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epitome of incomprehensibility
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When I had a boyfriend, I made one of these for him. Birthday or holiday, I forget, but he stayed on his relaxed but meditative chair and finished "The Snoose's Abstruse Crossword" with surprising quickness.
("Snoose" became my nickname after I showed him the song "On the Floor" where Pitbull pronounced "snooze" like "snoose" for the sake of a rhyme. Perhaps that was also our_song, like Fields_of_Verdun and Fast_Car. Love's old sweet song. The fruits of incongruity.)
Anyway, this is the clue I'm irrationally proud of: "half of tea, or past of a not-quite lap dance."
The gears of his mind turned.
It happened to be something he bought often from a café with a catlike name.
It was...
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lapsang, as in lapsang souchong. The "smoky tea" he particularly liked. And though he was too absorbed in finishing the puzzle, as I remember, to remark "naughty!" at suggested sexiness...the sang-song and dance of it all...his heart or esophagus was touched.
Still, it was somewhat of an accident that the clue led to one of his FAVOURITE teas. The letters fit the blanks. Making_crossword_puzzles is an exercise in limited possibilities.
When he suggested I should do more puzzles and submit them to a student paper at Concordia (I was still doing linguistics there), I protested. I don't know if he was serious or not - probably neither, it was just an Idea of Something To Do - but I knew it wouldn't like to spend time producing such a thing every week unmotivated by love. It would be a chore rather than a joy.
But now I fear that this sort of reticence, displayed several times over time, made me a less worthy companion in his eyes. My imperfect accommodation of my attention disorder got read as excuse-making, my anxiety as lack of ambition or laziness. I AM lazy sometimes. But I still persevere. Just not consistently, not always in the same way for long stretches, but I can pick up things I dropped temporarily and continue them. Can't a smart person understand that??
But he might be better off with a different sort of partner, so I don't need to be emo about stuff. I can be my own snoose. As James Joyce said, Be the Snoose You Want to See in the World.
...
If he had made me a crossword puzzle, maybe I wouldn't have completed it in one sitting. But how can I know? He never made me one.
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