Werewolves, Vampires, Sexuality, and Violence (Oh my!) ((Giggity))

Peronal Crap, feel free to skip past it to the dotted line. lol

So I watched Scream 4 in the theatre last night.  Made me insanely happy.  I think I love the ending better than anything that I read leaked onto the internet.

I came home, laid down for bed, and in less than an hour I was awake and in pain.  It felt like something was tearing across the back of my right forearm.  Got up, went downstairs and grabbed my brace, and strapped it on.  I really wish I knew what the heck is going on with my arms.  (Yep, got pain in the left arm now too -_-)  If you could believe it, it's just irritating at this point because I can't ignore it anymore.  Oh well.
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I've started research on something that may eventually turn into a book.  Or at least I'd like it to.

Werewolves and vampires have always, always held a special place in my heart.  I love elves and fae and zombies too, but c'mon.  As one might suspect, the whole concept of a werewolf or a vampire is a fairly subjective thing.  In the last decade or so, there's been dozens - if not hundreds - of different vampires and werewolves.  In the case of werewolves, they can be human shaped with fangs, a serial killer that's particularly brutal, a beast with intellect, a straight-up animal, or the the shirtless object of affection for any girl that has a fetish for well-built native Americans with a thing for clumsy white chicks with no real redeeming qualities.  Vampires have always been blood drinkers, but the ferocity of their attacks, the wildness of their nature, the location of their fangs, how strong they are - all of these things are up for debate within the mind of anyone who thinks about them.

I started digging into historical accounts of lycanthropy and vampirism only to find that even the legends themselves - the very things that created what we know now - were even more subjective than what we have now.  I need to find it now, but the most extreme version of a vampire I remember finding was nothing more than a spectre of a woman; her head was intact, she had no arms or legs, but all of her innards and her spine hung freely as she floated around wailing and consuming the blood of men.  And I read a text the other day, from the 50s, in which an anthropologist suggested that lycanthropy developed as a mythos out of man's desire to take up and wear the skins of other animals - in the hopes of becoming stronger than they were, and even more ferocious.  He also attempted to use this as an explanation for man's aggression and omnivorous nature - saying that some varieties of ape are 100% peaceful and that man is the only truly violent ape (give him a break, it was a weird point in history to be making the claims he did).

Mythos, in general, for any given culture, reveals stunning amounts of information about their values and about their fears.  Vampires and werewolves, now moreso than in the past, reveal two very specific things about a society:  their views on sexuality and their views on violent behaviour.

Vampires and werewolves represent the two subjects in different ways.  I would say they're masculine and feminine or light and dark of the same idea, but that doesn't fit.  At all.

In a very distinct way, vampires represent a sort of refined violence; the violence and the sexuality that was created by society.  Opposing that, werwolves represent wild violence, the violence and sexual nature that exists in man before it's altered by society.  I say representative, in that if you examine the amount of comfort and elaboration in the mythos, you get a sense of the people that made it.  I'm not copping out just yet, I will explain more at a later time, and after more research, but for now I'm done.  Just think on that some.

Achievable Dreams

With the lyrical voice of Joss Stone making me smile, I wanted to write about this to center myself.  A very good friend of mine has sort of infected me with this thing known of as being a Gleek.  The television show on Fox, Glee, has kind of become part of my soul.  A tiny portion of my personality, dedicated mostly to the "old" me is kind of vomitting in her mouth at the feel-good and "be happy in your own skin" messages, but the mature individual in me appreciates it and treasures the comfort those words can yield to a drifting soul like mine.  I could mourn the loss of some decent chunk of my childhood and notions of 100% support, but there's no real point in that.  What's in the past, by way of quantum mechanics, is something that I cannot go back to and would gladly not.

Out of the sixteen episodes I watched yesterday and today (I told you it was an infection) one particular bit of inspiration kind of stuck with me.  It was the notion of picking an obtainable dream, picturing it in your mind, and finding a way to make that happen.  I'm going to be honest here, no reason to lie really anyways, but my dreams as a child growing up (like all children's dreams generally are) weren't firmly rooted in reality.  And they existed in a very screwed up sense.  People that know me well - and even I - am aware that my behaviour is extremely masculine.  This is part because I'm fairly certain that "tomboy" is encoded somewhere in my DNA about 600,000 times (or is alternatively just in my DNA a handful of times and contains a BEAST of a promoter sequence).    And the masculine behaviour - at first - started as the distinct need to violently express myself in relation to the women around me.  The old logic was "If you act like a boy, talk like a boy, and walk like a boy you're more likely to attract girls".  Hush, growing up, I was the only lesbian I knew.  Only when I saw Sailor Uranus and Neptune (circa age 11, for me) did I finally figure out that I wasn't the only one.  Like some sort of hypochondriac  with WebMD, the internet gave me a word for who I was and other people like me.  Anyways, I digressed a little.  Nowadays I try as much as I can to just be ME.   Not a tomboy (though that is a label that is applicable), not a girly-girl.  Not anything really.

What all of this was generally leading to was the assertion that my likes and dreams kind of straddle both worlds, so to speak.

I thought about that whole achieveable dream mess, closed my eyes, and the very first thing I saw was the inside of a rustic log cabin.  Stone - if not wooden - floors, a roaring fireplace with herbs drying along the mantle, a wolfdog curled up on an area rug, a beautiful - medievally styled - kitchen, and a garage outside with my motorcycle, civie vehicle, and rat rod all inside.   Originally, in my youth, I'd envisioned a home full of children and my significant other declaring that I needed to fix the broken dishwasher again (yeah...I know.  It's like some sort of domestic horror movie, isn't it?).  I treasured the notion of that.  In a way, I still kind of do, but I treasure it in the way that one might look fondly upon an old memory or childhood toy.

As of now, I envision no one with me in this little dream, and I'm perfectly okay with that.  I've fought, constantly, with codependency (or at least what I felt it was).  I HAD to be wanted.  I HAD to be needed.  I HAD to be loved.  I don't NEED that anymore, though I do WANT it.  The paralyzing notion of being completely relationship-less, isn't all that paralyzing anymore.

There are certain people, whose name or names shall not be mentioned, that I love very much.  But I will not throw myself head-first into anything anymore.  I want to take my time and I want to just be me for the time being.

Though the dream I mentioned above is complex, it is possible; however, there are steps I need to take in order to get there.  The first of which being that I need to graduate from college and find a job - relatively simultaneously.  There's a sort of ticking clock set for my future, in the form of my sibling's high school graduation.  She's got two years, but when she's gone, I have to be gone too.  I need a tiny nest egg for that and a standing job.

I guess I've asserted everything that I really wanted to when I started this, but I wanna say this:

I'm a girl that loves cheap beer (especially Mexican) as much as she loves a gourmet cheesecake.  My favourite cereal ever is fruity pebbles.   Theatre flipped my entire personality inside out and my biology degree has helped me fully realize the rest of myself.  Only one person has ever made me cry happily (twice) because they made me feel so treasured.  I want to to travel the world.  I love romantic comedies and chick flicks as much as I love a good werewolf or vampire movie.   I envy the physique of MMA fighter "Mega" Megumi and yearn to look like her.  I want at least two motorcycles ( a Triumph and an Indian) but will settle for one if I have to.  I'm more at hope out in the woods than I am in a city.  I want to learn how to shave with a straight razor, just because they're so awesome and old school.  I have my entire back reserved for tattoos.  I guess I'll just finish with the wacky notion that I think I'm a Log Cabin Republican.