A real vampire’s life? It’s really draining

It is hard to verify this, seeing as it’s a self-selecting title, and each vampire might have a different definition of what it means to be vampirical. In Georgia, the Atlanta Vampire Alliance and its research arm, Suscitatio Enterprises LLC, spent two years collecting answers from more than 700 vampires answering hundreds of survey questions. From this we learn they:

1. Have much higher rates of asthma, migraines and anemia than normal humans.

2. Most commonly live in California, followed by Georgia, Texas, New York and Ohio.

3. Are an average age of 28.

Also, only 17 percent of vampires drink blood; 31 percent are solely psychic, and the rest are hybrids.

The keeper of this data is J. Collins, administrator for Voices of the Vampire Community, which Collins describes as “kind of like the United Nations of Vampires.”

“We really hope that the fruits of what we’re doing now will lead to us being understood later,” he said. Of course, as with any community, there have been internal struggles: Psychic vampires have perceived sanguinarians as rudimentary brutes, while blood vampires “had a very hard time accepting that psychic vampires are legitimate,” Belanger says. She sighs. “It boiled down to: Oh, sure, ‘I’m taking your energy, I’m taking your energy.’ (Sanguinarians) have a hard time wrapping their brains around the psychic stuff.”

In a phone interview, Sanguinarius, whose real name is Elizabeth, wholeheartedly expresses solidarity, but says that psychic vampires “concern themselves as much as we do with ethics ... but all ethics aside, they could just walk into some place, and pick some person, and feed on them until the person flops down and twitches. The cops can’t do anything because it’s not illegal. Now if I did that ... “

You can understand the inter-community annoyance, which sounds pretty much like run-of-the-mill interoffice tension (Oh, sure, she has kids, so she gets to leave at 5. Now if I tried that ...).

It’s all so “borrring.”

Deep down, we don’t really want vampires to be just like us. If we really have nothing to fear, then we also have nothing to be titillated by, nothing to make us shriek, then laugh, then shriek again. “No, no, don’t suck my blood! Or do. OK, do.”

In “Twilight,” Edward can stop moving cars with an outstretched hand, reads people’s minds, and gets all glittery when he stands in the sunlight.

When Rabinowitz is asked whether she possesses any of these skills, she thinks about it. “I do have a heightened sense of smell” when she feeds, she says. Personally, she thought the movie went a long way toward showing that vampires are complex, multifaceted beings. Regular folk.

Vampires should be pleased.

We average humans are a little disappointed.

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