On Twilight fans

I honestly forget whether I mentioned this before, but I still consider it the height of stupidity and hypocrisy for fangirls to swoon over the idea of being 'turned' by *^*EDWARD CULLEN FOR REALS OMG*^* as a prelude to saying that people with pica are just a bunch of demented lunatics.

Dead Space is >:(

I haven't even played it or anything. My roommate has it, and just glancing over, looking at all of the blood spilled on everything, and I can't have it...

Also, I'm trying to diet. It would appear that I'm attempting to hold to the "alternate days of the week" diet. Which doesn't exist, makes no sense, and I'm ravenously hungry late at night. I haven't mentioned it here, but the pain I feel from eating blood apparently comes from a magnification of hunger. No hunger before, no hunger after. Starving before, in serious pain after.

Eew, the layout's all different now

I needed an outlet for my "I can be a web designer, really!" feelings. And since nobody reads this anyway...

But the point is, a bit more effort with Google revealed definitively that Wikipedia was, to use a technical term, "full of shit" on the matter of nomenclature. Pretty much everything else agrees with what I've changed the names in question to, (or maybe not. I kind of hate the internet now. But the changes stand until I get a citation.) (As near as I can tell, all of the convenient-to-find information is from two conflicting edits of Wikipedia. Damnit, internet, don't make me kill again.) so the only thing that remains is to procrastinate about rewriting the posts that are already here.

Research-ish ramblings

So, I decided to read up a bit more on what's actually known about... things vaguely like what I, and, I assume, other people, have.

There are various conditions associated with acting "vampire-ish", like porphyria and rabies. Hopefully, I don't have those.

Since I'm using Wikipedia to do research (less scary than Google. "Related searches: real vampires how to become a vampire"), this is all kind of sketchy. I'm currently using the term "vampirism" because that's what the pica article says it's called. The condition called vampirism with an actual article is "Clinical Vampirism", which is something else entirely (in the sense that it's a sexual fetish. I'm not enough of a masochist to enjoy the feeling of the hunger pangs I get.). If I find a better term, I'll change what needs to be changed, since I like being right, but...

It just really bothers me that I have to refer to the Hematophagy and Pica articles, because the link within the Pica article redirects to Vampire, which is just... Vampires in general.

The Hematophagy article, by the way, currently (revision as of 23:27, 21 September 2008) states that drinking small amounts of one's own blood isn't taboo "[citation needed]". That's where this started, as I said before, but it ended up in... a slightly different place.

It's a big world... surely somebody else knows the pain of this hunger.

(Also, I slept in till noon, so I'm not exactly doing myself a favor in the eating department.)

My Experience

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I tasted blood. It wasn't too pleasant; I'd just lost a tooth, and my mouth tasted like penny. (As to why I knew how pennies tasted... heck, I dunno. Kids these days. Sheesh.) Later, as I got banged up by childhood (Not to discount how messy my present accidents are. I got my first sprain this year.) I, as most children do, would pick at my scabs. Probably less common is that I would eat them. Classic pica, I believe.

At some point, this expanded to include my (non-dried) blood, fresh or slightly aged/mellowed by exposure to the air. It was around this point, I believe, that I noticed that this gave me hunger pangs. So I had more blood. And got hungrier. With enough self-control and chocolate, I was generally able to stop, and keep the behavior to a minimum. I would occasionally have some off of some scrape or other, but it wasn't bothering me much.

But very recently, just thinking about how blood that I see in pictures must smell and taste is enough to excite the pangs that I usually feel after having a couple drops. Halloween is coming up, so I can only assume that this month will be fun. And that's why this blog is here.

In which I tell you what I'm going to tell you

The beauty of the internet is that it can bring many people from diverse backgrounds together, and let them celebrate or commiserate about some commonality. Sadly, this blog is oriented toward the latter.

The target audience of this blog is fellow vampires, or those who wish to know more about them. First, a vital clarification. When I speak of vampirism in the context of this blog, I am referring, not to the supernatural dashing rogues of fiction (I wish... except for the whole people-trying-to-kill-you thing), but to people who have a disorder which is a subset of pica, or something like such a disorder. Pica is the consumption of unusual items, frequently with no nutritional value. Vampirism is the consumption of blood. It's possible to be more-or-less okay with this, so long as the cravings are minimal, as I was for years. But, as of late, my not-quite-pica (I'll explain why what I have isn't exactly pica, in my estimation, later) has been acting up more and more. I decided that I needed a support group, to help me cope. Since I couldn't find one, I decided to make one myself.

I honestly don't know how many people this will help, but I figure it has to be better than nothing.