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Previous entries can be found in the directory.
I was like a lost moon—my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster movie scenario of desolation—that continued, nevertheless to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.
Speaking of ignoring the laws of gravity, Bella’s rhetoric is reaching RIDICULOUS new heights, huh? A “cataclysmic, disaster movie scenario of desolation?” Are you fucking KIDDING ME with this, S. Meyer? Also, what kind of tenuous, bullshit metaphor is this motherfucker? That is not how moons work! “I was like a moon, a moon that didn’t behave like a moon at all.” If these are the rules, we can make up any metaphor we want!
It was like I’d been in a deadly car crash, my heart impaled on the antennae, but I just kept on living for some reason but my heart didn’t beat anymore.
I was like a puzzle with a missing piece, but the puzzle had just become a new, shittier picture rather than remaining incomplete; the image on the surface had changed.
I was like a dog who loved a bone, but it turned out the bone was a vampire.
Bella and Jacob have gone back to riding bikes, but as Bella’s skill has improved the potency of the hallucinations has declined. She’s thrown more energy into the denial and self-loathing filled search for The Meadow (which has basically no chance of summoning the Edward Spirit) while somewhat more logically racking her brain for more adrenaline-producing activities (which does). I wonder what Bella and Jacob could do to get their adrenaline levels up. I bet Jacob has a few ideas.
One day Bella shows up at Jacob’s and he gives her a box of conversation hearts (though probably not these ones) because it is Valentine’s Day. Bella has lost track of time (she’s totally the guy in this relationship) and is taken aback by the date. “I feel like a schmuck,” she says. Before Bella was reminding me of an old Jewish man—now she’s reminding me of a specific one.
Maybe Bella ought to behave a little more like Larry David, not just talk like him, and compulsively avoid people for a while. At least Jacob. He creepily insists she be his Valentine, jokingly saying it requires her to be his “slave for life.” Bella expresses dismay at the way lines “get blurred a lot” around Jacob. It makes me uncomfortable that S. Meyer is setting us up to blame Bella for leading Jacob on if he makes any unwanted sexual advances. S. Meyer has the rape morality of a police officer in 1961.“She was asking for it.”-S. Meyer
Jacob asks if she wants to ride (bikes) on Friday, and Bella sees an opportunity for some distance.
I saw a chance and took it without taking time to think it
through.
“I’m going to a movie Friday.”
There's a line break error there again; they occur with such a startling regularity I no longer regard them as errors so much as really misguided attempts at forcing a pause for emphasis. It’s still annoying—fix this one thing and this whole series would be 200 pages shorter—but I’m resigned to it by now.
Bella’s putting the cart before the horse a little bit, inventing a date with Mike before it really exists, but at this point I suppose she’s rightly confident in her ability to lead men around by the dick. Jacob looks all wounded, though, and she feels his pain like ET or something. So she invites Jacob along too—acts like she meant to all along—and tells him to bring Quil.
At school, Bella puts her plan into action, letting Mike think she’s asking him out for a brief tantalizing second before shattering his heart. She suggests another bloody action film—probably something directed by Neveldine and Taylor—and wants to get a group together to see it. Mike starts suggesting all the couples he knows, trying to salvage what at least looks like a double-date (at least he doesn’t just suggest Jessica like he’s angling for a threesome; with Alice out of town there’s nobody who would be up for it anyway), but Bella says she wants to bring her La Push friends.
Mike bristles at the idea of huge brown men coming along, but she tells him her time spent with Jacob is like “tutoring.” For some strange reason, Mike’s thoughts don’t go immediately where mine went—I wrote a note in the margins that reads, “Tutoring minorities… about my body”—and he is reassured.
He tries to convince Bella to see something other than whatever gorefest she’s picked out; he has another romantic comedy in mind. At my old BU job I worked with a lot of frat-guy types who unironically claimed their favorite movies were like, Pretty Woman and shit. They talked about how good The Bounty Hunter was. It strikes me as a lack-of-imagination problem more than anything. Mike references a film called Tomorrow and Forever, which is apparently S. Meyer’s idea of a realistic-sounding rom-com in the aughts. It’s more like a realistic-sounding Lubitsch rom-com from the 30s, but whatever, thanks for trying. “Rotten Tomatoes gave it a better review,” he says.
