Comma Dot Comma

Popular plotline:

Lovely teenage girl moves to small town. While ordinary teenage boys vie for her attention, she only has eyes for a gorgeous, brooding loner, who is set on avoiding her. Finally the brooding loner confesses his attraction but declares that romance is impossible, as they are too different. Relationship progresses anyway. Lovely teenage girl discovers that her boyfriend is -GASP!- a vampire! But a good, REFORMED vampire, who does not eat people. However, he sometimes confuses his desire to kiss her with his desire to suck her dry, a problem he overcomes with tremendous self-control and a good supply of animal blood.

Does this describe:

a) Stephanie Meyer’s novel Twilight, 2005
b) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1, 1997
c) both

I don’t normally follow vampire-type stuff so I don’t know if this is just a common theme in the lit, or if there’s some borrowing going on. Granted the two girl characters are completely different, as are the romantic relationships. The Twilight relationship, though billed as a wonderful chaste romance, actually strikes me as fairly creepy and obsessive.

This plot similarity came to my attention a couple weeks ago. I was reading some review of something or other that, once again, referenced Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a TV show from 12 years ago. They are still mentioning this show? I thought to myself. Maybe I should check it out. It seemed like it might be my kind of thing, given the superheroes, the battles between good and evil, the scripture references, and so on. Turns out hulu.com has seasons 1 and 2 available and I’ve been working my way through. It looks like later seasons might get a little too soap opera for my taste, but the early episodes are quite enjoyable. Most of them take some ordinary aspect of poor teenage decision-making and ramp it up into cosmic doom narrowly averted, a format which I find funny. In one, this girl meets her soulmate in an online chatroom. Her friends all caution her that this guy may not be a sensitive 18-year-old from the next town over; what does she REALLY know about him? She brushes off their warnings. When they meet, it turns out that he is an ancient mind-control demon embodied in a 12-foot robot, out to take over the world. OH NO! EVIL ROBOT! Buffy saves her at the last second. There are also the love triangles, parental and authority figure issues, and friendship quandaries that are de rigeur for teen-focused television (hence the vampire romance between Buffy and Angel). I’m partway through season 2, where the menace level and the complexity of evil both seem to ramp up a bit from snakes, robots, and praying mantises. Still works, though.

The other thing I really like about the show is Buffy herself. She is surprisingly non-angst-ridden for a) a superhero and b) a teenage girl. Sure, she occasionally rebels against the save-the-world duties thrust upon her by fate, but overall she thinks it is pretty cool that she can single-handedly beat up and kill any evil creature that looms up in front of her. She is self-confident, loyal to her friends, nice to everyone else, and an advocate of mercy and compassion wherever possible. She is also VERY cute. Lest we find her too perfect, she does occasionally get moody, sarcastic, and distant. She frustrates her mother to no end. Usually she is out rescuing all of her friends and family from imminent destruction, but once in awhile they get to rescue her. Good times.

Phoenix is hard-hit by the recession. One of the best barometers of how things are going economically has been the prayer request email that gets sent out as needed from the church office. Our church is pretty solidly middle class– lots of teachers, nurses, mechanics, construction workers, police officers, handymen, and small business owners. People call in with their requests and depending on the urgency, they get broadcast to the church body in batches. What is happening in the church is what is happening in the city.

Last year this time, or a little earlier, many of the requests were for people trying to sell houses– they were losing money, potential buyers couldn’t get loans, things were sitting for months. Next it was the health problems. Some of it was run-of-the mill requests for illnesses and accidents, but several were related to problems with insurance and covering medical costs. Next it was small business owners whose capital and access to small business loans had dried up.

I haven’t seen a lot of church emails about layoffs and paycuts yet, but many of the people I know, here and in California, are facing imminent change. As employees of the public higher ed systems, both Dr. G. and I have our work emails flooded with budget-related memos, dire warnings, and drastic measures, some of which affect us.

In the past 8 months or so, I have only bought clothing from going-out of business sales. Those directional sign-holders now line the streets to advertise close-outs and liquidations in most parts of town. A few months ago, I counted six of them in a quarter-mile section of a major shopping area.

The constant building of gated communities and subdivisions, which was a main source of Phoenix wealth that fed off the constant growth, seems to have mostly stopped. Zillow alerts me monthly to the number of foreclosures in my immediate neighborhood. A friend’s daughter just bought a 2-yr-old foreclosed upon house for $90 k; it would have gone for over $200k in the past. I know a handful of people who have gone through foreclosure or had to destroy their credit and short-sell their houses.

The dominoes are still falling. And yet, among my friends and family, I do not find the grimness of mood that I might have expected. Some things are hard; but many other parts of life are good and full of hope. Things may, and probably will, get worse; but there is a feeling in the air of surely being able to face them when they come. My church is especially family-like, with an ethos of all pitching in when one has need, so maybe some of it is unique to that group. But I also think the optimism is particularly American, and a quality I have sorely missed when I spend lengths of time in other countries. Even though our optimism becomes annoyingly blithe and simplistic far too often, it is still, overall, good.

This month’s division of personal energy while awake, by task:

Work-related activities: 30%
Holding very, very still: 20%
Maintaining positive attitude: 30%
Church/volunteer activities: 10%
Investing in friends and family: 5%
Doing household chores: 2%
Miscellaneous: 3%