sovay | And I won't tell no one your name

This one was stolen from

greygirlbeast:

What does your first name mean?
Sonya is a Russian diminutive of Sophia: Greek σοφία, "wisdom." (I should be so lucky.) I was named for my great-grandmother on my mother's and her mother's side.

What does your middle name mean?
My first middle name is Leah, which is Hebrew of indeterminate origin; I've seen translations from "weary" to "wild cow" to "mistress," so anyone fluent in Hebrew should feel to comment and enlighten me. A disturbing number of people over the years have assumed from the pronunciation that I was named after Star Wars. My second middle name, which I didn't acquire until midway through childhood, is Glixman—my mother's maiden name and one of the more creatively spelled Ellis Island bastardizations of Glucksmann, "lucky man." Could be worse. Shaun Ferguson.

What does your last name mean?
Taaffe? Have some more indeterminacy.* I've most commonly heard the name explained as a Welsh patronymic for David. (Taffy was a Welshman . . .) I've also seen etymologies based on the rivers Taff or Tâf in Wales. In truth, I haven't the faintest.

So what does your name mean when put together?
Er . . . a little lucky weary Welsh wisdom? In a river? I need fewer adjectives around here.

What would you have been named if you were the opposite gender?
Simon, which I believe is a Hellenized form of the Hebrew name Shimeon. It's connected to the verb "to hear," but I'm not sure in what grammatical capacity; I've never looked it up.

Any other name oddities?
I've never attracted any nickname that stuck. By now, I would probably respond to Sovay, which is itself a variant of Sophia. I have discovered over the years that I'm superstitious about sharing my Hebrew name and I'm not entirely sure why.

Do you like your name?
Yes. It's sort of a cultural smash-up, but I am fond of it.

What do you like best about it?
The aforementioned cultural smash-up seems to have ensured that no one else has the name. (At least, if someone does, she hasn't yet turned up on Google.) And it's peculiar, which might explain why I'm always giving my characters the kind of names that make

fleurdelis28's longstanding challenge to use the spam name "Cadfael Aronowitz" in one of my stories sound, sadly, not implausible at all.

What do you like least about it?
The apparent inability of 99% of the population to pronounce my last name properly. I was most impressed by the telemarketer who managed to insert a voiced glottal stop in between the a's and consequently put about four syllables into it. I'm just waiting for a !Kung click to show up in there somewhere. Oh, and my high school spelled it improperly every year of the yearbook. Even the year I graduated. And my parents sent a letter to the yearbook editors to make sure that it would not be misspelled. That was amusing.

If you had to change your name (witness protection program, whatever), what would you want it to be?
So far I've written down three replies and ruled out each one of them for some reason or another. I may have to think about this one.

*The geography, at least, can be readily traced: the name starts out in Wales, moves to Ireland in the twelfth or thirteenth century, picks up some peerage in the 1600's, relocates to Austria and gathers aristocracy there over the next couple of centuries, and then World War I came along and all the titles went pffft. Not that my branch of the family, which came over in the mid-nineteenth century, would have been in the running for any sort of noble inheritance, but I'm still amused. At least I get to claim kinship, however distant, with some intriguing historical figures.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Aloysius Watermelontail

. . . which is a name whose origin story you've owed me for several weeks now.

Aloysius is easy. He's the name of my evil twin. I got the name from Daffy Duck, swearing that was his name moments before Elmer Fudd shot him. That it is also the name of Courtney Crumrin's great uncle only makes me happier. Aloysius, as my evil twin, has the power to remove portions of his face. He does this for shock value. I don't know why.

As for Watermelontail it is the portmanteau of watermelon and tailor. Watermelon being the fruit, tailor refering to the sartorial djur, a shadowy race of creatures that like abandonded places, making cloth out of darkness and refining Very Interesting Poisons. They would have found your BPAL experimentation of interest.

I used to bake bagels when I was in school. This involved me getting up at 3:30 in the morning and driving down icy forested roads from Mount Hope (in backwoods Mansfield) to the University of Connecticut in my little red Dodge Rampage. I programmed my body to wake up moments before my alarm clock (so as not to wake my roomate) and was usually still asleep and working on somatic memory by the time the big 6 rack carosel oven was up to temperature.

One morning I woke into a dream of this, drove into work, very distinctly listening to "Cowboys" by Portishead, and let myself in. The lights were on in the kitchen, the boiler was on as well, the stereo was playing the same album, just where I left off, and the oven was on. The bagel shop smelled like a barbecue.

This did not put my mind in any sort of good order. I went into the back. The boiler was going over, and there was something I didn't quite identify (it was slightly meaty) inside it. I turned it down, careful to not get any of the soup that was sheeting down the sides on my hands. The oven door was closed and smoke was pouring out. Again, there was the barbecue, but now the definite smell of burning hair as well.

Portishead was playing "All Mine" on the stereo and it was very loud. I opened the hood.

