Dear Paul Wesley

See? Just look at him.

Dear Paul Wesley,

How do you say "will you marry me" in Polish? No reason. I heard you got married so I thought I'd write you a letter letting you know you've made the biggest mistake of your life. It doesn't matter that we are from two different worlds (and I don't mean Polish vs. Canadian) and let's face it, the probabilities of us being together is as likely as a cat getting together with a fish (wait isn't that a catfish?), so it's terribly romantic, but I would hate to think you will live the rest of your life wondering "what if..." When I say two different worlds I mean the vampire vs. human worlds. To be more specific, you are a vampire. I am not. So far it's working for Elena, but I hear it didn't work out too well for Bella. I don't envy her giving birth by fang-section. Actually, if we're being picky, you're not really a vampire, you just play one on Vampire Diaries, but let's not be. Picky people don't enjoy the fullness of life.

I hear Poland is cold this time of year. Actually I rarely hear anything about Poland. Are Poland and Bulgaria enemies? Because that's where Nina Dobrev is from and you could use your relationship to start bridging the discrimination. I don't know if you made the best decision in changing your name. Now you sound British. Besides, Wasilewski is not that hard to say. It just makes people sound drunk when they say it. How are you finding life in America? Oh wait, you were born there. I hear you got kicked out a Christian boy's school. Did you go dancing? I think you're supposed to put a Bible's distance between you and the girl to fight temptation. I made the mistake of using an actual Bible and now no one wants to dance with me (it's really hard to dance attractively with a Bible). I've been watching your show for a while and I've discovered it's about this girl who has this diary that she uses to write about vampires. Pretty thrilling stuff. At least that is what the show was about until the diary mysteriously died... along with the crows and the fog. Maybe there was a crow epidemic. Fog is seasonal. (Good call killing off those details, writers.) I was very hesitant when I first started watching your show, but my coworker was addicted and got me addicted too. For one, I couldn't help thinking it was just a knock-off of Twilight (like most people I didn't know that the books by L. J. Smith were written long before) and though I appreciated all the great humor in Twilight (what? Wasn't it a comedy? It's not?! You're kidding!) I didn't love the idea of watching people get the blood sucked out of them. No offence. Guess what? I still don't. It's gross. Frankly, I'm far too squeamish for your show. Please stop going back into your past and feasting on people. Other than that you're amazing and I love you.

The Duck Award of Excellence

This post is pure diatribe. Pure, beautiful diatribe.

The Duck Award of Excellence

It's unfortunate but true: a lot of good literature doesn't make sense. It's like to be considered good a book must have attempted to make it as difficult as possible for their readers to understand what they are reading. I'm half kidding because I absolutely love painful old-school stuff like Shakespeare but Shakespeare has a good excuse for being difficult to understand: it's old. If it was difficult to understand then, everyone would have left the theatre frustrated and sent him to the guillotine (it was very violent back then). Many books that win awards are not very friendly to readers, though they may be doing all sorts of wonderful things like pushing boundaries and dealing with important subjects. But if I'm not enjoying a book, which doesn't mean it has to be a happy story or that it can't educate me on something, then what's the point? If I wanted to be educated on important topics only, I would just watch The Onion News. Seriously people. Many of the books I really love have not won any awards, or at least not the really important ones, like Christy, The Dwelling Place, Fortune's Rocks, I Capture the Castle, or fantasy book series like Dave Duncan's books, or CS Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia which do not necessarily have the most amazing writing in the history of the world, but they are the kind of stories that you get lost in. And there is nothing quite like getting lost in a book. Often I find I can't trust those little awards on books at all, I'll get all excited reading a book with an award, thinking, "This book can't possibly let me down, it won an award!" And then find myself feeling horrendously betrayed by the awards people when the books just plain sucks. Sadly, awards just can't be trusted. I believe the awards people are corrupt and give awards in exchange for bribes and personal favors (like those little kazoos in party favors or doing their laundry). I think there should fake awards for crappy books to warn readers. They could have a sticker with a picture of a duck on crutches and call it "The Duck Award of Excellence" and hope the authors don't notice the mini crutches. Only readers would secretly know it was a courtesy sticker that meant not to waste their precious reading time on such a lame book.