The Host Redux Chapters 23 and 24

Do you ever get two people mixed up and you have absolutely no hope of ever getting them straight? That's happening to me. I watched How To Lose Friends and Alienate People two days ago and Jeff Bridges is in it and I was like, "Hey, Jeff Bridges!" except I was thinking Jeff Daniels. And somehow, watching the movie, I didn't think that I didn't see Jeff Daniels in it. Then I downloaded The Big Lebowski and Jeff Bridges is ALSO in it and again, I was like, "Hey, Jeff Bridges!" except I was thinking Jeff Daniels. Then I saw Jeff Bridges in this movie, and connected him to his character in How To Lose Friends and Alienate People and then I wikied him and found out he's the brother of Beau Bridges, who plays Landry (NOT as good as Hammond, but still okay) on SG-1 and now I have a frame of reference for him, but I still can't separate him and Jeff Daniels in my mind. Further confusing things, I get Jeff Daniels mixed up with the guy who played one of the uncles (not Uncle Jesse, but the other one) on Full House. I also somehow keep thinking that David Carradine and Warren Beatty are the same person. My mind is a confusing place. Anyway, on to the recaps.

Chapter 23
Confessed

So let me ask you something. If you were kidnapped by a group of hostile humans and you believed they were all trying to kill you would you:
a) Try to escape
b) Make life as difficult as possible for your captors, or
c) Try to make life as easy for them as possible and do absolutely nothing to better your situation?

If you're a normal person, you'd choose a) and/or b). If you're a self-loathing moron, you would choose c). And yeah, there's the possibility of Stockholm Syndrome, but I'm pretty sure you don't get that IMMEDIATELY.

So Jamie comes to sleep with Wanderer and she's all, "You take the bed! I hate myself and I believe that everyone else is better than me and I'm like a puppy who has been repeatedly kicked, so I will take the floor. It's nothing less than I deserve." Jamie refuses and Wanderer goes "whatever" because she decides to just carry him and put him on the bed when he's asleep. Okay, you know, MAYBE I could get the whole thing where Melanie wants Jamie to take the bed out of a misplaced sense of familial love. What I can't get behind is her putting in so much effort to stay awake until Jamie is asleep and physically move him. I don't love anyone enough to put in that kind of effort.

We lay in silence for a while, listening to the low whistle of the doctor's breathing.
“Doc has a nice snore, doesn't he?” Jamie whispered.
At first I thought he was being sarcastic here, but I don't think he is. He is genuinely and unironically commenting on the niceness of the doctor's snore. I have never heard a snore I would describe as "nice." But the only person I know who snores is my mom and she has the most fucking insane snore. I actually taped her two nights ago. It was hilarious. Oh also, my brother occasionally snores. I remember sleeping with my mom at my aunt's house and my brother was sleeping on the floor. My mom and brother were snoring IN TANDEM and they sounded like a pair of motorcycles. I'm not even kidding. Like two motorcycles revving.

“You tired?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
This dialogue is riveting.

“Is everybody like that?” Jamie whispered long after I thought he'd fallen asleep. “Does
everybody stay?”
“No,” I told him sadly. “No. Melanie is special.”
“She's strong and brave.”
“Very.”
Seriously? When has she EVER been strong and brave? All she does is avoid trying to take control of the body and pine for Pedobear. Yeah. Yeah, she's soooooooo strong and brave.

“Your sister and I have… spent a lot of time together. She shared you with me. And… I started
to… to love you, too.”
Bullshit. LIFE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. The year before last, my friend had this huge crush on a guy we shall call Waldo. I heard stories about him literally EVERY DAY and they were stupid stories like, "Today, Waldo and I went to the bathroom at the same time!" (That was actually a different guy, but it's just an example). I felt like I knew more about this guy than some guys I've gone to school with my whole life. I had a shitload of pictures of him on my computer so much so that I felt like a stalker even though I didn't ask for any information about this guy. My point is, I was exposed to this guy so much without ever actually meeting him, but I felt no feelings at all about him. I didn't fall in love with him. I didn't feel anything. He was just some guy I heard about all the time. Unless you are mentally unstable, you CANNOT fall genuinely in love with someone you haven't even met.

“And Jared, too?”
I gritted my teeth for a second, chagrined that he had made the connection so easily. “Of course I don't want anything to hurt Jared, either.”
"So, I told you that Melanie shared her memories of the most important people in her life, and I told you that I fell in love because of those memories, and then you make the connection that I must love Pedobear too? YOU ARE SO BRILLIANT, JAMIE!"

“Yes, but I am what I am, Jamie."
"I yam what I yam. Now be a love and go find Olive Oyl."

“Jared won't believe you, either. He'll be the angriest of them all.”
"He looked into a mirror awhile ago, and that's what it said. I think it used to belong to some chick named Snow White...?"

Jeb chuckled. I looked up at him, and he had that same pouncing-cat expression he'd had
yesterday. The solved-puzzle expression.
Ha ha! "The solved puzzle expression." I guess Smeyer lost her thesaurus.

Blah blah, Wanderer starts to work in the field and everyone else hates her.

Chapter 24
Tolerated

Apparently Wanderer has been wearing the same clothes for like two weeks.

“Jeb,” the caramel woman acknowledged dryly.
I thought that said "carnal woman" at first. Can I just say that "caramel woman" is the fucking stupidest descriptor I have EVER heard?

It seemed as if the places where the bruises had formed were more sensitive
than the rest of me–they must still have been there.
That's some great detective work there, Captain Obvious.

Jeb explained. “If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will hop right out. But if you put
that frog in a pot of tepid water and slowly warm it, the frog doesn't figure out what's going on until it's too late. Boiled frog. It's just a matter of working by slow degrees.”
That's almost as bad as one of Seleho's analogies.

Pull Jamie out of his class, Jeb needed to speak with him.
Ha, I thought this said, "Pull Jamie out of his ass."

That was a really useless chapter.