Expecto Patronum

I remember the first time I ever heard about Harry Potter.

It was 1999. I was ten years old, in fourth grade, and had a habit of doodling on every single piece of paper any teacher ever handed me. My mom was a cafeteria manager at a local elementary school; a job she dreaded going to, but had to because otherwise she'd have no money to support her two young children as a single mother.

The word Harry Potter had been bandied about during the school day by various people my age, though I had no clue as to what it was, other than a new book that was apparently causing quite a stir among conservative parents and schoolteachers. When I got home, I mentioned this to my mom, and she said, with a frown, "Well, let me read it first, see if it's okay, and then if it's fine, you can read it."

From the time when we were first able to look at books, my mom gave them to us. She read to us constantly as children (a family tradition that carried over into our teenage years and eventually our adult years as well), encouraging us to embrace the written word, to find our own among the words and languages of the times. Fortunately for her, both my older brother and I fell prey to the same thing - we both became avid readers - when I went to the library, I'd check out a dozen books at a time (something that has since grown into checking out between 20-30 books at a time and then taking forever to return them; I'm pretty sure if the library had a blacklist, I'd be at the very top) something I am very grateful for because it gave me a chance to escape into other worlds, to lose myself in Narnia or delve deep into the ground with the Rats of Nimh.

My mother was never one for censorship except the personal kind, a trait I later adopted. It was up to us to decide what to read, but she gave us guidelines, gave us pointers on what was better and what was probably not something we'd like. With all of the controversy surrounding Harry Potter, what with people claiming it was "satanic" and that it "promoted witchcraft," she decided she would give it a one read once over and let us know if there was anything up with it.

Two days later she came back, scoffing, and said "There's nothing wrong with it, I don't know what's wrong with people these days. It was a really good book, very creative."

She gave the book to my brother and I, and both of us greedily read it cover to cover within a few hours (we were both fast readers, he and I). And just like that, our journey - which would span over the course of the next twelve years - started.

After the first book had been read again and again and again until the cover was practically falling off and my mom had to take it away to keep it intact, the second book came out. Only this time, instead of reading it all by ourselves, my mom volunteered to read it aloud to my brother and me. She'd done this in the past, first with the Narnia series, and then with a variety of solo books, such as Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, The Blue Cat of Castletown, and, one of my all-time favorites, The Westing Game. She liked keeping our minds active with all of these stories, but it was also a special time that we could spend together as a family, something that didn't happen very often. So of course we said yes, we very definitely had to have her read the second book aloud to us.

So she read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Two years later it was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

And then - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

By this time, the entire Harry Potter series had gained considerable fame, leaping from just a controversial book about witches to an entire culture, a series that shot so fast into popularity and demand that it was a shock to both the author (bless J.K. Rowling) and everyone else around her. The first movie had been contracted almost immediately after the first book had come out (Warner Bros. bought the rights in 1999, the same year that the Sorcerer's Stone book was released), and it literally screamed into life, smashing records and being nominated for many awards right off the bat.

My family and I were, suffice it to say, entirely immersed in Harry Potter and everything it came with.

It wasn't just about the stories themselves, however, which entranced us and drew us in so easily it was almost scary. It was about the fact that this series, which extreme religious groups and various nutcases around the world were calling "satanic" and "anti-family" and "promoting witchcraft," were, in fact, almost the direct opposite of what they were claiming. If anything, the entire series revolves around the concept of family, whether by one definition or another. My own family loved the magic, which was not just in the books, but in the writing itself, how it let us be a family together, how it drew us closer together. When we read together, it was something we all did, together, every one of us. It was a special time for us to be a family, and the values and morals within Harry Potter mimicked our own, which made us feel as though both it and we were doing something right.

When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, I was there, at midnight (well, 5 AM to start with, and then later 5 PM to wait), to pick up the final book. I came home, expecting everyone to be asleep, but both my mom and my older brother - and now my little brother - were up in my mom's bed, all of them waiting excitedly for me to get home so that we could read.

I was eighteen years old and had just graduated from high school. My brother was nineteen years old and had already finished his first year of college. And yet we still clambered, as adults, into my mom's bed, lay beside her, and listened to her read us a story.

My mom read aloud until 2 AM - and for a woman that goes to bed almost no later than ten every day, this was an incredible feat.

We went to sleep at 2 AM, then woke up at 8 AM and started reading again. And my mom read aloud to us, from 8 AM to about 5 PM that day, only stopping very briefly to get something to eat, before we finally finished.

And then it was done. And we all cried a little (or in my case, sobbed buckets of never ending tears that probably soaked my pillow for days), because it was finally, inevitably, irreparably, done.

Except it wasn't, not really. Because, to quote Supernatural, "nothing ever really ends, does it?"

There were the movies, which were still ongoing, but just because the books had "ended" did not mean that the magic had. We had spent all these years growing closer together because of this single series that no one thought would be anything, and those were moments that I cherished and loved and remembered.

Later on, it would become a tradition in my family to reread all seven books as a family every year. We've already started this year's; we're on The Prisoner of Azkaban now, and I like taking it slow because I like burying myself deep into the pages of the story and letting it surround me.

