the zombies & me

I never really thought of myself as a zombie type of gal. All the horror novels that Ari read when we were kids gave me the heebie-jeebies. (Let's be honest -- just reading the descriptions on the backs of those books were enough to give me the heebie-jeebies.) Certain episodes of Little House on the Prairie gave me nightmares (there was some scary shit in that show, I swear!). Jaws kept me out of the lake (yes, a lake) for almost an entire summer. And though I was preoccupied with armageddons of all sorts as a kid, zombies never really figured into my end-game scenarios.

And yet here I am, all tangled up in Newsflesh and The Walking Dead, and I'm not quite sure how that happened.

It sort of started with a walk down Central Park West a couple years back. And then there was Nathan's birthday gift not long after that. And then I watched a couple Romero movies. And the 28 Days Later movies. And then Nate & Shanna gave me some socks for Christmas with ZOMBIE written up the sides. And then I kind of got obsessed with the geopolitical machinations behind World War Z. (Just ask Evan, who had to put up with my incessant ramblings about this on many a long subway ride home...) And now ridiculous articles like this jump out at me from the boiling troubled sea that is our chronic information overload these days.

Nick and I were talking the other day about the many ways in which ebook-readers have changed the way we read, not the least of which is the sense of privacy they provide. I might not read quite so much YA dystopian fiction or zombie crap if everyone on the bus could see what I was reading every day.

Then finally yesterday morning there was this in my inbox, which made me chuckle out loud and think fondly of one of my absolute favorite childhood books:

"I tried to arrange a zombie apocalypse, just for you on your special day, but it didn't quite get off the ground.  Or out of the ground, as it were. At least ... I don't THINK it did ..."

And with that, my friends, comes what I am sure is this very surprising confession: I am a zombie type of gal.