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I've spent a great bulk of my life trying to decide whether or not I'm
insane. I ask this question with such urgency at times because I do desire
blood. For me it's not the 'eroticism' of the vampire--though that's a
nice bonus--or the desire to role-play one--I haven't, and I'm not truly
interested in what White Wolf has to offer. And I've never been so mentally
gone that I actually believe I'm 'immortal' and gifted with strange unearthly
powers of transformation and enchantment. I'm all too mortal, believe
me, and the only strange powers I have don't enchant people. No, for me
it's more the real and actual desire to drink human blood.
I have drunk blood on occasion; 99% of the time it's been voluntary. I
don't lurk in shadows unless it's bright out, I'm not a thin, ethereal
wraithlike being, I don't dress constantly in black. And I also eat garlic,
I don't fear crosses, I've touched holy water to my skin (a brief period
of exploring Catholicism before I decided on the pagan path), and the
only reason I have to fear sunlight is that I take St. John's Wort for
depression, and it increases my already high photosensitivity. (Which
is really annoying, because it makes getting my daily requirement of Vitamin
D rather horrific.)
But there are interesting corollaries. I have one of the odder family
histories around; I had an aunt in Oklahoma who swore she was a werewolf.
There are rumors she was just schizophrenic, but as I never met her...And
several of my ancestresses have been burned as witches, for either healing
with herbal skills or consorting with supposed demons. On one side of
my family, I'm related to Joan of Arc, she of the holy visions and crossdressing;
on the other side, Henry the VIII and the rest of the rotten Tudor stock
pop up, and they weren't exactly what you'd call pillars of stability.
Insanity doesn't just run in my family; it gallops. Were we rich, most
of the current crop would be termed 'charmingly eccentric'. As it is,
most people just think we're nuts.
And there are interesting physical oddities, too. No, none of us were
born with eleven toes or two heads, though my aunt and my mother's mother
were both born with extra ribs, sprouting from the collarbone. And most
of the women have reproductive problems--most of us don't produce progesterone
at all, or have other related problems--and if you've been to other parts
of the page, you already know I have a beard. But some of my family are
highly allergic to any form of allicin, which is not only the active agent
in garlic, but also all the other plants in the onion family. (I'm a garlic
junkie, but I have problems with high acid-content foods and the occasional
undercooked onion.) And we as a family are allergic to the sun. I used
to think that was ridiculous--how can anyone be allergic to sunlight??
It's a star, we're on a planet--come on! But we are--my aunt broke out
in hives when exposed, and I flash-burned in minutes before I started
taking St. John's. (The interesting thing there is that it increases photosensitivity
in animals; everything I've read says the effect doesn't extend to Homo
Sapiens. Go figure.)
And I will also admit, I'm a fairly morbid individual. If I could wear
black most of the time I would, but it's not as flattering as I would
like--brings out all the gold in my skin tone and really makes me look
jaundiced. My favorite form of makeup--when I wear any at all--is a green
concealer base under white rice powder, with black-outlined eyes and dark
brown lips. I've scared people that way. And though no one, ever, will
see me on the street and think, "Oh, there goes a Goth," that's been my
desire since high school. I'd wear black lace and tattered velvet if I
could afford it. I'd have coffins around the house. Hell, I already have
a monopoly on decorating with bats--they're everywhere, along with skulls
and roses and the odd string of Hallows lights here and there.
So where does the fetish for the dark leave off, and the vampire begin?
I'm not even as sure as I once was, that this is just a variety of the
psychological disease pica--because since I decided that, I moved from
California to Colorado, and actually met other vampires. I mean, I still
have problems looking in the mirror and saying, "I'm a vampire." Because
it's all so surreal--vampires aren't real, they don't walk the streets
of Denver, they don't go to parties and tickle their friends, they don't
hunt madly for coffeehouses and play Gay Monopoly and Risk until the wee
hours, while consuming coffee, tea and the odd slice of cheesecake. But
there they were--mostly rational, fairly normal individuals who just 'happened'
to also drink blood. Hmm. And here I am. And if I'm not a vampire...what
am I?
And daily existence is so draining at times. I had an ideal job once,
adored it--I got up at noon, got into work at three, worked until two
in the morning, went home happy. I loved it. I haven't found a night job
since, and there are days when it physically hurts to be out in the sun.