Rotten Tomatoes? Mike has access to an actual internet website? Clearly he exists in some kind of alternate-tech-universe, since we know Bella basically has oil lamps and rotary phones to work with. Mike is apparently not sophisticated enough, however, to understand that Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregator, so it doesn’t actually give anything a review so much as summarize the critical landscape, but whatever, thanks for trying.
Through a series of unfortunate, boring events, Bella’s Coalition Of The Willing To Go To The Movies falls apart—Quil gets in a fight at school (“You should see the other guy!”-Quil Ateara), some of the girls excuse themselves from the trip on account of the fact that they think Bella is a bitch, and some other people get sick because a stomach virus is going around. In the end it’s Bella, Jacob, and Mike. Bella is like, “fuuuuuck.”
Jacob shows up first, and he has finally finished fixing up his car. He wants to drive them to the movies in it tonight as the “maiden voyage.” I’m not saying I don’t trust Jacob’s skills, but wouldn’t a better maiden voyage be like, around a cul-de-sac a few times? They’re going to take that bitch out on the highway?
Shit gets rape-y again really fast: Bella high-fives Jacob and he twists his fingers through hers, morphing it into a hand-hold. Shudder. Then Mike shows up, and Jacob recognizes him from way back in the day. This happens:
“The one who thought you were his girlfriend. Is he still confused?”
I raised one eyebrow. “Some people are hard to discourage.”
“Then again,” Jacob said thoughtfully, “sometimes persistence pays off.”
It reminds me of that Jeff Dunham interview from the NYT when he started talking about how he made fun of all groups and races except for white Christians because his audience was white and Christian and also he was white and Christian and then he suddenly breaks off and says “Oh boy, I'm walking into something here.” Jacob teeters on the precipice of shattering his own self-delusion but jumps back just in time.
Jacob and Mike are not quite openly hostile to each other, but Bella comes fairly close to telling them to just whip ‘em out, measure ‘em and get it over with. Bella asks Mike if it’s okay if Jacob drives—he just built the car “from scratch” and all. From scratch? It’s not like he hammered out the steel, Bella. Mike is repeatedly described as having a “sullen” or “disgusted” expression. Good. Fuck you, Mike. It’s actually kind of hard to dislike Mike when he is around someone as hateable as Jacob, but Mike earns my scorn despite the odds—he leans forward from the back seat and leans his chin on the shoulder of Bella’s seat, so their cheeks almost touch. Gross. Bella practically puts her head through the window jerking away so fast (or so I imagine).
Bella’s mildly impressed with Jacob when Mike asks if he can put music on and Jacob explains that Bella doesn’t like music. She never told him that, but he seems to have picked up on her avoidance of all things potentially romantic. It’s weird for me to think about Bella getting bothered by the lyrics to music, because it’s hard for me to remember that people think about lyrics very much at all. I haven’t given lyrics much thought (beyond lines I find particularly clever) since I was 14 trying to deconstruct “Adam’s Song.” I haven’t the faintest idea what most of my favorite songs are about, which is probably because of two reasons.
A) The current trend in indie-rock seems to be a push back from lyrics with any significant, obvious meaning. There’s an emphasis on harmonies and a backlash leftover from emo and the hyper-verbose-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness of that movement. (And yet they always seemed so dumb, those lyricists. My friend Ryan and I used to always joke about how that Dashboard Confessional song “Vindicated” was like the second coming of Alanis Morisette’s “Ironic”—a song built around a word the songwriter mistakenly believes is a big, fancy word in the first place and nonetheless fails to fully understand in the second place.)
B) It’s impossible to understand what the lyrics are in Grizzly Bear and Radiohead songs anyway, and the best parts of Dirty Projectors songs aren’t even words so much as generic vowel sounds.
Mike can’t believe that Bella doesn’t like music, and out of context it does sound weird. My wife was recently talking to a guy who claimed to not like music, which she interpreted as a new kind of hipster affectation. “I’m too hip to like ANYTHING.”
Bella finds it hysterical when Jacob gives her money to buy his ticket; he’s too young to get his own. She asks if she’ll get in trouble with Billy. “No, I told him you were planning to corrupt my youthful innocence,” he says. I had to stop for a second there—Jacob told Billy WHAT? Why would I not be surprised if Jacob was keeping his father up to date on his quest to get into Bella’s pants? I’m not saying Billy Black is a bad father, but when it came time to teach Jacob about the birds and the bees he just put a porno in the VCR.