Due to this little book, this little series, I've gained good friends, close friends, that I love and adore. I've gained an appreciation of life, of "magic," whether real or whatever you perceive it to be, of family and friends and sadness and grief and anger and frustration and most importantly of all, of love and laughter and life. I've never had a series impact me so profoundly, nor so positively, than this, and nothing ever really will come close to Harry Potter. It is truly a "magical" series, whether you believe it or not

J.K. Rowling won't ever see this, but if I could, I would tell her how much I appreciate her giving me this in my life because even though it's not, I feel like it's personal. It's something I hold near and dear to my heart, and it's something that drew my family together, whether it be my biological family or the family I adopted and chose to have (Jenan, Andi, Sarah, Neisha, all of you guys - I'm looking at you). I would tell her how thankful I am to have something like this in my life, because that one little series, that one simple book series has, in its own way, entirely changed my life and for that I am eternally grateful.

Happy birthday, J.K. Rowling - you will, and forever be, on that special shelf in my heart for people that I am most grateful for but have yet to have the opportunity to meet. Even if I never get to meet you -

- thank you.

That Awkward Moment When...

Do you ever have those moments where you just feel completely and utterly and very annoyingly stupid about things?

For example:

Say there is a group of people. Said people are talking about something or other, something you're not quite sure about (like whether or not Kim Kardash and Kanye really did name their kid North West, like they're in a Cary Grant movie or something). And, when you try to explain that you honestly have no clue what's going on, you're brushed off, given a quick reply, and/or not really helped at all because people tend to get frustrated when they have to explain things forty-two times to the same person.

Sometimes I'm pretty certain my brain works at a lesser capacity than most.

For one thing, I am outrageously forgetful over lots of things, such as doing homework (when I was in school, that is), understanding the laws of physics, putting away my shoes in the closet, picking up my jacket off the floor. And I am stupidly in touch with remembering all the entirely useless facts about life, such as how many Star Trek: Voyager episodes it took before it became glaringly obvious Janeway and Chakotay were in love with each other, or that Random Person X was a completely mundane and ordinary extra on some movie or another. You'd think that when you reach a certain age, your brain realizes what should stay and what should go, but apparently my brain still hasn't gotten that memo yet.

Either way, it's never fun to feel stupid, especially when  all you want to do is fit into a group. Nobody likes feeling as though they don't quite belong, and since I've lived for most of my life being That Friend that people mostly forget about, it's really something that I can relate to.

This is a review blog, but hopefully it won't make anyone feel stupid or ignorant. I know how that feels, and really, in the end it's not all that important what you know. It's how you use the knowledge you have that ultimately proves to be the most interesting - and the most defining of a person. So it's okay that I know twelve good uses for Swiss Cheese, but someone else might know twelve good uses for Gouda. I know what I know, you know what you know, and basically, if we combine these two vast wells of knowledge, we'll be able to rule the world properly.

And have a lot of cheese while doing it.

In the Beginning...

For the record, this wasn't my idea.

It was an accumulation of various useless thoughts and a cornucopia of weird and/or totally unhelpful information, as well as a small dab of peer pressure from those who said "this would be a Good Idea" (famous last words).

Sure, I've wanted to be a writer since I was about six years old and figured out that crayons could be used to draw instead of eat (they never tasted like the color I wanted), but managing a blog - or any type of online thing that requires more than just a minute to check and involves longer than putting my slippers on hasn't exactly been my forte (re: all those online classes I did terribly at). I suppose it was only inevitable that I start one of these things - I've been told that it's good practice, that it shows good initiative, that it will start me on the path to greatness - 

Oh wait, no, that was Slytherin.

At any rate, I finally sat my not-so-little butt down and decided to get cracking in the blogosphere (or whatever the term is for it these days). And as for another thing, the inner ramblings of a twenty-something year old who's way too obsessed with all things Supernatural and Harry Potter can probably get a little tiring after awhile. Not to mention I probably smell like flavored Tootsie Rolls, I eat too much beef jerky, and I'm pretty certain I talk to my cats more than I talk to actual people these days.

As it turns out, I've decided one of my (few) talents involves writing - and another involves knowing stupid amounts of useless facts and minutiae about things that aren't really useful in the everyday world. But really, what does it matter if you know the sixty-fourth number of Pi, or you solved the prime factorization of RSA-210 (thanks, Misha) or if two trains leaving their respective stations at the same time will reach each other in approximately six point two minutes, give or take a second? Where some's talents lie in mathematical equations (and that's great, there's gotta be at least SOME people in this world who know how to do that, because my brain hurts just thinking about it), other's talents lie in eating copious amounts of Almond Hershey's Kisses and reciting the lyrics to every N*Sync song known to (wo)man. Or perhaps your talents lie in being able to understand a word I'm saying in this long paragraph of nonsensical ramblings.

Basically, this blog will be a mishmash of All Things and will generally involve a healthy amount of the aforementioned television show and books, and will probably also offer generally useless reviews on other such nonsense such as ice cream flavors, terribly unhealthy yet still delicious fast food joints, weird or strange happenings in the world, as well as a large dose of books, movies, TV shows, music, People That Make Me Happy (PTMMH), and other things that make up a Mandy (shaken, not stirred).

So if I haven't already scared you off, feel free to sit back, kick up your feet, and listen to my inner monologues, most of which I'm guessing won't really have an impact on much of anything, except to amuse my own self and perhaps my very supportive mother.

Still, it's fun to know that at least one person will read this, at the very least.