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Och: my sleep is all messed up. Too. Much. Light.

6:11 a. m. as I write this, and the Sun's already up. When I woke at 4:30, the cardinals were singing their dawn songs. (Like roosters, they have special receptors in their brains that register even the slightest increase in light.) CST: Cardinal Standard Time. Whtt whtt whtt: cheerio! Yeah, and the broom you rode in on, too.

When I went to bed at 11 last night, there was still light in the western sky. Where I live, it's about 8 hours from sundown to sunrise at the summer sunstead, but as any Northron can tell you, just because the Sun's below the horizon doesn't mean it's dark. In Shetland they call it the simmer dim: the long, slow twilights of summer's solstice-tide.

Nor am I the only one. Here and now we're all walking around in a collective state of chronic sleep deprivation. Add heat and voilà: the proverbial Midsummer Madness. Small wonder I've heard more sirens and seen more car crashes during the past two weeks than in the previous two months put together.

I just had a thought-vampire stories involve a woman falling in love with a competent, but dangerous, man.  Dracula came out in 1897, when the women's movement was strong, soon to result in women's suffrage.   Vampire stories often involve a woman giving up her independence and competency to be with a man.  She's hypnotized, can't look away, and he by turn, wants her lifeblood-that which keeps her alive and functioning.   Is this a perspective on the rights of women?  Is it possible that there is fear that a man will take a woman's right to live away from her? If not by force, than by stealth?  That even so, a woman's nature isn't strong enough to resist?  Are vampire stories in general just reinforcements of patristic ideas?