This is, of course, discounting the whole St. John's Wort thing. I take
St. John's for depression, as Paxil, the former chemical alternative I
was taking, felt too artificial, if that makes any sense. Also, I'm deeply
uneasy about Prozac. (Case in point--friend of mine takes it, and it works
great for her. But she's a victim of multiple personality disorder. She
has 80-odd people in one body, and on Prozac, she has three. So it works
for her. But any drug that can do that scares me.)
But, on St. John's Wort, I must get an hour's worth of sunlight every
day. Which is just about my limit, or over, some days. I sit and gripe
and grumble for the half hour per day I Usually get, then go home and
slather my skin with aloe in the hopes the tenderness goes away. I am
one of the few 'vampires' I know that actually has tanned skin--and I
have a tan because of sun damage, over the years, on the face and the
lower arms. It never goes away, and the rest of me is generally ice-pale
in contrast, with prominent blue veining that unsettles me.
Mostly I'm an energy vamp, though--about every year or so, I get the need
to drink actual blood, and it's strong, and it's unnerving, and let's
just say I'm glad I'm married, because otherwise...My main problem is
that my father died of AIDS, and as I've seen what it does, I'm pathologically
afraid of drinking from those I don't trust. I'd be much more predatory,
given half a chance. Instead, I've rather perfected the art of supping
energy fields--or, if it gets out of hand, sapping them completely. Ergh.
But there are few better things than going to a club playing heavy industrial
music, and 'drinking' from the dancers on the floor...Of course, I had
to move to Spokane, land of big hair and country music. Eep. And, it doesn't
replace the taste, the satisfaction, of drinking blood itself.
For that matter, let's bring up blood-drinking for a moment. When I drink
blood, I do feel better and stronger; when I don't, I feel more listless,
less physically capable, and generally fatigued. But there are dozens
of causes in my case for this--being overweight, having unbalanced hormones,
having Poly-Cystic Ovarian Disorder...hell, being depressed fits in there,
too. It might be the blood that makes me better; it might not. And there's
no sure way to tell which right now.
There are days I relentlessly wish to be normal. Oh, yes, I'd still decorate
in Muted Dead Rose, sure, but I wish I would stop going into heat, nearly,
whenever some female around me is bleeding. I wish I could stop going
straight for the neck whenever I'm getting passionate with someone. I
wish I hadn't decided I was thoroughly insane in my twenties and went
radically vegetarian--now, I don't even have my fangs anymore! Ground
down through grazing and calcium deprivation. Joy.
I wish I could go out and enjoy a sunny day without being slathered in
sunscreen that rarely works (the only one I've ever found that does anything
is NO-AD, in the higher numbers; it's not perfect, but if you keep your
exposure to a minimum...) or wrapped in sweaters or towels. I wish I didn't
have to squint to see when I don't have sunglasses. I wish, on my bad
days, I didn't walk down a city block and cause people to collapse behind
me; that's not only rude, that's immoral, and usually I have better control,
but ...I wish. Oh, I wish.
September 2000
And the real test begins...I've recently moved to Seattle to go to
college for the first time, but my lover--my wife, my heartmate, my
other half, and oh, did I mention, also my donor?--elected to stay behind
in Spokane. With the 22-year-old. We aren't separating, this is just
a period of change and growth, but it has been a trial not being able
to just roll over and take the sustenance I need. Sleeping alone also
is not loads of fun for me anymore. And I've only been here since
the first of the month...
October 2000
Amazing how hungry one gets without a donor. Considering my donor was
also my love interest, I've also got to factor in major loneliness.
Not sleeping well, not eating well, not drinking (enough water)(and
no blood) is starting to take its toll. Been here over a month and outside
of looking around at all the green and feeling my soul sigh and uncurl,
it hasn't been much fun. Had some time before the Blair Witch Webfest
got underway, though, to revamp the site a bit.
