My Soul May Carry Rabies

While I would hesitate to call myself an online quiz aficionado, I do take them from time to time. I typically steer away from the IQ rating ones and have long since given up on the purity tests, mainly because the results for both are so dismally low that they suggest I spent my first twenty or so years of life caged in the basement of some dilapidated Victorian home, fed fish-heads from a slop bucket twice a day but denied even the barest education or social contact for fear that my mongoloid form would diminish whatever cultural capital the family had up to that point managed to accrue. Should the comparison have crossed your mind, I would readily grant that Boo Radley metaphors are also appropriate.

So anyway (the lingual calling card, I might observe, of the serial meanderer and long-story-teller), the other day I took the "Meet Your Daemon" quiz on the spiffily interactive website for New Line Cinema's forthcoming The Golden Compass. Why was I there in the first place, you ask? Perhaps it was my affection for fantasy literature and Hollywood's oft unrealized potential to visually bring off that literature spectacularly. Perhaps because when you glance at only the final eleven letters of the URL, one finds themselves staring into the face of "assmovie.com." Most likely, it's because I had already seen the new international movie trailer. I mean, for God's sake, there's fucking armor-clad polar bears fighting in this thing! These "gentle giants" have once and for all cast aside their Coke bottles and Christmas cheer and returned once more to what the Creator intended them to be: hulking bastions of savage ass-kickery.

The idea behind the Daemon in general, at least within the book/movie's mythology (as far as I can tell), is that every person's soul is manifested in an animal companion of the opposite gender, and while children's (because of their open potential) Daemons may often change shape during these early, formative years, as people progress toward adulthood this avatar gradually settles into a fixed shape. Thus the type of animal companion you have is a representative of your personal characteristics. This handy quiz allows you, after answering a mere twenty questions, to find out what your Daemon would be.

Diligently, I completed the quiz and waited with bated breath to see what totem my soul would greet me as. I am not an entirely arrogant man, and thus felt no compulsion to see a great lion, a majestic eagle, or even a damn marmoset saunter across my screen. But what did I get? A mouse named Aurora. Yes, the very core of my being can best be summed up as a tiny rodent that lives behind your appliances and, centuries past, may have helped spread plague throughout Europe. Indeed, mine is an animal almost universally put forth as a sign of helplessness and timidity, and should sufficient numbers of my soul congregate in one locale, words like "infestation" are bandied about. This, dear reader, is the type of man whose blog you read. Furthermore, if I did have the utter misfortune of residing in this fantastic universe, what the hell use would I get out of dear little Aurora? Send her out to scare housewives, or harvest me modest amounts of expired cheese? Perhaps I could throw her at the eyes of an attacker, hoping those disturbing little pink paws of hers might find purchase on a retina. I, of course, would never know, as I would be frantically sprinting the other way. Hurumph. Mouse indeed.

My wife's daemon simply puzzles me. Hers is a honey bee named Borealis. Now, I of course appreciate the synchronicity of our two daemons obviously suiting each other so well (if you don't get why they are suited yet, then congratulations on failing fifth grade science), but apart from that, what traits does one associate with the honey bee? Hard working, I suppose, though the word "drone" can too easily be bandied about. Colorful? Okay, if yellow and black are your thing. There is, of course, the vast array of material associated with "honey," but even I will only go so far, dear reader, to sate your boredom; allow me to politely decline.

So should you find yourself bored anytime in the near future, pop over to the website mentioned above and see what your Daemon might be. As is ever the case in these things, it's best to answer truthfully and not in the hopes of getting a specific beastie, since the character traits these deranged people associate with certain animals can, at times, boggle the mind. For instance, when I retook the test (I was still hoping for something a little higher up the mammalia food chain), I got a snow leopard named Elpis (the majestic symbol of, I shit you not, the Girl Scout Association of Kyrgyzstan). First on the list of descriptors was "spontaneous." How exactly is a snow leopard spontaneous? Does he suddenly decide, mid attack, that rather than biting the throat of his prey as usual, he'll instead try mauling its genitals just for the hell of it? Is it merely a ploy used by this cunning feline on its Match.com application? Needless to say, I'm not all that spontaneous, and disturbingly, the snow leopard's diet tends to subsist off of rodents. Poor Aurora has her work cut out for her, it seems.