I'm not sure I can figure out reality right about now. I just left a party that had devolved into the surreal about an hour before I left it. It started out so mundane. We were eating holiday snacks, chatting, and playing digital games. (For the record, if you haven't tried Jackbox TV games, find a way to do it with a group. My favorite is Quiplash, but there are others that are also very entertaining.) After a while, a suggestion of karaoke morphed into just playing songs that everyone knew, sent from YouTube on an iPad to the TV, and the assembled partygoers sang along (nearly everyone, I think). But as that started to break apart into groups, and any organizational control over the iPad was lost, strangeness ensued. First, we just watched Miike Snow videos (My Trigger and Genghis Khan) just because they were groovy and the dancing in them is so phenomenal. I wanted to believe that the men who starred in those two videos were the ones making the music, but I don't think they are. I kind of liked imagining them as professional dancers first who found out they were also hip music producers. I'm afraid the answer is less romantic.
It was a short hop from there to being waist deep in the surrealism. I don't know where it came from, but someone put up a video describing Cuil Theory by Roy Kelly. I want to explain. I want to describe. It is simply indescribable. Not sure I will ever think of hamburgers the same way. You disapprove. My eye is twitching involuntarily.
We scattered through the house after that. My daughter turned on Too Many Cooks in an effort to draw us back into one unified group, and it worked to a point. I paid attention long enough to recognize a teenage actress who is also in the Walking Dead. By then several of us were starting to collect our coats and purses to be able to leave. Lucky for me we stayed long enough for me to see the performance art piece called Shia LaBeouf. Once again, it was wonderful dancing and beautiful orchestration. I wondered aloud what it would have been like to be one of the middle school kids who made up the youth choir in part of it. What does being in weird artistic productions as a child do to the way kids develop and grow? Does it expand their horizons? Allow them to access the creative side of their brains? Or does it make it harder for them to connect to the real world? If they had trouble with reality after an experience like that, is it necessarily a bad thing?
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