November 2000
Taken the advice of some new chums on the VDA elist, and have completely
given in to my cravings for algae drinks (so far the best of the bunch
being something called Green Angel, made by Two Juice Guys and found
at Uwajimaya
in Seattle, with a taste of pond scum and a smell vaguely like fruity
beer, but oh, how wonderful it felt for the rest of the day!) and yogurt
(current favorite there--Brown Cow cream-on-top yogurt, with wonderful
swimmy active cultures, fruit on the bottom, a thick layer of condensed
cream on top, and sweetened with maple syrup--lovely!), as they seem
to think these are 'high-prana' foods (along with broccoli, sprouts
and the like). Still researching why pranic breathing and these foods
help someone who wants blood all the time. Also wondering how
massage helps--is it just being touched, or what, exactly? I'm doing
my best not to drain my masseuse, but that could be happening as well...
December 2000
Someone asked me this question: "What does vampirism mean to you?"
What it used to mean: feeling that I've gone insane. My wanting blood
was something I absolutely could not explain except for vague and upsetting
medicalia, such as porphyria (for which I had no other symptoms), pica
(for which I also had no other symptoms) and obsessive-compulsive disorder
(for which I'm practically a walking textbook of symptoms, disturbingly
enough). Even having a goddess stomping about in the back of my head
didn't interfere with my ability to reason, yet wanting blood, wanting
to drink blood, and feeling better when I did...it completely threw
me off kilter. "Normal" people don't need blood. Therefore I'm abnormal.
And if I'm abnormal, shouldn't I be locked away somewhere in order to
save the society at large?
Now: I've relaxed a lot. For one thing, I've come to terms with my OCD.
It could be worse--I could be a compulsive hand-washer. In my case I'm
more on the obsessive side, which means being tormented by thoughts
of what one could do, given the opportunity. I have convinced myself
that without good provocation, I wouldn't do half the things my brain
obsesses over, and therefore can reasonably ignore them. For the rest
of it, I mostly just get anxious on occasion and I keep St. John's around
for that. And I count the occasional tiles and cracks in flooring, and
I've cornered that into Things That Are Only Done When I'm Alone, which
has worked out wonderfully. And along the way of learning to cope with
those personality facets, suddenly wanting blood became no big deal.
There are still people I don't tell--I really don't want to be locked
up, so why make them worry about me--but for the most part, enough of
my friends and close ones know to make me a little easier about who
I choose to be.
So what does vampirism mean to me? Part of it is, it means I'm a little
bit more than the average of humanity around me. Better? No, it's a
highly inefficient design, needing blood and life energy to exist, or
suffering because of the lack. But I am more than just the body I'm
in, I need more, I process differently, I'm slightly larger than life.
(Well, actually, [staring fixedly at hips and belly], I'm LITERALLY
larger than life, but we won't go there).
It means my life and my magic and my psychology all get wrapped around
the issues of blood and energy, as opposed to simply concentrating blissfully
on a higher power to take it all away and give me blessings. I am my
higher power. I'm still vaguely frightened by the inherent responsibilities
in that, but I hold to it. And vampirism supports me in this. When I
ingest another's blood, I become them--not only their cells joining
my cells, my body absorbing their unique genetic structure, but also,
their energy becomes mine, part of their being joins me. When I feed
someone, I am joined with them in a way that transcends most other experiences
I can think of. This is the true nature of communion--soul to soul,
being in each others' skins, existing inside each other. For that moment
there is no difference between us, we are the same, the boundaries dissolve.
In that I find truth.
Aprille 2001
My lady love keeps threatening to feed me. By this I mean she says
'You're really hungry, let me go get the blade', and then she forgets,
or I forget, or I get a migraine and have to curl up in a ball under
my bed, or she has an attack of suicidal depression and I'm yet again
having to be the Strong One...Things. Shit. Lots of things and shit
happening. Between one thing and another I haven't fed on anything beyond
occasional energy sips from the love and the universe for a good four
months now. Acccck. There are slight glimmers of good things on the
horizon, though. For one, the lady in question are back on the meds
that will make her more stable. Which will eventually free up enough
cash and energy for me to go in to the doc and see what torture he next
wants to inflict. At the very least I may go back on some hormone-balancing
drugs, try to jumpstart my system into some kind of female functionality,
at the very least a droplevel of the heavy hormones I'm dealing with
now. So, that could be a good thing. In the meantime I'm still hanging
on the the upper branch with my teeth, hoping not to fall.
August 2001
Those of you looking beyond the last five updates are bound to be disappointed.
