Sue recently wrote about the novel Twilight and how much she hated it.   Somehow she just didn’t see the appeal in a romance between a girl and the vampire who wants to eat her.  It made me think of the many supposed romances - real, literary or in the movies - that have made my flesh crawl a little (if you like this sort of thing, you might also enjoy Scribbit’s list of romantic movies that weren’t).

1. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady - As I have mentioned before, Henry Higgins was a jerk. He always treated Eliza like crap. There is nothing attractive about him, and if Eliza stayed with him, she was a dope.

2. Abelard and Heloise - Heloise’s letters to Abelard are cravenly devoted. She loved him passionately and thought the love was returned. His letters to her are the pompous, self-important bilge of a narcissist. Only in her last letter, which is impersonal and business-like, does she salvage her self-respect with a little distance.  And the style of her last letter is so different that some scholars think she didn’t even write it.

3. Wuthering Heights - I love the novel precisely because it is NOT a romance, but I am amazed at how many women think that Heathcliff is some sort of ideal lover.  Heathcliff is a sociopath.  If you find him attractive, maybe you could just wait outside your local prison for the first unattached stalker to be released.

4. Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt - Heidegger was a famous historian who had an affair with his student, the political theorist Hannah Arendt. They wrote letters to each other for years, and I tried to read the published collection. I tried, but Heidegger’s first letter to Arendt began by congratulating her on how the affair was going to develop her womanhood and keep her from de-feminizing herself with all that book learnin’. I dropped the book after the first few pages, wondering, Why, why, WHY would anyone sleep with this jackass?

5. Any relationship involving any female character Frank Miller has ever written.

6. The Man Who Knew Too Much - This movie probably doesn’t belong on this list. It isn’t a romance, and Hitchcock, of course, liked to show the creepiness of the everyman. But I included it anyway because a husband who keeps forcing drugs on his wife to silence her crying after their child is kidnapped? That’s a special kind of marriage.

7. Closer - On a slow night at home, I saw this Julia Roberts-Clive Owen movie based on a couple of blurbs, including one that called it “a romance for grown-ups.”  Uh, no.  This is not romantic or grown-up.  This is a depressing tale of irresponsible people rutting.  Avoid at all costs.

8.  Romeo and Juliet - Are you ready to kill me?  I know, I know; it’s the world’s most famous romance.  But don’t those two overwrought teenagers strike you as a bit, um, whiny?  As a friend said to me once, the only real tragedy in this play is when Mercutio dies.

So tell me, dear readers, what romances failed to woo you?

Chilihead is hosting a carnival of blogging stories. She has a list of questions for people to answer about how they started blogging. If you want to try this too, her questions are here.

How did you start blogging?

I was sitting home alone one night while my daughters were sleeping. My husband worked nights at the time, so I was home alone at night a lot. I had heard my pastor mention that he had a blog, so I thought I’d look for it. After seeing his, I thought, “Hmm. Maybe I could do one of those.”

I mentioned it to my husband, and he suggested naming the blog “Toddled Dredge,” a phrase we had been mentally saving since we first saw it as the mangled closed-caption spelling of the Olympic skater Todd Eldridge. At the time I had no idea how much I would write about my toddlers or how often I would have to dredge something up from my brain when I was too tired to feel creative. It was just kismet, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Did you intend to be a blog w/a following? If so, how did you go about it?

No. I might feel a little wistful for a big readership, but I don’t think I’m cut out for it. I think I would vacillate between anxiety over the pressure to post, exultation at the number of comments, and paralyzing stage fright.

I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people choose to stop for a few minutes and read my words, or even direct people here. One of the best gifts of the blogging coimmunity has been the way they make me feel respected just for stringing words together well. Respect was something I desperately needed when I began as an isolated SAHM, and I am still very grateful for it.

What do you hope to achieve or accomplish with your blog? Have you been successful? If not, do you have a plan to achieve those goals?

When I first started, I was brain-starved from staying home with two small children. I had very few opportunities for adult conversation, and hoped that blogging would be a place for intellectual challenges and stimulating debate.

That has happened, but not in the way I expected. Instead of immersing myself in a world of intellectual bloggers, I have found my home among the mommybloggers. This has happened for one very important reason: mommybloggers write better than the intellectuals do. I’m not kidding. Look around. The bloggers who want to be culture critics or demagogues or political pundits are, for the most part, boring. They have not mastered the brevity of the medium. They seem to consider all of their words too important to be left out, so they ramble on for whole unecessary paragraphs. They make my eyes hurt.

I find more mommybloggers (I apologize if you are offended at the term, but I am one too) producing carefully crafted posts, weighing each word. It has challenged me in my own writing, teaching me a healthy brutality in editing my own stuff. I am a better writer now for reading momblogs.

I still don’t find the blogworld a very good place for debate. The internet encourages too much frantic emotion. Some bloggers are skilled at encouraging measured, thoughtful responses among their commenters and some manage the occasional circus with dignity, but it is rare that I find someone actually having polite disagreement. The more common etiquette seems to be to say nothing if you disagree. (If you want to read a fairly technical but polite blog disagreement, check out the comments in my real-life friend Angie’s post on the nature of God).

Has the focus of your blog changed since you started blogging? How?

