Twilight Confessional: Pocket Edward Cheaper Than Therapy

It's taken me a while to get to the point where I am [usually] capable of whipping mini-Edward out of by bag and snapping pictures of him and his hijinks. Truth be told, snarky or no, I hate drawing attention to myself and generally tend to do whatever it takes to go about my day-to-day existence unnoticed. In fact, I'm pretending that nobody but JJ and myself are reading this blog due to the fact that I would otherwise be too mortified to 'fess up to some of this stuff, and while this is not far from reality, I know it is not entirely true. But I am making progress. Baby steps...

Case in point: a few weeks (months?) back, when I found myself in Hot Topic for the first time, uncomfortably wandering around looking at the stuff I had owned the first time it was cool (Judas Priest Screaming for Vengeance? Really? Been there, done that, stenciled it on a denim binder...), it was tough. I felt like I should be whipping out photos of my [non-existent] kids to justify my presence there. But I was on a mission, and I wasn't leaving without sniffing the Twilight perfume. It was hard to have to ask - as nonchalantly as I could, having come from the office and clearly not wearing enough studded accessories and conspicuously lacking piercings - to have said perfume brought out from its locked cabinet. While this was a minor victory for me, what happened next was truly a breakthrough: just as it was about to be whisked back to its lucite lair, I quickly mumbled to the [half my age] salesgirl something about how my friend and I were doing a "where's-the-garden-gnome?" type thing with our Edward Cullen action figures, and would she mind terribly if I took a picture of Edward with the perfume bottle??? To my surprise, she was totally game, admired Edward (the action figures had apparently never made it to the brick-and-mortar store shelves), and told me she thought the whole thing was pretty cool. I left elated. Say what you will, but for $19.99 (and a potentially massive cellphone bill), I am eventually going to get over my inability to make a spectacle of myself in public. For better or for worse.