I only keep the last five, otherwise this page would be needlessly long.
I do still have the original essay I wrote for this page linked in here
and there, so you can revel in the first babblings. In the meantime,
I'm back in Spokane, Washington, and it doesn't suck as bad as it did
previously. Don't get me wrong--it's still dead and barren and weird
here, and not in any good way. But there are better sights and stronger
friendships to be had this time around, so it's not as bad. I'm learning
to be open about wanting blood--that damned honesty bug, it's going
to get me arrested or beaten to death by rednecks any day now--to those
near and dear at least, save for my immediate family, who--okay, all
the gays in the audience, say it with me-- "just wouldn't understand".
Yep, I knew you knew it.
January 2002
2002 already. You can tell how often I update this page, huh? Well,
still in Spokane. Looks like I'm going to be stuck
here for at least two more years. On the plus side, I'm currently listed
as partially disabled, due to knee and joint pain, and the hormonal
weirdness (which has nothing to do with vampirism, as far as I know).
On the down side, the Supreme Court just voted against people with partial
disabilities--basically, their decision said if you can get out of bed
in the morning, brush your teeth and fix breakfast for yourself, you
aren't disabled. Great. So, not being able to walk around much beyond
that is not good enough? Having to use a cane to cross my living room
doesn't count? Fuckers.
July 2002
Due to several months of being unable to access any computer and get
online, I lost my entire page on Dreamwater. (You'll notice that, in
the corrected, not-pulled-down-from-Internet-Wayback-Machine pages,
you won't see a Dreamwater credit anymore). They have a 50 meg limit.
I had 37 megs of page materials, stored files, graphics, et cetera,
that I will never see again. I realize my part in all of this was that
I didn't back up anything to external disk. On the other hand, as I
can't recall anything being specifically mentioned when I signed up,
I a) thought they had the standard 90-day use-it-or-lose-it clause in
their contract (they don't, btw--it's a 30-day auto-delete), and b),
as I didn't have my own computer at that time, I was using them as drop-box
storage, thinking, every three months I will get on and keep my page
going until I get my own computer.
So. Amidst this spring's wonderful pagan organization disintegration-in-progress
(a story I don't specifically plan to retell here, because it's long,
drawn-out, and ugly no matter from which side I relate it), I spent
something like two months off-line. The first month Dreamwater zapped
me and I never knew. Second month I fought my way to a computer and
realized that everything was gone.
Now I'm having a hell of a time tracking everything down that *was*
once there. I'm using a combo of the Internet Wayback Machine and Google's
online cache service, but it's hard, slow going. And I'd truly like
to complain to Dreamwater, maybe point out to them that it might be
a grand idea if they upped their auto-delete function to 90 days, but
right now I'm still spitting fire over the loss. I'm trying to see rationally
that it wasn't their fault, that all they saw was an account inactive
for 60 days--but it's hard. It's hard not to take it personally and
resent them for destroying things I may never get back. Original poetry
I didn't have backed up anywhere else, stories I'd posted just to those
pages, information pages in sections that don't seem to be accessible
through the Wayback Machine...it's still a crushing loss to me, even
now.
So is being a vampire right now. I can't remember the last time I fed.
We haven't had the money enough to start investigating the beet juice
and chlorophyll alternatives a friend tipped me off about. And now,
I find myself falling asleep at completely random times, not having
the energy God gave a soapdish, and wondering if I've fallen into some
weird sort of anemic state. (Check this: my doc says, oh, it's probably
just allergies--if it hasn't cleared up in two weeks, come back and
talk to me. Riiiight.)
Oh, yeah, And Spokane still sucks. Like I haven't said that enough
times.
Late July 2002
I may have found the perfect way to deal with not feeding and having
a body in physical collapse: insomnia and updating my webpage. If hallucinations
don't set in, I might start to like this. Strange thing about insomnia,
and this requires a little digression. Took in a movie tonight with
a friend--local theatre has started running midnight movies, and this
weekend was Fight Club. Fight Club, in addition to being a stellar film,
mentions insomnia. Insomnia, it says, creates distance. You wander through
your life, half-asleep, half-awake, at all times drifting and disconnected.
