A Day in the Life of a Vampire

Forget your crosses, your holy water, and your wooden stakes.  Vampires aren’t anything like what you’ve seen in the movies.  We can walk in the daylight; sit in places of holy worship, and pretty much live normal lives, with one exception.  The only truth to come out of the ridiculous Hollywood lore is that we do, in fact, drink blood.  Don’t freak out though, even if I came across you in a dark alley and did decide to grab a quick bite; you’d never remember it happening.  There would be no puncture wounds, no serious blood loss.  It would be a blip in time that meant nothing to you or to me for that matter.
      My life is pretty plain, as is the life of most vampires.  You might be surprised to know that we live amongst normal humans as if we are normal humans ourselves.  We have jobs, mortgages, bills, and even some drama.  I’d like to run you through a normal day in the life of a typical vampire, so that maybe you humans won’t be so obsessed with becoming friends with, or flat out becoming a vampire.  Trust me, it ain’t that great.
      At precisely five a.m., my alarm blares with that annoying beeping sound, and I actually hurt my hand when I slam it down on the off button.  While I do heal much faster than a human, I still get hurt and can even bleed.  Lamenting at the inanimate object I just assaulted, I roll out of bed and stumble to the shower.  After about ten minutes in the shower, I run out of hot water because I share a water heater with three other units in my building.  Cursing my small and practically shared living quarters, I get out of the shower and dry off.  My skin is not perfect, and is somewhat dry, so I slather on perfumed lotion and put on some makeup.  Vampires are not always the epitome of beauty, and although I am quite cute, I still get blemishes and need to
cover them up from time to time. 
    After I’m ready, I head out to work a full hour and fifteen minutes before I’m due in to battle rush hour traffic.  Sitting on the freeway morning and night for that amount of time five days a week gets me sort of irritable, so by the end of the week, I’m a complete bitch to both my friends and my co-workers. 
    Once I get to the office, I sit in a six by six cube for eight hours dealing with incredibly rude, and sometimes unbelievably stupid students.  I’m an academic advisor for an online college, and it blows my mind daily that some of those students get through the admissions process when they can barely spell their own names.  That is a rant for another day altogether.  After I’d heard ,’my internet is down so I couldn’t get to class for two weeks straight’ for the eleventh time, I decided it was time for lunch.  One of our sister schools had a mishap earlier in the month in which their raw sewage spewed up through the flooring and now we have four hundred people crammed into
a building with a max capacity of two-fifty.  Parking is a nightmare on a regular day when we aren’t overcrowded, but with the addition of one hundred seventy five new people, parking is scarce.  It takes half my lunch break to walk to my car and back, so I need to rush to the nearest greasy spoon, grab a heart attack combo, and race back only to park five miles away again.  I should have just left my car at the fast food joint, it was probably closer.
    Since my time is so limited, I have to get back to my desk and try to shovel as much food into my mouth as I can before the next student calls in and berates me my claiming I must surely make minimum wage and file my nails at my desk all day because he didn’t get the answer he wanted when posing his ridiculous question.  Little does the student know I’ve made note of his home address, so if he tells me one more time that my My Space picture gives him the impression I’d ‘seen a party or two’, and I couldn’t possibly tell him what he needed to do to graduate, I will fly out to his house and suck him dry before working on my tan.  Might as well since I will already be there right?  By the way, YES vampires can get a tan.  Anyway, I don’t kill humans, but he was getting dangerously close to forcing me to break that rule.
    By that point, I’m already annoyed and ready to bite the crap out of my cube mate who talks incessantly about his band or whatever other arbitrary topic he dreamed up the night before.  Sometimes I think it would be funny to just randomly bite some of my co-workers, just to kinda let them know who’s boss ya know?  Anyway, after listening to who knows what my cube mate was talking about for the last, holy shit, half hour, I finally turn around and see that I have six new voicemails.  Well, only three are new, three are from students who hadn’t heard from me since they left me a message twenty minutes before, and were in desperate need of my attention.  I stare at the messages and daydream about going to the club with the girls at work, ones I
actually like, to get totally drunk and maybe bite a patron or two for fun.
    At any rate, when my day finally ends at five p.m., I jump up out of my chair, and hike five miles to my car only to sit in traffic for another hour and fifteen minutes.  I do like the afternoon radio shows though, White Trash News Flash makes my drive worth it for sure.
    When I get home, I sit down in front of the TV and try to decide who I’m going to have for dinner.  I can eat human food for appearances sake, but it has absolutely no taste for me.  No matter how fabulous something looks, I cannot smell or taste it, so eating food is really depressing, especially because I remember what good food tasted like before I was turned into a vampire.  I toss around calling the guy from work that has a crush on me.  He is not at all cute, but has the best tasting blood ever.  I hated giving him the wrong impression though, so decided against it.  I’d save that for a time I was truly desperate.  I had a couple of human friends that tasted okay, and one of them would have to suffice.
    I called my friend Jake because he and I hung out regularly and he never thought it was odd if I asked him over to watch a movie.  It was oh so convenient that the special venom in vampire fangs messed with the minds of humans so that they never recalled anything that happened.  Thankfully it was only for the brief moment in which they were bitten, so they didn’t lose chunks of their human memories. There was also a special healing agent in the venom that immediately closed and healed puncture wounds.  In all honesty, the only reason humans think they believe in vampires is because a couple of douche bags wanted to show off a time or two and exposed themselves to humans.  They are no longer amongst the ‘undead’ for that little stunt. 
    After we watched The Breakfast Club, I quickly went in for the big bite just before he got up to leave.  Thanking Jake for hanging with me for a while, I sent him on his way and then watched American Idol before jumping on the internet and doing some surfing.  It was mind boggling the info one could find on the web.  Just for shits and giggles, I would Google ‘vampires’ to see if anything new had been posted recently.  My favorite posts were blogs talking about being a vampire or becoming a vampire.  Those were especially hilarious because no true, self-respecting vampire would post a website about how to become a vampire, or offer to make others a vampire…for a small fee of course.
    I laughed out loud and shut down my computer before getting ready for bed.  After getting into my pajamas, which consisted of shorts and a light-weight t-shirt, I headed to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my fabulously white teeth.  After I was all cleaned up, I grabbed the latest trashy romance novel I’d picked up at the newsstand, and read for about an hour before finally crashing for the night.
    So, there you have it.  I hope this look at a day in the life of a vampire was helpful for you.  Please do not roam cemeteries looking for the undead to change you into a vampire so that you can escape the horrible reality that is your cushy, upper class, Emo life.  That isn’t the type of human we look to change.  If you are meant to join the legion of the undead, we’ll call you, but don’t wait by the phone insignificant humans.  If you are chosen, we’ll use your window.