I've crossed over.

I finally saw Twilight. But only because it was downstairs in the DVD machine that we get to rent free movies from. You know, why not, because it's free. I mean, what's all the fuss about anyway?...

...I bought the book New Moon several days later and read it in 24 hours. And I'm dying to get a night without the kids to go see the movie. I'm making myself wait to see that movie before I move on to reading Eclipse.

I'm hooked. I'm sorry if I ever thought you were silly for buying into the Twilight craze. I found this article that just about sums it all up for me...

Grown women and 'Twilight': The love that dare not speak its shame

By MONICA HESSE

The Washington Post

We know. You hate “Twilight.” You don’t want to hear anything more about “Twilight.” That’s why this is not another story about the “Twilight” or “New Moon” mania, nor will it rhapsodize on the vampire craze, nor does it contain any interviews with Robert Pattinson.

This is a story about shame.

All across the country, there were women who managed to avoid Stephenie Meyer’s series about a star-crossed human/vampire teen couple. (Vampire Edward lusts for mortal Bella but also for her blood; the books are less plot than endless yearning). They resisted the first three books — refused to read them, didn’t know they existed — and the lunacy that was “Breaking Dawn.”

“Twilight” came for the tweens, then for the moms of tweens, then for the co-workers who started wearing those ridiculous Team Jacob shirts, and the resisters said nothing because they thought “Twilight” could not come for them. They were too literary. They didn’t do vampires. They were feminists.

Then something happened: the release of the “Twilight” movie, which last year introduced $384 million worth of audience members to Kristen Stewart as mortal Bella and Pattinson as lust incarnate.

Jenny West, 32, had never heard of the series until she saw ads for the movie last year. “I bought ‘Twilight’ (the book) with the full intention of ripping it apart.” Then she read it. In one night. Bought “New Moon” the next day.

“I was kind of horrified with myself, and I had to keep going.” When she finished the last book, she reopened the first one and started again.

She founded the blog Twitarded to process what had happened to her.

People, be warned. With the sequel “New Moon” now in theaters, everyone is vulnerable.

One minute you’re a functioning member of society, the next you’re succumbing to the dark side, wondering how deep you’re willing to go — and what that longing says about you.

In “Twilight,” Edward Cullen waffled between wooing and eating new girl Bella Swan. He chose love. In “New Moon,” the darkest installment of the series, Edward becomes convinced that his girlfriend would be safer without him, so he dumps her to protect her and then vanishes. Bella, catatonic from the pain, finds solace in Jacob Black, the devoted friend who has just learned he is a werewolf, and their relationship grows deeper, and this description is utterly, utterly useless because none of it gets at what the “Twilight” series is actually about, which is being 17.

It’s a time capsule to the breathless period when the world could literally end depending on whether your lab partner touched your hand, when every conversation was so agonizing and so thrilling (and the border between the two emotions was so thin), and your heart was bigger and more delicate than it is now, and everything was just so much more.

Lauren Ashlock, 27, snuck the books into her house, at first reading them in the bathroom so her husband wouldn’t laugh. The floodgates opened. “I’d locked away a lot of emotions,” she says. “I’d numbed out.”

The behavior that followed will make perfect sense to someone who has read “Twilight”: Ashlock got three dogs and named them after “New Moon’s” werewolf pack. When the Ashlocks have a child, they will name it from the novels: “If it’s a girl her middle name will be Renesmee, and I don’t care if you hate the name because I love it.”

I think I need to read the first book now, you know, because the book is always better. :)