That's where I am now. Add that to the growing list of medical complaints:
- PCO
- migraines, potentially due to hormone imbalance
- bad joints, potentially due to hormone imbalance
- carpal tunnel (the doctor qualified it as 'mild' on one side, and
'less mild' on the other--what, exactly, does that mean?)
- we've reached the stage where my doctor's scale no longer goes up
high enough to accurately weigh me
- and let's not forget a possible case of anemia, due to a going-on-two-weeks-now
bout of falling asleep at random intervals, being continuously tired,
and feeling incredibly fatigued and dizzy
- which brings us to this week's wonderful new friend, insomnia
The problem with an ongoing fatigue state when combined with insomnia
is that I end up wandering around, tired all the time, tired enough
to fall down, but then when I do, when I lay down and try to sleep,
my brain won't shut off. I'm not saying, oh, yes, definitive mark of
the vampyr here, I'm saying it's more of my unique physiological insanity,
but it's still a very annoying thing.
31 August 2002
Been a hell of a month. My social worker signed me up for a class through
Goodwill called Chart Your Course. Supposedly one of those ego-boosting
exercises that will impress all of us poor disabled people to get off
our poor disabled asses and get off the public dole. In my case, it
may or may not work--I remain convinced I can't get a job, being a fat
chick with a beard, but I might have become convinced to go back to
school. So for the second time, I'm going to make the attempt to sign
on and complete a course of instruction.
I'm a little scared about this. On the plus side, I no longer have
to get up at seven ayem for a while, slather my bod in sunscreen, and
stagger out the door to class. So that's a yay thing.
In other news, the endo appointment went alarmingly well. I now have
two new medical terms to add to my glossary. I have been diagnosed with
acanthosis
nigricans, an ailment that comes from being hyperinsulinemic. Also,
my doctor wrote a letter to the state calling me someone with 'profound
hyperandrogenemia',
as well as dyslipidemia.
Whee, all the new medical terms!
What this breaks down to is, yes, I have PCO, which we knew. However,
now we know it by diagnosed symptomology. How this impacts my vampirism
is interesting--my doctor put me on two new prescriptions. One of them's
for Metformin,
a medicine that interrupts the insulin resistance cycle. It causes only
mild hyperglycemia, but since I was hyperglycemic to start with, it's
causing some mild sugar crashing after I take it. So I'm going to have
to watch that--eat more often, eat smaller meals, that kind of thing.
The odd thing has been how Metformin's decreasing my hunger--it's lowering
my need for blood, while at the same time making me crazy for protein.
I'm wondering if this is a good or bad thing, but it does leave me without
that knife-in-the-belly bloodhunger, so I'm going with it for now.
11 October 2002
So, it's been a while. Been really busy, actually. But somewhere in
all the hustle and bustle my love in life found a new career (pro dom
with her own tiny dungeon), fed me for the first time in I can't remember
how long, and found a slave that could charm my heart, let alone hers.
This lady is not only (according to that busy love, and the sounds I
hear through the thin walls) very responsive, but she also has a wicked
sense of humor and she sews. This is not a big deal to people who don't
have to pay double to get something that doesn't fit right. She is a
professional seamstress, and she has agreed--assuming we keep her in
fabric, and why wouldn't we--to make a wardrobe for my lady and myself.
Sounds like a plan to me.
Metformin update: as you can see from the above, the hunger's back
in force. Blood, sugar, sweets, ice, cold drinks, sweet drinks, fruit
juice--the hypoglycemia's the worst it's been since 1996. Whether I
can afford it or not, I'm going to make an effort to keep Odwalla Superfood
in the house (or other equivalent algae drink), and try and increase
my consumption of foods with a high glycemic index (like carrots, beets
and peas) to keep my sugar up. My doctor's understandably worried about
that. I'm understandably worried about the fact that I'm taking two
potassium-sparing drugs, and won't that up my blood potassium levels?
I'll know when the tests come back, after my next endo appointment,
but it does make my mind uneasy.
15 October 2002
The pieces of my life are starting to grate when they move together.
