A Real Vampire Slayer

It's a pretty fair assessment to say that, of all the people I interacted with, I hated at least 50% of them. A few of them, I had a reason for. My aunt says that hate destroys the vessel that carries it. And while I'm pretty sure I was in no danger of destruction, it was doing me no favors.

I left that here, along with most of my other tendencies that I was sick of.

That's not totally true. there was one person that I hated, and I focused all of the rage that was normally spread out among hundreds on this one woman.

Stephanie Meyer.

If the name doesn't strike a bell, let me give you something with which to associate her.

Twilight.

I used to work with books, so the initial annoyance came from having to stock hers books. I'd get in boxes and boxes of them a week, and yet I was still out of at least one of them at any given time. The premise, a girl who falls madly in love with a vampire, seemed awful, but it was only after they announced a movie that it became a real problem.

Other people began to realize that people were reading this stuff, and there was a nonstop flow of books very likely even worse than Stephanie Meyer's list coming in every week, books about vampires and undead, and their love stories. It was more than a little sickening. Every summary on the back read much the same thing. Some teenage chick has met the man of her dreams. There's only one problem. He wants to suck her blood.

Some awful Vampire romance novels. My favorite, the one of the right, with the tag line "Maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend isn't such a bright idea..." She got paid for that book.

My problem with Stephanie Meyer wasn't so much her books, though I won't read them. Any book you can pump out in less than three months can't be all that great. I hated her because she opened the door for countless other hacks to write books that suck. I'm sorry, but when, and more importantly, how, did it become acceptable for teenage girls to fall in love with vampires. I remember watching blade as a kid, and that, Wesley Snipes, is what vampires are supposed to be. Terrifying, bloodsucking demon spawn. Not vessels of teenage angst. I suppose Joss Whedon is also partly to blame, but I'm willing to let him go by the wayside, as he is responsible for the creation of Firefly as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

How are these two even comparable. One is clearly overflowing with awesome. The other is a pasty teenager. And yet people want to pass this ugly kid off as a vampire.

Anyways, the point of this is, recently, this hasn't been too much of an issue. The movie is no longer in theaters so its popularity has fallen a bit, and more importantly, I no longer work in books. However, on Tuesdays, my workload brings me through entertainment, and so I can usually get a little worked up once a week.

Yesterday was different though. I scanned all of books, and nothing. There were plenty of new vampire romance books, there were still a thousand copies of every Twilight novel, and I really didn't care.

I didn't mind hating Stephanie Meyer. I knew where all that negative motion was, and I could account for it. Now though, what's happening with all that emotion. Because hating things, unlike some of my other old habits, hasn't come back as soon as I found myself back in Maryland.

So do I really not hate anything now. It's hard to imagine me as a person who doesn't hate. It provided balance, offset my overly compassionate side. Is that, too, going to go by the wayside?

Then again, it could just be because I'm sick. I haven't been feeling any strong emotion all week. We'll see.