With all the requisite respect and admiration for Stephanie Meyers. I can only dream of making as much money from writing as you have.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

If the Twilight Saga has taught us anything, it's that being immortal means becoming a vampire. Which basically seems to involve twinkling in the sunlight, the odd turn at stalking a human teenager, and a bizarre aversion to ever smiling or having fun.

Hmmm. I think given a choice between mortality and an eternity listening to the seemingly endless whinings of Mr and Mrs Cullen, death would seem like sweet relief.
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I was sitting in a corner of the living room reading a novel. I was devoting a good proportion of my eternal life to the goal of reading every novel in existence, and since there was an infinite (and growning) amount of books in the universe, both good and bad, this pursuit was well suited to a person with an infinite amound of days left to read them. I was writing copious reviews of each of these books up on my blog, which had been running for seventy years now.

Then my peaceful musings were broken as Bella Cullen (nee Swann) floated into the room. She looked despondant as always.

"Oh," she sighed, gliding effortlessly into a chair "I'm so clumsy. And unattractive. I don't know how Edward still loves me."

She sat down, staring mournfully somewhere into the middle distance. I sensed that she wanted some attention, but since I had spent a good fifty years commiserating with her about all of her alleged problems, I instead snuggled further into the couch and focussed my mind on my book.

But after ten minutes, I became aware of a glowering pile of anger hiding just behind the armchair of the couch. Of course it was Edward, hiding just out of Bella's line of sight, craning his neck as he watched her breathing slowly in and out. After 20 minutes of watching this hardly singular activity repeat itself over and over again, I began to wonder what the attraction was.

"I love her so much," he growled in as gruff a voice as an emo wearing tight jeans could muster. "Why doesn't she understand this yet?"

He gave a strangled cry.

"Bellaaaaa!"

Bella gave a strangled gasp and raced into his arms. "Edward!"

I didn't want to wait to see the soppy and saliva-filled antics that came next. I peeked past the curtain and glanced outside. Full sunlight. I raced outside and sat directly in the glare, wishing for a swift and easeful death, never to see these people again.

I looked down at my hands, hoping and praying that they would be aflame burning away into grey, ashy dust.

Alas, this kind of vampire could not be eliminated through the healing flame of sunlight. I sat in the sun glistening like a fairy and wishing that I could just plain die.

Discarded Rose

This is not a happy story. No one will ride off on a white horse into the sunset. But it is a story of the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.

I met Ryan on the first day of university, when we were both feeling scared and small and we were looking for a friend. Ryan had a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour, a slew of nerdy hobbies and a cute desire to please. I liked him at once. He was easy to talk to, friendly and we had a lot in common.

Oh, and I was convinced he was gay.

In time, I came to think of Ryan as my best friend. I'd take him shopping with me and ask his opinion on clothes. Heck, I'd even ask his opinion on men! Every day after we finished classes, you could find us in the university bar surrounded by a raucous crowd of friends, just chatting and enjoying ourselves.

Now I was used to Ryan phoning me at least twice a week, so it didn't mean that much to me when he called up out of the blue one morning and asked if I wanted to go to the movies that Wednesday.

Of course, I instantly replied, I'll help you ring around to invite people if you like.

No, no, he said. I'll deal with everything. Please don't invite anyone.

I remember just being grateful that I got to go to the movies without having to do any actual organising. I hadn't realised at that point what day it was. It was February 10. Wednesday would be February 14. But I had never associated Ryan with any romantic thought whatsoever, so the significance of that date completely passed me by.

At the appointed hour, Ryan rang my doorbell. I raced over in my jeans and tshirt and flung open the door...

... to see Ryan in a tuxedo carrying two dozen red roses and a jewellry box (containing a lovely pair of silver earrings). It would have been the perfect Valentines day - had I not though of Ryan as my brother.

As it happens, it was one of the most awkward moments of my life, and Ryan and I have never been close friends since. I can't blame him. I would have been hurt too.

But it remains the most trouble any person has ever gone to in the hope of winning my affections.

Sony eReader

I am truly, madly, deeply in love with only one piece of technology: my e-reader. Now to you lucky individuals living outside Australia, you've probably had access to these for a good ten years now. But it's only been just this year that a decent range has landed in Australia.

This has long annoyed me, as ebooks generally cost $5-10 to purchase, but in Australia actual physical books cost $30-40. For someone with a hard-to-kick one a month habit, this has always been a concern to me. Plus try lugging 8 different books around in your carry-on every time you go on a flight, just in case you're in the mood for a particular novel. Far easier to carry them all around on one itsy-bitsy convenient gadget.

Because I don't want this to sound like a sales pitch, I'm now going to shift gears and tell you about the day I bought my beautiful Sony Pocket. Believe me, it helps to describe the depth of feeling I have for this brilliant little machine.

It just so happened that the Sony Pocket came out exactly a month after the iPhone 4, though it was announced amid much fanfare a good three months earlier. My head was therefore awhirl with stories of the iPhone 4 "line parties" that the phone companies had all organised. I remembered all the newspaper articles where people in the line were interviewed and photographed.

And in my naivety, I thought to myself surely, SURELY if people started lining up for a simple phone 24 hours in advance, they will start lining up for an e-reader - a new piece of technology only newly avaliable in the country - a whole week in advance!

I didn't want to risk missing out of one of these gadgets. The iPhone I could miss with a clear conscience. But not this.

So I pushed myself out of bed at 6 in the morning on the day of the launch. Took a whole day off work too. By 7:02 I was standing in the cold outside the Sony store.

Completely alone.

Well, I couldn't go home, could I? It had taken me half an hour to get there in the first place! And what if a bunch people turned up right before opening? I couldn't miss out, I just couldn't! So there I stood, shivering slightly.

For two hours.

At 8:45 the store owner finally arrived and opened the door. The startled look on his face when I traipsed into the store straight after him was almost worth the two hour wait. But not quite.

And that's how I became the owner of the first Sony Pocket ever to be sold in greater New South Wales.