I haven't been back on Sphynxcat's IRC channel in, gods, probably a
month by now. Nothing's gone wrong--that I know of--it's just...not
something I can tune into at this point. Plus the new meds are back
to scaring me--I skipped a dose today and fell into a sleep that felt
like coma for about five hours. I kept trying to pull out of it and
never quite managed until whatever it was, whatever crash had happened,
hypoglycemic or not, had passed. I'm slowly losing my ability to remain
the solitary pilgrim in town, and, regardless of the scars, regardless
of the emotional pain that's still present, I'm getting involved in
the local pagan community again. I'm probably, against all better judgment,
even going to the Witches' Night Out Ball this year, because the place
where it's being held burned down last week and the owners are insisting
that, damn it, arson fire or not, they're holding the damn dance with
generators if they have to.
Only, there's no water to the building, and there's really no way to
legally get around that. So it's still up in the air when it's going
to be held.
And I've been talking to Bholanath on the side. Man has a mind like
an eel. It's been interesting. So, of course, the me here part of this
early-morning posting.
It all ties up in uncomfortable ways with the fact that, for something
completely unrelated to this site, I've been reading slash stories about
Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, and for some reason, half the stories I've
been reading have involved biting, and wounding, and Lex licking blood
from the wounds, and...gods...Yeah. Sure. This is what the local vampire
needs, a steady diet for several hours of young attractive men screwing
their brains out in interesting outfits with blood involved.
I may need help.
6 November 2002
So. Struggled the past two weeks to get my damn phone back--somewhere
between the fact that the lines running through my basement paradise
are nearly older than the house itself, and the fact that there apparently
was never a phone wire running into the house in the first place to
carry a signal...how creepy is that?...I lost phone service for two
weeks.
But hey, we're back now, and check out this page dealing with sun sensitivity.
First, goggle at the fact presented first--if it's true that I only
need ten minutes of sunlight a day, maaaan, am I going to be yelling
at doctors from now on! Second, scroll down to the section mentioned
for sunscreens and look for the brand name Sun Play. Apparently, they
have an SPF 130 on the market. I'm going to do my best to track down
an address for these people and ordering instructions. Check back in
a week or so. (Profound thanks go to alert reader Kenneth from Singapore.
Yeah, international vamp community!)
24 December 2002
I've been sick, off and on, for about two months now. It's either sleep
all the time and have no energy, or the rapid-fire whatsit that attacked
everyone in this entire house. Upstairs they all have ear infections.
Downstairs we got high fever and hallucinations. Whee.
But I moved the page. And in a few days, I'll probably have the strength
to link it over here so that people actually know it's been moved. Ha.
13 January 2003
"January first, and a bright new day dawns, to look at one's
lifestyle and see if it has any." (Peg Bracken)
I'm not too sure about the life having style, but it does seem to still
have a kind of broken vivacity that I'm going to try to improve. I'm
slooooowly dragging this page and the others over to a new server, and
slooooowly checking all the links to make sure they still function and
are still links to vampire sites, not Judeo-Christian death cults or
something. In the meantime, I'm doing very, very little. Next doctor's
appointment, I'm going to beg, and if that doesn't work, scream and
insist to be taken off the Metformin, and put on something that doesn't
cause nineteen horrid side effects from dawn 'til dusk. Honestly, if
it was just the no-alcohol thing, well, that would suck, but the lack
of alcohol paired with an increase in depression and the constant fatigue
and the gastric disturbances...please. There has to be something else.
This is stupid.
9 February 2003
I promise, I promise, I'm going to be shifting
some stuph around, and updating other areas, but I just haven't had
time just yet. I'm two weeks into another new med--this one's called
Actos, and whee, the side effects just sound like so much fun--pulmonary
edema, liver and kidney complications. In addition to feeling like I'm
constantly coming down with a cold and a staggering case of dry mouth.
Still. Less annoying overall than Metformin and I only have to take
it once a day.
11 March 2003
I'm a sloth. Really, I am. Nothing gets done around here, and so very
very little gets done for updating the page. I'm not talking on the
vamp lists I'm on at the moment and...gods, it must be six months since
I've loaded up IRC and talked with Sphynxcat or anyone else. Gaaaah.
Plus, right now I'm sick, and voiceless due to laryngitis, and feeling
sorry for myself on top of it. So.
Done some very very little work here and there, mostly new links below
the actual info links. Other than that, no, nothing's changed here.
I'm useless!
