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The secret teenager within

Did Dinosaur art part 2 today. I still don't like dinosaurs but I do like teaching 7-year-olds. They're just so appreciative. I was treated with an embarrassing reverence all because my drawing skills don't totally suck (but let me get this straight, I'm no Picasso). I tell you, it's almost enough to go to a girl's head; if I was a teeny bit more insecure I'd be enrolling myself into teacher training college double quick.

Apart from acting as an unpaid art slave at school I've been sleeping (the dreaded pregnancy narcolepsy strikes again) and working my way through the Twilight series for the second time. I love it even more on second reading, which is why you've barely heard from me in the past week - I've had my head buried in VampireLoveLand.

Now, it has crossed my mind that I shouldn't really be reading books about vampires. After all, the Twilight series is kind of meant for teenagers (or at least, I assume this to be the case since most bookstores are stocking them in the Teenage section) and there isn't even any sh*gging until Breaking Dawn (even then it's not exactly detailed, going direct from frenzied snogging to the aftermath). Plus, I'm a 30-something matron who nobody ever mistakenly calls 'miss' anymore, mother to two girls and a fetus, married for more years than Alpha and I care to remember (only joking sweetie, kiss kiss!) and am supposedly sensible, mature and responsible.

Thus, or so the logic goes, I should not be spending most of my waking hours immersed in a love story about an awkward teenager and a vampire, should I? It's not the most plausible plot line after all. I mean, vampires? Come on!

But, you see, in my secret heart of hearts I am still a teenager. Despite the irrefutable evidence every time I look in the mirror and witness the cruel ravages of time, I still secretly believe myself to be a dewy-skinned, pure-hearted, 17-year-old innocent- basically, the Me I once was before being pulverised by repeated exposure to the bitter disappointments meted out by Life and too many Marlboro Lights.

It also doesn't help that I, just like Bella Swan, can barely walk five yards without tripping over my own feet and have never managed a gymnastic maneuver in my life. I was always the last one to be picked in gym at school. Plus there's the awkward thing, the feeling slightly out of step with 99% of everyone else in the world, the almost permanent undercurrent of angst and uncertainty, the nagging thought that I'm about to do something utterly klutzy at any given moment, and the sheer embarrassment of having arms and legs that don't always want to do my bidding (and I'm not just talking about when I've had one too many strawberry daquiris).

You see, I'm overidentifying. Totally, utterly, insanely overidentifying with a fictitious character who is decades younger than me, a thousand times more hot and a million times more unlikely. 

Oh well. I'll snap out of it at some point. In the meantime, any other Twilight fans out there can join me in reading Midnight Sun, which is Twilight re-written from Edward Cullen's point of view. Enjoy... sigh.

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