I expected to write about books a lot more than I now do. The community built around books is much smaller than the one around parenting, and within the community of booklovers there are only so many who love the same sorts of books I do (or hate the same sorts of books I do, which is equally important).

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started?

I wish I had known more about the mechanics of blogging. I’m still pretty clueless about most technical aspects.

Do you make money with your blog?

No.

Does your immediate or extended family know about your blog? If so, do they read it? If not, why?

My sister and her husband read regularly, as do a few real life friends. My husband reads every post and every comment. He loves to see that people read me and respond, even if it’s only with a “Hey! Nice post!” My parents know, but are too easily confused by the internet to find my site reliably. They only read when I specially point something out to them.

My in-laws do not know about it, I think, though I was nervous for a while when I gained a reader in their city. I would not want them to know because they are very polite people who only say nice things about my children. Even statements from me like “I’m tired because the baby kept me up” or “The children don’t eat enough” are met with eyes askance and disapproving silence. They would not approve of me describing the really hard days of motherhood, or being honest with strangers about family conflict.

What two pieces of advice would you give to a new blogger?

Be fair to people. Remember that commenters frequently take whatever emotion you are expressing and intensify it, so think before you hit the publish button. A few months ago I read a post where a mom playfully complained about the little girls who kept calling her son. The commenters went on to “humorously” call this elementary schoolgirl things like “slut.” It was really disturbing. If the mother of that little girl ever found the site - or the girl herself - I think she would be very hurt.

Don’t “should” on yourself. Blogging is supposed to be fun, not an obligation. Don’t beat yourself up for not posting or not meeting some other goal you had. You will never write at all if you do it out of guilt. Relax and let it be fun.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTby_e4-Rhg]
Really. I do.

My year’s worth of blogging, while in one sense providing lots of cumulative information about me, has gradually become more secretive. When I started writing I was truly anonymous, but as more of you read and responded and as I discovered your blogs too, I acquired a persona, something to live up to, a reputation of sorts to protect. I have found myself less and less willing to show you the shabby or embarrassing parts of me - not anything grand, just the odd little details I keep covered.

But what good is a blog that’s not real? With that in mind, I thought I’d welcome you further into the crazy.

1. I have daydreams in which I become First Lady. In this daydream, I reluctantly marry a president, and become media’s darling for my dignity and grace. This is absurd for many reasons, such as 1) I am already happily married to a man who will never become president; 2) there has never been a president I would want to be married to 3) there are no current presidential candidates I would want to be married to 4) if I were thrust into the spotlight of such publicity, no one would be impressed by my dignity. Much more likely there would be public photos of me picking my nose or fixing my panty line or leaking milk, and a few fashion columns in the theme of “Good night, what is that woman wearing! Does she own a mirror?.”

2. Somewhere in the last three years of baby-having, I lost the desire for new clothes. I hate to buy new clothes. I pass clothing stores, see all the garments hanging on the rack and think only, ‘Why would I buy more laundry?” And it shows. Oh, it shows. Our daughter was baptized today and Az said he wanted to wear a suit, and I said, “No! That means I’ll have to wear a dress! I don’t have a dress!” And then I had to hunt through my stored non-maternity clothes to see if I could find a dress that fit. I didn’t find one and had to wear one that didn’t fit. And did the church folks notice anything unusual about that? No, because even in church I dress like an absent-minded professor who was laid off years ago and became an absent-minded homeless person. This is fashion a la Veronica.

3. I love cheesy movies about music. Maybe I watched too many Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies as a kid (”Let’s put on a show!”), but predictable plots with mediocre scores still thrill me a little. I try to hide my delight from Az and can pose as a jaded film critic, but when nobody’s watching I might watch the movie twice. The wide-eyed fan is still alive and well in me. I have actually been singing - yes, singing! out loud! - this for the last few days.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dYc3PblZR8]

I went shopping Friday night while Az stayed home with the kids. By the time I got home, it was dark. The air was too cold for anyone to be out on their porches. I pulled into the driveway and I just sat there, free for a few moments in the bliss of being completely unnoticed.

I stayed in the car for maybe 30 minutes, watching the night sky and the trees, soaking in the silence. I have found this stage of pregnancy draining because of my appalling obviousness. I am large and clumsy. I don’t fit between the space people normally leave between chairs anymore. I have to ask them to excuse me. I have to speak up.

I huff when I walk up steps. I cannot even stand in line too long without squatting or leaning to rest. People stare.

I hate this. Now more than ever, I want to fly under the radar. I want to deal with this discomfort, and the disappointment that it isn’t over yet, without the questions and the stares and the playfully harassing demands “Haven’t you had that baby yet?” I want to be silent and secret until I feel ready to face the world.

Az cannot handle silence. He tells me every day that I look angry. He wants my words, and he wants me to tell him frequently that I am not nursing resentment against him. We have been married almost eleven years, and in that time he has not yet accepted that I can have emotions that are not about him. There is no polite and loving way in this marriage to say, “Please be quiet. Leave me alone.”

I want to hide myself in a cave and lie full-length on the cool limestone until it leaches all my troubled heat away. I want to be still and quiet in the dark, and not come out until this baby is ready to be born. I want to coccoon myself, and think about something else for a while.

She will come when she comes. There is nothing I can do about it. And so I want desperately to do nothing and be unnoticed until she comes.