A first post directly to dagblog, so howdy. And a deviation from my normal patter. A question: what is the popular costume for children (mediated by adults, I guess) in your region, this year? For adults (including teenagers)? 

I guess my question comes from an abysmal ignorance of what is the style nowadays (we have no children and I seldom see them, though I do hear them), and how does one balance scariness with cuteness with everything else that children figure? For someone involved in the narratives of child rearing, I'm sure the equation is more easily resolved, or if not, understood in different terms, like, is this or that costume affordable? feasible? and will it totally embarrass me (and the child, family, friends and all the associate "friends" mirrored on Facebook, school, etc.)? Or perhaps my own self-consciousness is too revealing, and you can guess that I am lousy at costumes (masquerades don't liberate, they entrap: nothing is forgotten, and identity is always discovered, isn't it? And, if not, how do we then spackle over the penumbras of open secrets nowadays? I mean: those areas where the carnival spins without the persistence of fatal memory and which we enter from time to time and then, I don't know, lie? about our entry there.)

I doubt there is any danger that those domains offering the "other" in desire, interest, whatever are disappearing, as these domains have actually less to do with physical objects than with perception. An arch, a door, a gate is easily magicked into being by its expectation or even the backward look of regret. But with memory now so ubiquitous, and most of it not ours to control (if ever that was the case), where then do we lose ourselves?