12 May 2003
Haven't updated this page--and it wasn't much of an update then--since
March. Probably won't get around to it for a month or so. Life exploded
on me in big nasty ways. Moving to Oregon upcoming; mother died one
week ago, almost exactly; friendships imploding all around me. Summing
up: this has been the second worst week of my entire life, the first
being the time I came home on my birthday after being fired from my
job only to be told that I was a dangerous and disruptive influence
who might conceivably harm children that could no longer live in the
house I (at that time) shared with my girlfriend.
Bad day. Bad, bad day, that ended a bad, bad week. This week has been
very nearly worse.
13 August 2003
Fully four months later, and I finally get around to this. Yes, I am
the wandering village idiot. I've been spending most of my time lately
packing, stressing, or on LiveJournal, so...I've been busy. I have a
few updates, mostly verifications, and the move is still pending--in
about a month, to Portland, Oregon. Where, apparently, they have more
than five vampires who like the Tuesday Meet-ups. Um...whee? Of course,
I am a bitter and evil old woman, therefore, I may not like them. Or
they may think I'm a bitch. Or, well, both.
2 September 2003
Fourteen days until we move. Yeepers, we're so not ready. But I'm talking
to a new guy who found part of this page, and wrote me, and here's part
of what I wrote in the last letter I sent. Figured it needed to be here,
not only for my benefit:
"Whole milk occasionally helps with cravings, if you're not
lactose-intolerant. Some claim beet juice works really well. I've
also had great success with algae drinks--Odwalla makes Superfood,
which is on the spendy side but tasty, and Nantucket Nectars makes
something called Green Angel which is very good.
Look up the concept of prana, pranic energy, pranic life force--a
lot of current thinking goes along the lines that vampires are people
who were somehow born without the ability to sustain great quantities
of prana, so have to get it from other sources. And the easiest source
is live human blood. But there are inherent risks with that, so there
are backups--whole milk (sans rBGH if you can get it), algae drinks,
fresh juice--whatever you find that is close to the living whole food
concept. I've had good success with yogurt, even, now and again, most
specifically the type that has live acidophilis cultures."
2 October 2004
Let's just say the lawyer's trip didn't go well and leave it at that.
I haven't yet contacted the right social-support office to figure out
how to begin to reapply for disability, so I'm hanging in limbo at the
moment. Figures. I'm also slowly figuring out which supplements help
me, which ones don't, and which ones to avoid--for instance, I started
off taking gingko for memory, and that didn't so much work, so I spent
three months taking gotu kola, and that didn't seem to bring me any
improvement whatsoever. So it's back to the drawing board to figure
out what would help memory without making my body sicker.
16 November 2004
Been in a strange headspace all morning, getting messages from someone
who wants to be a donor to her apparently dizzy, immunodeficient boyfriend,
and all my off-the-cuff ideas suddenly sound vegetarian. Which has always
weirded me out--how can one be a vampire and not eat meat?
But I know a lot of people who do it, and see no conflict. And I know
I feel better when I have live-culture yogurt in my system, when I'm
drinking my beloved algae drinks, when I have sprout salads and living
vegetal food. *shrugs*
Whatever.
23 November 2004
So this is interesting--Vampress invited me to join her Vampire Top
100 list. I made up a nifty new banner to go with my application, and
by 'nifty new banner' I mean 'tacky piece of MSPaint crap I threw together'.
Now, I like it, but it's not the greatest thing going, I know that.
Still, it'll do for now.
I'm still working on revising this, but it's up and running. Gimme
a week and I should have found and transferred everything that was up
on Aloof Hosting before--and no, I'm not linking them, because in less
than three more weeks they will evaporate from history. Which is why
I had to move.
4 December 2004
New article I'm just going to keep linked up here for the moment--on
the importance of a correct electrolyte
balance. Go read.
In other news, I am the Land of Mysterious Ailments at the moment,
and no idea why. Everything seems to be slowly resolving, but for once,
my hunger? Completely gone. I think my body's too worried about the
system completely crashing to be hungry. :) Which is good, in a way--means
I'm not having to worry about knocking down the new roommatese and getting
a knife--and bad in a way--will it come back? Is this it? Maybe I'm
too sick to crave anything?
Dunno what it means, let you know when I do, in case anyone actually
cares. Ha!
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