Do you think S. Meyer has seen a movie before, by the way? The ones she imagines are all so bland that it almost seems like she’s mocking film as a medium in general. (I read once that S. Meyer has never seen an R-rated movie, but that has to be bullshit, right?) Bella tells us about people getting blown up and impaled, but then for a while she just watches “the colors and movements on the screen.” Bella would make a great film critic, huh?
Mike and Jacob spend a good portion of the film with their arms on Bella’s hand rests, both with their palms up, “like steel bear traps,” Bella says. Both of these guys have such a terrible strategy! “I’ll just annoy this girl’s clothes off!” Jacob has the edge in the “creepiest” competition for being more manifestly self-deluded; Mike just seems dumb.
And the Jacob situation gets worse. Mike gets sick in the middle of the movie and Jacob and Bella follow him out. Jacob has to check on him in the bathroom. Not a fun gig. Once when I was sixteen I was in Vegas and an old woman asked me to check on her husband in the bathroom and make sure he was still alive. Hard to forget stuff like that.
Bella and Jacob have to wait for a while, and the ensuing conversation sums up the central, troubling theme of vaguely sexual misunderstanding that has characterized this section of the book. When Bella sits by Jacob he puts his arm around her. She shrugs it off and he grabs her by the hand, then locks his other hand around her wrist to hold her in place. “Where did he get the confidence from?” Bella wonders. I don’t think “confidence” is the right word, but “rapedacity” isn’t a word at all. It would be perfect if it were, though.
Jacob asks Bella if she likes him, she says she does, more than Mike, more than anyone she knows.
“But that’s all,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
Run-on sentence aside, that is what is galling about Jacob: he knows she doesn’t like him in a romantic way, but then he tells her that he’s “prepared to be annoyingly persistent.” He’s just going to WEAR HER DOWN. Very sexy. Bella is not improving the situation either; Jacob says he has “loads of time” (Ron Weasley over here) and this happens:
I sighed. “You shouldn’t waste it on me,” I said, though I wanted him to.
He says he can live with their current, sexually frustrating situation but when Bella tries to pull her hand away he doesn’t let her. Then she basically admits she likes holding his hand anyway.
“This doesn’t really bother you, does it?” he demanded, squeezing my fingers. [Shudder]
“No,” I sighed. Truthfully, it felt nice.
UGH all around. This whole situation is fraught with stupidity and I just want all of them to shut the fuck up and go home. Luckily, I basically get my wish. Mike comes out and they leave, and on the way home Jacob and Bella can’t really talk so Bella dives inward again.
It was so wrong to encourage Jacob. Pure selfishness. It didn’t matter that I’d tried to make my position clear.
If she was totally honest with herself, Bella would admit that she can blur lines with the best of them. But instead she goes into a weird extended metaphor that sounds kind of like that self-help program Ruth joined briefly on Six Feet Under.
I was an empty shell. Like a vacant house—condemned—for months I’d been utterly uninhabitable. Now I was a little improved. The front room was in better repair.
Does she mean her boobs? Am I not getting it?
He deserved better than that—better than a one-room, falling down fixer-upper.
You’re losing me, Bella! Is it a one-room house or is the front room in better repair? (And what is “better repair?”) It can’t be both, can it? Can a one room house have a front room?
No amount of investment on his part could put me back in working order.
Bella’s personal housing bubble has burst, Edward took out the last sub-prime mortgage she had, and now her heart is foreclosed and she needs a bailout or a voucher from HUD or something. Get it? Do we need to dig this metaphor any deeper?
After they drop Mike at home, Jacob starts to feel sick too, but before he goes he really self-consciously makes a non-rape-y overture to Bella. “I won’t ever let you down,” he says. “I would never, ever hurt you.” Bella is touched—and at one point a smile breaks across Jacob’s face “the way the sunrise set the clouds on fire.” That’s a simile with a metaphor nestled inside it, by the way. In case you’re keeping score.
