Questions of Scale

This morning, I stumbled blearily out of bed. "I had a terrible nightmare just now," I said to D.
"So did I," he interjected, "It was about a humongulous."
"A what?"
"A humongulous."
"I don't know what that is."
He begins confidently tapping away in a flourish of Google triumph. But the search gods are fickle - there's no trace of this word. He tries several alternate spellings: no luck.
"Why don't you tell me what it means?" I suggest.
"It's a tiny, miniature version of a person...."
"A homunculus."
"That's it!"
"Why was that a nightmare?"
Defensively: "It just was."
Pause. I ponder.
"Wait. Why would a *tiny* person be called a humongolous...?"
(In a rush:) "I don't know. I don't like you."

---

My dream, overlooked in the tumult of homunculi, involved having to climb an appallingly huge mountain, and feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. (Thanks for the subtle - almost impenetrable - response to my Mt. Grademore anxiety, unconscious mind. You always do such seamless work.) Suddenly my friend Leslie showed up, and announced that she was here in her (new) professional capacity as a (and I quote) "mountain dominatrix.". She made me first go up and then into the mountain, where we then watched a Canadian-style Heritage holographic performance about the history of miners' unions. This quickly devolved into a a spy caper in which I was being chased by a serial killer, whom I had to killed in appalling, gory detail in order to keep him from murdering me and my grandmother.

I think I need to read fewer crime thrillers.  And grade fewer papers.

In the apocalyptic mode

You may remember that the family Sycorax has some rather eccentric holiday traditions, not least of which is the (bi-)annual celebration of Solstice in a serious of elaborate theatrical party-rituals.  There are rules: you may want to review them.

This year's Solstice bore a particular burden, as it was also the Mayan End of Days.  The Apocalyptice, so to speak. The Party to End All Parties.

Things you would have heard chez Sycorax in this year's Solstice crescendo:

Mère Sycorax:   Oh! D! Would you like to wear this monocle?
D:   Um.... Probably not?

“Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long, long ago.”

(Some time later....)

Ariel:   Do these peacock stockings look OK?
D:   Yes.
Ariel:   They don't look ridiculous?
D:   You're about to put on horse-head-shaped eyelashes. Why are you worrying about the stockings?

D was clearly channeling Man Ray when he took this photograph.

A Washingtonian Fairy Tale

Over the creek and through the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism to grandmother's house I went.

I'm in Honolulu now, but over the Thanksgiving weekend I was in DC, where the streets are littered with organizations pulled straight from the X-Files.  This gave me the opportunity to check in with my Bracknellian grandmother in person, in her charming apartment overlooking the treetops, and to tell her a little bit about some work I've been doing on the no-longer-quite-fledgling National Theatre of Scotland.

I give you the list of things my grandmother rejected fundamentally as concepts while I was talking with her that afternoon:

• Storytelling. ("What is 'storytelling'?  I've never heard of such a thing," she says, disdain dripping from her scare-quotes. "It's... well... I, um, I really don't think I can give a definition much clearer than the one contained in the word itself, Nonna."  She scoffs with a small incredulous noise: "We certainly never did anything like that in our family.")
  
• Rural locales as the sites of culture. ("There's culture outside of Glasgow and Edinburgh?  Really?" A slow patrician drawl: "You surprise me." Her raised eyebrows say that I haven't surprised her, because she doesn't believe me.)
  
• Sandwiches. ("I hate sandwiches. I've always hated sandwiches." "Really, Nonna? Because a solid third of all of the meals you've ever served me have been sandwiches."  This merits no more than an arch look and a dismissive flick of the hand. Of course, she also claimed on this visit that she'd be faking every single interest she'd ever evinced in her 90+ years on this earth. Maybe sandwiches just got caught in the crossfire.)
  
• Scottish music. ("There's no such thing."  "There is." "Oh? What is it then, Scottish music?" She clearly thinks she's got me there. So I pull out the most obvious example: "Have you ever heard a bagpiper?".  "Yes," she says, confident in the hand she has to play, "In London."  "London did not invent the bagpipes!" I cry with excessive force.)
  

Note that of these concepts, she only even admitted to the existence of sandwiches, and she stopped just short of calling them abominations.  She's a woman of stark absolutes, my grandmother.  It's for us plebians to dabble in nuance.