Currently I'm being driven crazy...well, okay, that's not true, but I'm somewhat frustrated...by requests from someone who is apparently blogging in Swedish and who wants me to go read their blog.

Do I strike you as a person who speaks Swedish? Of course not. And, unfortunately, I can't find an on-line source for translating from Swedish. (Well, I found a primitive one, but I just don't have time to sit down and translate an entire web page, one word at a time.)

Anyhow. I'm sure he's a great guy with many interesting things to say and I regret that I'm going to have to write back and explain to him that it's not that I'm having trouble with "some of the language" on his page, it's that I can't read a word except for the ones he posts in English.

I mean, he's in Sweden, anyhow, according to his last note to me. I assume he's writing in Swedish, but I can't even be sure of that. I have a vague memory of his having told me once before that he was, at least at the time, in Austria. Maybe he's just in Sweden now temporarily or something.

I'm giving this more thought than it deserves, aren't I? Still. It's very sad to be an ignorant American sometimes.

I'm avoiding working at the moment. It's boring to write papers on subjects you don't understand and don't particularly care about, okay? I finished one a few minutes ago and then realized that I'd forgotten to put in all the salesy stuff about how wonderful our system is and how everyone should use it. Bleah.

Spent a fair amount of time yesterday getting caught up on the week's accumulated Spike BtVS episodes. A lot of repeats of episodes I've already seen, so I didn't have to spend the entire day at it. I also got to watch the first-run episode that CP (she's such an angel) loaned me.

Many thoughts, all jostling frantically for release in my head.

Why does everyone who gets vamped become a nearly unrecognizable monster (personality-wise, I mean), except for Spike?

William's mother became quite the uberbitch, didn't she? She seems to have been overtaken by a vampire of significant ickiness, what with the whole sex-with-mommy motif. I'd say she was the one with the issues, and not William. I mean, based on the theory that the "personality" of the person vamped is reflected in the vampire, she was a woman with a few problems, right?

But is that true? About the carry-over personality, I mean? I'm not sure I buy it.

There's Angel. An average sort of an idiot, from what I've seen of him historically, but he became a major force for the dark side, post-vamping. Decimating gypsy encampments, driving innocent girls to insanity, etc.

Drusilla's a harder case to figure what with the madness and all, but certainly her lunatic post-vamp personality bears no noticeable resemblance to what we saw of her before.

And Mom, as seen this past episode, well, in that era it's true that women had major acting to do, but did she have all of that Freudian weirdness stored up inside of her before getting bitten? The flashback is ambiguous, at most.

But Spike? Just post-vamping, when he turned his mother, he was little different than he'd been before. In the slayer-slaying flashbacks, when he took the first slayer, he was still Spike. All fighty and stuff, yeah, but hardly in the grip of some overpowering evil force.

When Angel is Angelus, you can feel the evil. Even when he's demon-controlled, Spike's just...Spike. Sometimes a little crankier and more prone to biting than other times, but none of the psychopathic traits that seem so clear in Angel and Drusilla. I continue not to buy the description of him as a major force for evil. I'd suspect he was more trying to live up (down?) to Drusilla's expectations than anything else.

Anyhow. Moving on.

Okay, so now Buffy is willing to kill anyone who stands between her and success? She'll sacrifice friends, family, anything necessary.

Except Spike.

If I'm not mistaken, at the end of that episode, she rather definitely chose Spike over Giles, even.

And I'm watching this and thinking that now she's ready to kill her little sister but not a guy she's not even willing to admit she's in love with?

What kind of plot-related reason can this have? In the end, will it be Spike who saves the world?

Stay tuned for no additional discussion.