He leaves and Bella finds herself wishing they were related, “so that I would have some legitimate claim on him that still left me free of any blame now.” Jacob and Bella would be the kind of really affectionate siblings who freak everybody else out.
At some point Bella just starts talking in straight Rod Stewart lyrics.
“One thing I truly knew—knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest—was how love gave someone the power to break you.
We start to crawl out of the abyss of bad writings and worse feelings, though. Bella sums up the last 20 pages or so of bullshit in two sentences:
He was my best friend. I would always love him, and it would never, ever be enough.
And then we get the best sentence of the last hundred pages or so:
I went inside to sit by the phone and bite my nails.
That sentence really cheered me up. We also get a great Charlie moment—when Bella comes in he’s watching the game, sitting on the floor a foot from the screen, he’s so excited by whatever he’s watching. Charlie is the best.
Bella had asked Jacob to call when he got home, and she panics when it takes too long. She calls and gets Billy on the line; Jacob is home but too sick to talk. Billy discourages Bella from visiting when she offers (“We had to have a can of Campell’s around her somewhere,” Bella muses in an odd bit of product placement) but all of her concerns about Jacob go away when she starts vomiting uncontrollably.
In a way, it’s like she’s purging away all of the awfulness of the last few chapters; it’s a cathartic stomach virus, at least for me. She spends the following day lying on the bathroom floor, but eventually Charlie gets word that Mike has recovered. Hours later, Bella is on her feet. She calls to check up on Jacob, and he answers, but he sounds like shit and feels like it too. He thinks whatever he has is worse than the stomach virus, and he reinforces Billy’s visitation ban.
What does Jacob have? The world’s worst case of blue balls? Or something wolf? I mean, something worse?
“I’m going to a movie Friday.”
There's a line break error there again; they occur with such a startling regularity I no longer regard them as errors so much as really misguided attempts at forcing a pause for emphasis. It’s still annoying—fix this one thing and this whole series would be 200 pages shorter—but I’m resigned to it by now.
Bella’s putting the cart before the horse a little bit, inventing a date with Mike before it really exists, but at this point I suppose she’s rightly confident in her ability to lead men around by the dick. Jacob looks all wounded, though, and she feels his pain like ET or something. So she invites Jacob along too—acts like she meant to all along—and tells him to bring Quil.
At school, Bella puts her plan into action, letting Mike think she’s asking him out for a brief tantalizing second before shattering his heart. She suggests another bloody action film—probably something directed by Neveldine and Taylor—and wants to get a group together to see it. Mike starts suggesting all the couples he knows, trying to salvage what at least looks like a double-date (at least he doesn’t just suggest Jessica like he’s angling for a threesome; with Alice out of town there’s nobody who would be up for it anyway), but Bella says she wants to bring her La Push friends.
Mike bristles at the idea of huge brown men coming along, but she tells him her time spent with Jacob is like “tutoring.” For some strange reason, Mike’s thoughts don’t go immediately where mine went—I wrote a note in the margins that reads, “Tutoring minorities… about my body”—and he is reassured.
He tries to convince Bella to see something other than whatever gorefest she’s picked out; he has another romantic comedy in mind. At my old BU job I worked with a lot of frat-guy types who unironically claimed their favorite movies were like, Pretty Woman and shit. They talked about how good The Bounty Hunter was. It strikes me as a lack-of-imagination problem more than anything. Mike references a film called Tomorrow and Forever, which is apparently S. Meyer’s idea of a realistic-sounding rom-com in the aughts. It’s more like a realistic-sounding Lubitsch rom-com from the 30s, but whatever, thanks for trying. “Rotten Tomatoes gave it a better review,” he says.
Rotten Tomatoes? Mike has access to an actual internet website? Clearly he exists in some kind of alternate-tech-universe, since we know Bella basically has oil lamps and rotary phones to work with. Mike is apparently not sophisticated enough, however, to understand that Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregator, so it doesn’t actually give anything a review so much as summarize the critical landscape, but whatever, thanks for trying.
Through a series of unfortunate, boring events, Bella’s Coalition Of The Willing To Go To The Movies falls apart—Quil gets in a fight at school (“You should see the other guy!”-Quil Ateara), some of the girls excuse themselves from the trip on account of the fact that they think Bella is a bitch, and some other people get sick because a stomach virus is going around. In the end it’s Bella, Jacob, and Mike. Bella is like, “fuuuuuck.”
