloves." Or, "It's a little chilly out." Or just laugh it off. But not me.

My FIRST THOUGHT as a possible (and probable?) response to him was, "Well, that's because I'm a vampire." I quickly realized that that wasn't something I could say to the governor of North Dakota and expect to keep my job, so I just stuttered a lot and tried to think of something else to say:

Me: Oh, uh... Um... Er.... well...

NDDOT Guy: This is the gal that was just calling to see if your plane had landed.

Whew! Saved by a sane person! Thank God my internal filter was working this afternoon, or it may have been a completely different story!

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