--from "Secret Agent, James Bondstein," on You Don't Have to be Jewish

I missed school every day last week. Given President's Day on Monday, that made a total of four days, Tuesday through Friday, easily my record since starting college.

This isn't good, to put it mildly.

But you may recall that I pulled an all-nighter the preceding week, and my internal clock was still making its way back towards equilibrium when the cold hit. The combination was too much. I couldn't sleep at night; I would have stayed up during the day, ordinarily, but, thanks to the cold, I was utterly unable to do so. Throw in a greatly reduced attention span during the times I was awake (not to mention a box-a-day tissue requirement, and so on), and I wasn't able to get much done even when I was up.

I'm still not entirely out of the woods, but I'm decidedly on the upswing -- I feel more like myself today than I have in a week now -- so I fully expect to be back in class tomorrow. The only question is whether I stand a chance of taking on everything that needs to be done this week. Which includes a somewhat overdue geology assignment for tomorrow night; an essay on Roxanna for Tuesday; whatever I need to do for my acting class, if I can somehow find out what it was; and a geology test on Thursday. It's the essay on Tuesday that worries me.

Plus there's Clean Sheets, American Studies, my column for the college paper, and so on.

Remind me again why I like doing all this?

I hit the bottom of my tissue supply again, so I went out and bought myself a box of Kleenex Cold Care, with the extra layer and the aloe lotion and everything. Because, darn it, I deserve a luxurious nose-blowing experience.

Ah, the life of the American consumer...

"Since vampires aren't human, that wouldn't be murder, but it occurred to me (and my boss) that it might be cruelty to animals."

I doubt it. Animals are alive; vampires are not. Ergo, vampires aren't animals.

For the same reason, I think the preceding paragraph is flawed; robbing or raping the vampires wouldn't be felonies either. Robbery requires that some person's property be robbed, which wouldn't be the case here... unless the vampires in question were slaves of a human. As I haven't seen the episode in question, I can't rule out the latter possibility, so if that was the case--bearing in mind that by "slaves" I do mean actual chattel, not just servants--I stand corrected. But if not, robbery is out.

(Lest you point out that slavery is illegal in this country, I'll point out that that presumably doesn't apply to vampires either.)

As for rape, similar problem there; no person to rape. Although Buffy might be in violation of some statute against indecent/immoral behavior; vibrators are illegal in some areas, after all. But, in that case, she'd already have violated that by having sex with Angel.