Fitty fizzog he have

I attempt to outwit mosquito.

I woke sometime in the middle of the night to a mosquito buzzing past my ear. I had noticed the other day an itchy spot on my shoulder and wrote it off as something random while suspecting I might have a mosquito. Well, I do. I turned the lights on and tried to find it, to no avail. There are so many surfaces where a mosquito can hide in my bedroom—a reason why J___’s bare-walled apartment might not be a bad idea. Second strategy I attempted, after the mosquito buzzed by me while I was out of bed hunting it, was to pull the bed sheet completely over my head and form a sort of tent. The air got warm and close and of course I began to feel I might suffocate myself (probably unlikely, else there would be warnings to parents not to let children wrap themselves in bedsheets, the same way there are warnings about children and plastic bags), plus I was forming a leaking bubble of carbon dioxide under the sheet that would only attract the mosquito the more—and lo, soon enough I heard the buzz again, more faintly.

Final strategy was to turn on the lights in the bedroom (mosquitoes do bite more when it’s dark, don’t they?) and sleep with the eye mask. Surprisingly, I was able to sleep.

I dream my summer camp crush shows me how he outwits mosquitoes.

I had a dream of M___ G_____ the actor from musical theater summer camp, who these days leaves in Queens and occasionally posts sad and lonely Facebook messages about being in lockdown, or ironic word-witty Facebook messages that are clearly funny, but belong to a completely different school of humor than my own. (Incidentally, All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre, winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Bollinger comic novel house, which I yesterday attempted to start reading, has that same kind of “different school of humor from mine,” similar to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I also read with that sense of “I can see that’s a joke” “I can see that’s a joke as well”—but still not laughing. Better P. G. Wodehouse or Jerome K. Jerome.) He was my roommate in a shared three-bedroom apartment. I told him I had a mosquito in my bedroom and asked him if he had any advice. He showed me his “system”: either a fan or the in-window air conditioner blowing, and on the wall next to his bed an “array” that distracted and trapped the mosquito as it blew in the fan air. It looked like art, a three-dimensional painting made from little pieces of rubber sticking out from the wall in a patterned square. In fact, I suspected it was art, and that perhaps it wasn’t even part of his “system” but was just rattling in the wind.

M___ and I had great rapport. Great “I’m gay, he’s straight” rapport that was practically satisfying. But later in the dream, when it was morning and we were all making breakfast in the kitchen of __ _______ ____ _____ (me, M___, our other roommate or roommates, plus Meghan my sister), Meghan commented to me, “Be careful. I hear from my girlfriends he’s a good lover.”

“Your girlfriends?” I say.

“My female friends from high school and stuff. Don’t worry, I never did anything with him.”

She says this quite strongly, making me think either she clearly never did anything with him—or she did. Meanwhile I get an image of a house party we had held at __ _______ ____ when we were all in school—and yes, M___ G_____ was there. But he and I weren’t friendly at the time. (The house party took place post-summer camp and pre-“M___ and I are roommates now.”)

Were my hopes dashed by what Meghan said? No. But it was a reality check.

Poldark has new male character worth dreaming about.

I watched the first half of the Season Three premiere of Poldark last night. If the finale of Season Two had raised all the characters (except Elizabeth who belatedly faced the thought she might be carrying Ross’s child), the Season Three premiere dashed them all to the ground again, even George—although George doesn’t know it yet. Demelza’s brother turned up.

“Fitty fizzog he have, little brother of yourn,” says Prudie with a mischievous glimmer in her eye.

Prudie, incidentally, has been looking younger. But she’s still quite a bit older than brother Drake! Jud is gone, for good, Prudie says. Is she experiencing a renaissance of sorts? Drake is rather cute, although no older than 18 or 21. He’s come to tell Demelza their father is dying. She goes to say goodbye to her father, reluctantly, where we see her second brother, Samuel, older than Drake, and also handsome, but a religious zealot like their father. Nobody calls Samuel a “fitty fizzog,” suggesting that Drake is being set up to the heartbreaker. Perhaps he’ll fall in love with Elizabeth’s son’s Geoffrey Charles’s new governess and Elizabeth’s cousin.

A small note on the episode: everyone was speaking in Cornwall-speak again, particularly Demelza, like they might have at the beginning of Season One, inverting subjects and verbs and using “ye” instead of “you.” Someone came in and said, “OK, we got a little casual in season two. Back to ‘ye’ and ‘yourn’ again.”