Jacob shows up first, and he has finally finished fixing up his car. He wants to drive them to the movies in it tonight as the “maiden voyage.” I’m not saying I don’t trust Jacob’s skills, but wouldn’t a better maiden voyage be like, around a cul-de-sac a few times? They’re going to take that bitch out on the highway?
Shit gets rape-y again really fast: Bella high-fives Jacob and he twists his fingers through hers, morphing it into a hand-hold. Shudder. Then Mike shows up, and Jacob recognizes him from way back in the day. This happens:
“The one who thought you were his girlfriend. Is he still confused?”
I raised one eyebrow. “Some people are hard to discourage.”
“Then again,” Jacob said thoughtfully, “sometimes persistence pays off.”
It reminds me of that Jeff Dunham interview from the NYT when he started talking about how he made fun of all groups and races except for white Christians because his audience was white and Christian and also he was white and Christian and then he suddenly breaks off and says “Oh boy, I'm walking into something here.” Jacob teeters on the precipice of shattering his own self-delusion but jumps back just in time.
Jacob and Mike are not quite openly hostile to each other, but Bella comes fairly close to telling them to just whip ‘em out, measure ‘em and get it over with. Bella asks Mike if it’s okay if Jacob drives—he just built the car “from scratch” and all. From scratch? It’s not like he hammered out the steel, Bella. Mike is repeatedly described as having a “sullen” or “disgusted” expression. Good. Fuck you, Mike. It’s actually kind of hard to dislike Mike when he is around someone as hateable as Jacob, but Mike earns my scorn despite the odds—he leans forward from the back seat and leans his chin on the shoulder of Bella’s seat, so their cheeks almost touch. Gross. Bella practically puts her head through the window jerking away so fast (or so I imagine).
Bella’s mildly impressed with Jacob when Mike asks if he can put music on and Jacob explains that Bella doesn’t like music. She never told him that, but he seems to have picked up on her avoidance of all things potentially romantic. It’s weird for me to think about Bella getting bothered by the lyrics to music, because it’s hard for me to remember that people think about lyrics very much at all. I haven’t given lyrics much thought (beyond lines I find particularly clever) since I was 14 trying to deconstruct “Adam’s Song.” I haven’t the faintest idea what most of my favorite songs are about, which is probably because of two reasons.
A) The current trend in indie-rock seems to be a push back from lyrics with any significant, obvious meaning. There’s an emphasis on harmonies and a backlash leftover from emo and the hyper-verbose-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness of that movement. (And yet they always seemed so dumb, those lyricists. My friend Ryan and I used to always joke about how that Dashboard Confessional song “Vindicated” was like the second coming of Alanis Morisette’s “Ironic”—a song built around a word the songwriter mistakenly believes is a big, fancy word in the first place and nonetheless fails to fully understand in the second place.)
B) It’s impossible to understand what the lyrics are in Grizzly Bear and Radiohead songs anyway, and the best parts of Dirty Projectors songs aren’t even words so much as generic vowel sounds.
Mike can’t believe that Bella doesn’t like music, and out of context it does sound weird. My wife was recently talking to a guy who claimed to not like music, which she interpreted as a new kind of hipster affectation. “I’m too hip to like ANYTHING.”
Bella finds it hysterical when Jacob gives her money to buy his ticket; he’s too young to get his own. She asks if she’ll get in trouble with Billy. “No, I told him you were planning to corrupt my youthful innocence,” he says. I had to stop for a second there—Jacob told Billy WHAT? Why would I not be surprised if Jacob was keeping his father up to date on his quest to get into Bella’s pants? I’m not saying Billy Black is a bad father, but when it came time to teach Jacob about the birds and the bees he just put a porno in the VCR.
Do you think S. Meyer has seen a movie before, by the way? The ones she imagines are all so bland that it almost seems like she’s mocking film as a medium in general. (I read once that S. Meyer has never seen an R-rated movie, but that has to be bullshit, right?) Bella tells us about people getting blown up and impaled, but then for a while she just watches “the colors and movements on the screen.” Bella would make a great film critic, huh?
