Stagnant water for vampires
So another thing I’m learning on my internship is how to read mainstream fiction. I’ve never really done that before, you know? I’ve read a lot of comics and school books and science fiction and fantasy and game books, but never normal real-world fiction like the kind you can buy in grocery stores.
But Adina-the-master-carpenter lent me a book the other day and it takes place in the real world and I’m reading it and it’s pretty cool. The book is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and it’s about a guy in the 1920’s whose parents die right before he’s supposed to graduate from vet school. He’s so distraught that he can’t finish his exams, so he runs away and accidentally joins the circus.
I find this particularly intriguing because thoughts of some disaster preventing me from earning my college degree used to plague me all the time. Only in my head this disaster was never the death of my parents.* Usually it was turning into a vampire. This was particularly relevant in my college years because my friends and I would all get together and pretend to be vampires every Saturday. And I used to think about how much it would suck to spend all that money going to school and then become a vampire at the last minute and not be able to graduate because I’m undead. It would suck for me especially because I dropped out of high school, and it’s impossible to maintain a sense of vampiric romance if you’re a high school drop-out without a college degree. Romantic vampires are always educated.
So it’s really weird for me to read this book, because now that I’ve graduated the thing that happened to the protagonist can’t happen to me anymore. It really hit me last week when I shaved my legs. In Vampire: The Masquerade, your hair (and body hair) re-sets to the way it was on the moment of your death every night. I walked out of the shower, and FOR THE FIRST TIME I thought “Okay vampires, if you’re going to do it, do it now!”
I’m afraid. This desire to get stuck in time is new. It means I’m not looking forward to accomplishing anything in particular. If I kept my legs shaved, I could go completely stagnant and not notice.
Right. Water for Elephants. I can tell Sara Gruen did a sack of research, and she’s got plenty of fascinating things to say about circus-grunt life in the 1920’s. It seems like whenever she runs out of fascinating things, though, she defaults to describing a penis. I’ve been keeping a list. These are the penises she has described thus far:
Irate masturbating dwarf - turgid and purple
Dead horse - long and floppy
Ninety-three year old man in the shower - wet and shriveled
I guess I can understand this impulse. Penises are inherently funny. The penis-space would likely be better spent on plot, though. I should watch out for this in my journals. If I’m talking about a penis, it probably means my life doesn’t have enough plot. It’s not a perfect litmus test, but I’ve got the could-I-become-a-vampire-now backup test, and the two working together should mean something.
Right now, my litmus is the wrong color.
* My parents are not allowed to die. Like, seriously. I’m fully convinced that they will become timeless elves long before they start going decrepit or senile. Or maybe my dad will build himself an infinitely durable robot body out of old coat hangers and epoxy. Mom will get one too. Dad’s a puppeteer. He can do stuff like that.
But Adina-the-master-carpenter lent me a book the other day and it takes place in the real world and I’m reading it and it’s pretty cool. The book is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and it’s about a guy in the 1920’s whose parents die right before he’s supposed to graduate from vet school. He’s so distraught that he can’t finish his exams, so he runs away and accidentally joins the circus.
I find this particularly intriguing because thoughts of some disaster preventing me from earning my college degree used to plague me all the time. Only in my head this disaster was never the death of my parents.* Usually it was turning into a vampire. This was particularly relevant in my college years because my friends and I would all get together and pretend to be vampires every Saturday. And I used to think about how much it would suck to spend all that money going to school and then become a vampire at the last minute and not be able to graduate because I’m undead. It would suck for me especially because I dropped out of high school, and it’s impossible to maintain a sense of vampiric romance if you’re a high school drop-out without a college degree. Romantic vampires are always educated.
So it’s really weird for me to read this book, because now that I’ve graduated the thing that happened to the protagonist can’t happen to me anymore. It really hit me last week when I shaved my legs. In Vampire: The Masquerade, your hair (and body hair) re-sets to the way it was on the moment of your death every night. I walked out of the shower, and FOR THE FIRST TIME I thought “Okay vampires, if you’re going to do it, do it now!”
I’m afraid. This desire to get stuck in time is new. It means I’m not looking forward to accomplishing anything in particular. If I kept my legs shaved, I could go completely stagnant and not notice.
Right. Water for Elephants. I can tell Sara Gruen did a sack of research, and she’s got plenty of fascinating things to say about circus-grunt life in the 1920’s. It seems like whenever she runs out of fascinating things, though, she defaults to describing a penis. I’ve been keeping a list. These are the penises she has described thus far:
Irate masturbating dwarf - turgid and purple
Dead horse - long and floppy
Ninety-three year old man in the shower - wet and shriveled
I guess I can understand this impulse. Penises are inherently funny. The penis-space would likely be better spent on plot, though. I should watch out for this in my journals. If I’m talking about a penis, it probably means my life doesn’t have enough plot. It’s not a perfect litmus test, but I’ve got the could-I-become-a-vampire-now backup test, and the two working together should mean something.
Right now, my litmus is the wrong color.
* My parents are not allowed to die. Like, seriously. I’m fully convinced that they will become timeless elves long before they start going decrepit or senile. Or maybe my dad will build himself an infinitely durable robot body out of old coat hangers and epoxy. Mom will get one too. Dad’s a puppeteer. He can do stuff like that.