The dream slips forward in time, and I am speaking to a seedy and very British looking plainclothes police officer outside the back of the bagel shop. An ambulance is pulling away and a pair of uniformed officers are speculating about the kosheric implications of this incident. The plainclothes officer shoos them and tells me that he's quite certain he knows who is responsible, and he's quite certain that the perpetrator will not be caught. If I am interested, I can meet him at a coffee shop call the Cirque, which is, in the dream, right behind the bagel shop, in an area that doesn't spatially exist in our world. I have come to understand the person in the oven was a friend of mine, and the reason she wnet in the oven was some sort of personal vendetta, so I am interested. I agree to meet him.

Time slips forward again to "Half Day Closing" on the same album; I am with my friends D (male) and B (female) who have (though they can barely tolerate one another's company in waking life) agreed to come with me to the Cirque. The place is seedy and dark inside, painted mostly black, with raised, inset booths along each side, round tables, red lamps and red table candles that you'd find in Italian restaurant's on the patio. It's been decorated with circus posters and there is a little round stage in the front. We sit and wait for a little while. There is a woman singing the song, karaoke up on stage. Her friends are the only other people in the place.

Then the officer gets dragged past the table. At first, it's very hard to see the dragging agency. There are two, small, slight figures. Actually, though this was several years ago (1997), they look somewhat like Skarrow (the creature pictured in the icon, if you're not familiar)similar body plan, features, swept back hair. They are dressed, however, in robes and coats and pants and scarves and things, all of them so dark black that they absorb all the light shining on the exposed skin on the figures wearing them, making the whole appear to be made of shadow. Unlike times that I have met them before, they have no visible auras. They are also wearing very heavy gauntlet type gloves.

The plainclothes officer looks very ill and weak. They drag him in front of the stage and around to the right of it, out the door to the exit and restrooms. I get up and chase them through the door.

One of them is waiting on the other side. He jabs me in the forearm with a trio of spikes that pop out of his gauntlet. The pain, even in a dream, is horrible, and it makes me nauseous. I fall over, as they drag the officer out the back into the red light of the alley behind...

D and B drag me back into the main room and up the stairs on the left side of the stage. At the top, there is a tiny room with a table, a pair of chairs and a little old man who could be Chinese, but is probably western going for a Circus of Dr. Lao sort of thing. Truth be told, he looked a lot like the actor who played Ming the Merciless in the versio of Flash Gordon that had the Queen soundtrack. In any case, he took my now lumpy and black veined arm, forced it down on the table, took a big, curved leatherworking needle, and undid the skin from wrist to elbow. He laid the skin open to reveal pink flesh and black seeds. Watermelon. Taking the needle, he pressed down theough the flesh at the wrist and elbow and, lifting it aside for the moment, scraped the remainder of the poison from the underside of my skin. He then replaced my watermelon arm and sewed the skin back together. I paid him $40 for this surgery.

I went back downstairs to find D slumped over at the table, runners and shoots growing out of his mouth from the poison. The door to the restrooms/exit was swinging, so I went out. I continued into the alley.

There was a series of red lights above that illuminated the whole alley, and, most disturbingly, the remarkably lifelike (if such a word could be used) grafiti mural of Baphomet on the facing wall.

That's about when B walked up in a way that was very unlike B, and tried to tell me something about where they had gone and when she got close enough, knife-handed me in the solar plexus, which caused my body to split like a watermelon.

At which point I woke up a couple of minutes before my alarmclock for my shift at the bagel shop.

He laid the skin open to reveal pink flesh and black seeds. Watermelon.

I'd been wondering how the watermelons got into this story.

Truth be told, he looked a lot like the actor who played Ming the Merciless in the versio of Flash Gordon that had the Queen soundtrack.

. . . Max von Sydow?

Thanks for the etiology. Have you ever tried turning this into a piece of fiction?

Was that Max von Sydow?
*one disbelieving imdb trip later*
... I'll be damned. It's not been since I think the very beginnings of college that I saw Flash, so that would make sense that I wouldn't have recognized him.

The watermelons take a long time to get into the dream, but it is the central image of the whole thing, and what sticks with me to this day. When I imagine the slithering insides of me, I have to push aside that image.

As for making it into something else, maybe. It's a tricky question. I don't think I would write the dream up as a story. I don't think I would do it justice. I did a poem about the tailors (kind of recently), and once wrote them up for a gaming company that employed me long ago, when I was long on deadline and short on ideas, which felt a little tawdry, so I hadn't touched them in a long, long time.

The tailors were sort of a discovery. They were something that a bunch of us sort of "found" or made up or something, I'm not really sure. Whatever was the case, I think I got stuck with them. Not factual creatures in any meaningful sense, they have a little more weight than purely imaginary things because there are a good handful of people who did believe in them for a while and had fairly authentic experiences with them; this makes me hesitate using them.

And I won't tell no one your name

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Watermelons and Tailors - Part 1

Watermelons and Tailors - Part 2

Watermelons and Tailors - Part 3 Where the Watermelons Come In

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