Mike and Jacob spend a good portion of the film with their arms on Bella’s hand rests, both with their palms up, “like steel bear traps,” Bella says. Both of these guys have such a terrible strategy! “I’ll just annoy this girl’s clothes off!” Jacob has the edge in the “creepiest” competition for being more manifestly self-deluded; Mike just seems dumb.
And the Jacob situation gets worse. Mike gets sick in the middle of the movie and Jacob and Bella follow him out. Jacob has to check on him in the bathroom. Not a fun gig. Once when I was sixteen I was in Vegas and an old woman asked me to check on her husband in the bathroom and make sure he was still alive. Hard to forget stuff like that.
Bella and Jacob have to wait for a while, and the ensuing conversation sums up the central, troubling theme of vaguely sexual misunderstanding that has characterized this section of the book. When Bella sits by Jacob he puts his arm around her. She shrugs it off and he grabs her by the hand, then locks his other hand around her wrist to hold her in place. “Where did he get the confidence from?” Bella wonders. I don’t think “confidence” is the right word, but “rapedacity” isn’t a word at all. It would be perfect if it were, though.
Jacob asks Bella if she likes him, she says she does, more than Mike, more than anyone she knows.
“But that’s all,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
Run-on sentence aside, that is what is galling about Jacob: he knows she doesn’t like him in a romantic way, but then he tells her that he’s “prepared to be annoyingly persistent.” He’s just going to WEAR HER DOWN. Very sexy. Bella is not improving the situation either; Jacob says he has “loads of time” (Ron Weasley over here) and this happens:
I sighed. “You shouldn’t waste it on me,” I said, though I wanted him to.
He says he can live with their current, sexually frustrating situation but when Bella tries to pull her hand away he doesn’t let her. Then she basically admits she likes holding his hand anyway.
“This doesn’t really bother you, does it?” he demanded, squeezing my fingers. [Shudder]
“No,” I sighed. Truthfully, it felt nice.
UGH all around. This whole situation is fraught with stupidity and I just want all of them to shut the fuck up and go home. Luckily, I basically get my wish. Mike comes out and they leave, and on the way home Jacob and Bella can’t really talk so Bella dives inward again.
It was so wrong to encourage Jacob. Pure selfishness. It didn’t matter that I’d tried to make my position clear.
If she was totally honest with herself, Bella would admit that she can blur lines with the best of them. But instead she goes into a weird extended metaphor that sounds kind of like that self-help program Ruth joined briefly on Six Feet Under.
I was an empty shell. Like a vacant house—condemned—for months I’d been utterly uninhabitable. Now I was a little improved. The front room was in better repair.
Does she mean her boobs? Am I not getting it?
He deserved better than that—better than a one-room, falling down fixer-upper.
You’re losing me, Bella! Is it a one-room house or is the front room in better repair? (And what is “better repair?”) It can’t be both, can it? Can a one room house have a front room?
No amount of investment on his part could put me back in working order.
Bella’s personal housing bubble has burst, Edward took out the last sub-prime mortgage she had, and now her heart is foreclosed and she needs a bailout or a voucher from HUD or something. Get it? Do we need to dig this metaphor any deeper?
After they drop Mike at home, Jacob starts to feel sick too, but before he goes he really self-consciously makes a non-rape-y overture to Bella. “I won’t ever let you down,” he says. “I would never, ever hurt you.” Bella is touched—and at one point a smile breaks across Jacob’s face “the way the sunrise set the clouds on fire.” That’s a simile with a metaphor nestled inside it, by the way. In case you’re keeping score.
He leaves and Bella finds herself wishing they were related, “so that I would have some legitimate claim on him that still left me free of any blame now.” Jacob and Bella would be the kind of really affectionate siblings who freak everybody else out.
At some point Bella just starts talking in straight Rod Stewart lyrics.
“One thing I truly knew—knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest—was how love gave someone the power to break you.
We start to crawl out of the abyss of bad writings and worse feelings, though. Bella sums up the last 20 pages or so of bullshit in two sentences:
He was my best friend. I would always love him, and it would never, ever be enough.
And then we get the best sentence of the last hundred pages or so:
I went inside to sit by the phone and bite my nails.
That sentence really cheered me up. We also get a great Charlie moment—when Bella comes in he’s watching the game, sitting on the floor a foot from the screen, he’s so excited by whatever he’s watching. Charlie is the best.
