Be Cool

What fun is being cool if you can't wear a sombrero? –– Calvin and Hobbes

Sign Off

However hidden this page is, I'm proud and humbled to have been able to share my stories.  This blog is just one in a million clogging the internet, but it was mine, and it connected me to listeners I never knew I had: thanks for reading.

The Lily White Shall in Love Delight

Always

Just Like Magic

I didn't finish the Harry Potter series until this year.  I knew the ending before I read it, and had forgotten the majority of events characterizing the first six books by the time I was told the ending.  In other words, I'm not your average Potterhead.  What I learned when a Potter-drunk friend of mine convinced me to revisit the series is that J.K. Rowling is quite possibly the only modern author I consider in the league of my precious classics authors.  Rowling is a master of plot development, managing a steady pace that leaves the reader neither bored nor whiplashed, and painstakingly darkening the world of wizards with each successive novel.  She beautifully combines Harry's life as an unwanted addition to a muggle family, a bumbling idiot around cute girls, a procrastinator, and a bad dancer with his life as "the Chosen One," greatest weapon against dark forces and soon-to-be savior of the wizarding world.  Harry is real because he's confused, and frightened, and lovestruck, and sarcastic, and angry, and powerful, and small; even Ron, who has "the emotional range of a teaspoon," is brought to life on the page by Harry's side, in all his awkward, ginger glory.  I admire Rowling because she created such truly real characters that they needn't have been impersonated by actors to come alive: when I read her words, I might as well have been sitting in the Gryffindor common room leaning in to hear Harry's whispers on polyjuice potion, or tensed at my desk with Snape breathing down my neck.  More impressive still was the depth of her writing: each successive read brought new information previously skated over--phrases with double meanings, names derived from ancient stories, characters based on previously existing people.  Rowling's novels are treasure troves of information, encompassing reality within this folklorish world of dragons and witches, both in her three-dimensional characters and her reality-based inspiration.

Rowling envelopes me in her world: I often found myself wondering where my Hogwarts letter was, and why it was six years late.  Harry Potter was no longer a piece of another's imagination, a peak inside the writer's head, and yet he was so much more than a person strolling through a wall at King's Cross: he came to represent to me that childish wonder at the possibilities reality had in store--the belief that what hasn't been proven false is practically true.  Hogwarts was the magic hidden away in my jacket pockets and the unturned stones on my street; Voldemort was my fear of plane crashes and midnight robbers and my own mortality; Dumbledore was my reason and discipline and all other responsibilities accompanying adulthood; Hermione was my obsessive compulsive tendencies and my love of academic excellence and rules; Ron was my cheesy jokes and hours spent watching mindless television with friends; and Harry was my courage, and my passion, and my humbling self-consciousness. Harry Potter was my life.

A Book Long Enough

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. –– C.S. Lewis

Eagle Eye

My favorite summer days are those that I convince myself waking before 12 in the afternoon is a good idea, and, equipped with phone, key, tennis shoes, and a motivational playlist, trek three blocks to my local organic food store.  Their banana bread and blueberry granola are the best way to start my morning.  I like to peruse the shelves, smelling the natural ingredients and raising my eyebrows at fruits I knew not of until that moment.  I might spin the handmade-jewelry case a few times for good measure, and then it's just a skip, a hop, and a dangerous intersection to the thrift book shop.  Eagle Eye is my hidey-hole, a nook untouched by my hectic world of teenage concerns.  They've strapped a brass bell to the door handle that rings on my entrance.  The store is deeper than it's exterior suggests, but you could walk to the back in thirty strides, and from one wall to the other in ten.  The shelves are a foot shorter than me, so that most of my time there is spent stooped until I've collected my top picks, which I carefully spread on the carpeted floor and plop down criss-cross-applesauce to edit down to my soon-to-be purchases.  I can only imagine the looks on the faces of my fellow customers at a seventeen year old girl stacking classics like a seven year old stacks picture books--can only imagine it because when I'm sitting there, no one else matters.  I haven't come to be social, I didn't dress for company, I dressed for a day of book-watching and banana-bread-eating, and as I read first the back cover of one, and the first page of another novel, I smile in delight at my slightly-used new acquaintances pressed between pages of books I have stacked to tote home, whom I need not impress with flowery language or elegant dress, yet still speak to me like I'm an adult.

Lost

Not all who wander are lost. –– J.R.R. Tolkien