I vant to sahk yuhr bluhd.

Okay, so there's no such thing as Vampires, right? That's something we can agree on?

Okay, good.

I'm not sure exactly what it was the really grabbed my interest about these "Real Life Vampire" web sites, and those people claiming to, in fact, be those real life vampires. It was partly, I think, their sincerity and in it, their desperation to be something different, something mysterious, something bordering on frightening, instead of just being a plain, boring human being, like the rest of us.

It was also, I think, the extremely exclusionary nature of this vampirism's design. You couldn't be turned into a vampire by anyone else -- no bite on the neck would send you down that long, dark road to damnation and immortality. You either were one, or you weren't. And if someone who wasn't already part of the club came knocking at the door, wanting to join, the only answer they got was, "Sorry, you can't."

If you weren't already a vampire, there was no joining up later.

It would seem to me -- and this, of course, is just a guess -- that these "Vampires" were the sorts of people who found themselves excluded from groups earlier on in their lives and who now adore the ability to be able to exclude others from the group that they have since created for themselves.

Just as entertaining to me is listening to the vampires complain about how gosh-darn difficult it is to be a vampire. How the sun hurts their eyes, how their "more empathic nature" makes them more prone to depression, how...blah blah blah. It all comes down to the same thing: "Poor me."

Which really isn't different from a lot of people. A lot of people aren't happy with their lot in life. They don't like their job, they don't like their girlfriend or their wife. They don't like their computer or the CD they just bought or their car that has started to make funny sounds while driving to a job that, have I mentioned, they don't like very much.

But these vampires...oh, they've taken it a step further. They have even more things to get all angst-y about. The sunlight, their empathy, that insatiable appetite for blood...oh, you couldn't *possibly* understand the pain I'm going through right now...

You're just...you know...a *mortal*...

We all want to be unique. We all want to be our own individual selves, separate from the rest of the world. When we walk down the street, there isn't one of us who wants to be just another face in the crowd, our identities disappearing in the sea of ordinary, average, every-day people. We all want to be remembered after we've died, 100 years after we've died, 1000 years after we've died. And we're all trying to figure out some way of maintaining that individuality, to make sure that we are and will always be unique beings, and not be forgotten.

And most of us -- vampires included, I would think -- are still looking for our ways of ensuring that.