Bella had asked Jacob to call when he got home, and she panics when it takes too long. She calls and gets Billy on the line; Jacob is home but too sick to talk. Billy discourages Bella from visiting when she offers (“We had to have a can of Campell’s around her somewhere,” Bella muses in an odd bit of product placement) but all of her concerns about Jacob go away when she starts vomiting uncontrollably.
In a way, it’s like she’s purging away all of the awfulness of the last few chapters; it’s a cathartic stomach virus, at least for me. She spends the following day lying on the bathroom floor, but eventually Charlie gets word that Mike has recovered. Hours later, Bella is on her feet. She calls to check up on Jacob, and he answers, but he sounds like shit and feels like it too. He thinks whatever he has is worse than the stomach virus, and he reinforces Billy’s visitation ban.
What does Jacob have? The world’s worst case of blue balls? Or something wolf? I mean, something worse?
6 comments:
jacob reminded me of this guy i used to go to high school with who used who tried to guilt trip all the girls into hooking up with him. i literally had to force myself to read every part with jacob involved because of how creepy and chauvinistic he was.
I am not rereading this book, I may take another peek towards the end, but it occurs to me reading your critiques that Bella in this book is not the Bella that we know. Twilight Bella would not have said schmuck. She is a very different person with Jacob. This is problematic to me. Mostly because the 2 Bellas are the Bella with Edward and the Bella with Jacob. I define her by her relationships with these two dudes because that's how she defines herself. Now I am wanting her to to take a break from both of them to find out who she is without either of them. I am starting to not like Bella, guys! I was too indulgent with her before.
I go back and forth. Sometimes I hate Bella and she is awful. Other times she's great and I totally dig her suffering martyr complex. I'm with thetrace in that I always hate Jacob. I knew dudes like that too. I was not one of those dudes. Okay, maybe I was briefly.
But how can we say that this isn't Bella? So far this is 50% of our total picture of Bella! I know you guys know things I don't know, but I haven't really questioned her, other than the aforementioned super-mechanical decision to find the meadow.
How I feel about Bella really sort of depends on my mood. I do agree that she is very defined by her relationships, though. Or, rather, I think she lets herself be defined by them.
Jacob, on the other hand, annoys the hell out of me.
Jacob seems to be a nice enough guy but he gets so annoying after a while. He kind of reminds me of this guy I'm friends with. He knows that I don't like him beyond friendship but everytime we talk he has to say something to make things awkward. I know how Bella feels lol.
But I don't think Bellas really trying to mess with his mind, I think shes just trying to be friendly and affectionate but Jacob is just really taking it the wrong way. :/
i have to disagree, musicallyinclined.
yeah, jacob is continuing to pursue her despite her stating that she's not reciprocating. but part of being a responsible person is understanding that your actions speak just as loudly as your words, and she you freaks the fuck out when jacob is gone, spends all her time with him, snuggles and gets handholdey with him, etc. her actions are not saying red light. they are saying green light. maaaaaybe yellow light. but seriously, green light.
i've had my share of mooney dudes, and the only time i've let it go on is when i liked the attention and was being a selfish asshole. i let my own need for attention take precedence over the emotional well-being of the mooney dude.
if bella wants to make it crystal clear that she is absolutely not interested at all in jacob's romantic advances that's not that hard to do. yeah, she'd have to risk losing jacob as an emotional crutch, but if she wasn't a selfish asshole, that would be worth the cost, because she would want him to be happy. she half-heartedly admits that she's being selfish, but she takes no efforts to undo it. because, bottom line, she wants his attention and it's the only thing keeping her together.
jacob is continuing to pursue bella because she has given him zero reason not to. he's lived 16 or so years without bangin' any ladies, and probably feels like he can last a few more months, since bella is basically his girlfriend already, they just haven't consummated it.
i don't hate bella. i just think she's a selfish jerk, but most people are at times, especially teenagers. i don't really like bella more with edward, because it seems like they just spend their time staring at each other. i think she had a personality before she met edward but then just kinda collapsed on top of him and gave up being a person with interests of her own.
i'm curious about why i don't see the grossness of jacob's behavior. i wonder what i'm missing, or what i don't find it bothersome. he just seems cheerfully persistent to me.
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