Awkward moments with my dad.

Why do the gross commercials with gyrating women selling something always show up when I'm watching TV with my dad? Or that one with the guy grinning from ear to ear because some pill is giving him a bigger wang? It's just uncomfortable. I don't want to acknowledge the presence of sex in the presence of my dad. I just wanna watch VH1 recap Saturday Night Live in the 2000s. I'm starting to think there's an evil little man living in my TV who makes these horrible commercials come on whenever my dad is in the room. Never when I'm alone.

But my dad is, thankfully, cool as a cucumber when this happens. This completely suggestive and cheesy Trojan ad for a "personal massager" showed up when we were watching the SNL retrospective, and while I promptly hid in my sweater, he just says "Jesus, I thought this was an SNL skit."

Go dads.

Up to Speed

A lot has happened since I last wrote here. Let's break it down.

Don't Ask Don't Tell got repealed! This coincided with the day I returned home for break, and the night that Titanic was shown commercial-free on USA Network. I obviously watched the whole thing. It's only been one of my all time favorite, would-take-this-to-a-desert-island movies since I was thirteen. Why would I pass up a chance to watch it uninterrupted by peppy people trying to make be buy cat food and moderately priced electronics?

I had just gotten to the part where Leo was showing Kate his drawings of the one-legged prostitute from Paris, when my dad emerges from his office and says, all matter-of-factly, "Leo was pretty adorable in this movie."

I like to think this was his way of celebrating the DADT repeal.

Then of course was the obligatory "I'm back in New York let's go to Manhattan and shop" day. I had tea with my sister and a friend from school, then we wandered around the Union Square holiday market getting gifts for people including ourselves. It was very cold. But we found refuge in a nearby coffee shop that also sold frozen yogurt. That sounds like a dream one would have after bad takeout but it really happened. There was an attractive Scandinavian-looking fellow sitting at the counter who totally saw us checking him out in the reflection in the window.

Five minutes later it was Christmas. I spent it eating way too much food and opening boxes with sweaters in them and trying not to flinch when my poor grandmother examined my nose ring. I hate to admit it, but I was kind of thankful the blizzard forced us home early. I was all too happy to collapse into the couch and watch The Daily Show OnDemand for hours.

As for today, I'm trying to be productive but all I want to do is nap. My dad and I are thinking of seeing a movie tonight, but I can't decide if I want to go highbrow or lowbrow. I know I should see "The King's Speech" so I have something to say during the Oscar broadcast and I can only gush about "Black Swan" for so long, but I've always had this lingering thing for Barbara Streisand and Dustin Hoffman as The Fockers. Maybe I'll ditch both those ideas and see "True Grit" because it'll still give me something to talk about during the Oscar broadcast and I've always had a lingering thing for Matt Damon. Any leading man who goes for a recurring guest spot on 30 Rock is a keeper in my book. Even better if they're from Boston. Hooh-rah.

I'm the worst college student ever?

LolCats are funny only when you haven't slept enough.

I can't pull an all nighter. I tried. I really did. I had to write a fifteen page paper and do some research for it too. But at around 5am I decided to take a two hour power nap. I would snooze for two hours, let dances of Northern Irish youth dance in my head (that's what my paper was on), wake up feeling great at 7am, crank out fifteen pages by 5pm and that that would be that. So I collapsed onto my bed, woke up at 7am as planned, hit the snooze because it was still dark out (thanks a lot, winter), and trudged downstairs, where I promptly fell asleep on the couch for THREE HOURS.

I felt really lame because I thought this was finally my night to be a hardcore college student and stay up all night like the boss I am. But I'm clearly an old person who needs sleep.

I wrote the paper in about seven hours. It ended up being 11 pages instead of 15. But that's okay, I hope so.

Tonight is my last night before winter break. I'm taking myself to see Black Swan, because no one is here anymore. Then I might delete some of the weird Pandora stations I made during finals, because I get cravings for music I don't normally listen to when I'm writing finals. This semester, it was 80s power ballads. My modmate was blasting them while we pounded out our last papers. It was kind of great. So monumental. Eventually I made a Pandora station based on "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams and "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" came on while I was writing my last few paragraphs on Northern Ireland. It was weird and made too much sense for my life.

Charlie Brown, you get me.

Whew. I finally feel like a human being after feeling like less than one for a while. A lot of his has to do with getting an extension on one of my finals, which really balanced my work out a lot more than it was before. Also, I kicked ass on my presentation for one of my classes. It was on Northern Ireland's peace lines. I'm getting really fascinated with that conflict, probably because it seems like no one in the US really talks about it. Most of the books I've found on the subject are from the UK or Ireland, and you don't see anyone throwing benefit concerts here for Ulster or making "Save Belfast" t-shirts. I still wonder why that is.

Anyways, I'm surviving finals with the help of coffee and peppy music. I'm loving Girl Talk's new album and my Ting Tings radio station. Also, I have an appropriate finals week desktop background:
Charlie Brown, you get me.

Whiplash

Thanksgiving break is basically over. I have to be on a train back to my second home in about ten hours, and it feels like just yesterday I was getting off that damn thing. I had plans to get everything done while I was here. I was going to do work on my big bed, see Harry Potter with the family again, maybe see some friends, run all my errands like a boss, and generally feel on top of shit.

But I spent it watching Youtube, getting into fights with the family members I live with, crying about said fights and also about dead pets (Our parakeet died and left the other one without a buddy, and I'm still torn up about my darling Penny) and eating way too much food. Well maybe that last one isn't so bad. But I got no work done and I'm just exhausted. Emotionally and physically. I don't feel like me vs. finals will be a fair match. But maybe I'll pull a miracle out from somewhere. I do have four hours on a train tomorrow. Those will hopefully be cozy and productive. I'll try and nab a seat by the window so I can see what the world looks like from Stamford to Amherst. That would be nice.

Why I am raising my future offspring on Harry Potter

In three hours, I'll be sitting in a movie theater with popcorn and caffeine in hand, having heart palpitations as the lights dim and the first installment of Deathly Hallows begins. The beginning to the end of an era.

I've been a Harry Potter fan since I was about ten years old. So basically for half my life. My mom and I used to take turns reading pages of The Sorcerer's Stone, which started out slow but ended up being something neither of us could put down no matter how long past my bedtime it was getting. Even at that young an age, I knew how special this book was. Beneath all the fantasy and magic (which was fantastic as well) there was something undeniably real. These kids had real problems and personalities. I thought they were a lot like me and I was honestly a little bit surprised and devastated when I didn't get a Hogwarts letter delivered to my house.

Harry Potter and I grew up together, in a way. As I got older, so did the books. Harry and Ron got into fights about things just like my friends and I did. I had teachers who didn't like me just like Professor Snape had it out for all the Gryffindors. On days when I fought with my parents, I prayed that the Weasleys would adopt me into their house and Molly would knit me a sweater with an "L" on it. As I applied to colleges in junior year, I felt pangs of sadness because I knew, no matter how much I wanted it to be real, Hogwarts would never exist in the world I lived in and I couldn't just delete my Common App account and go there to double major in Charms and Divination and minor in flirting with attractive wizard boys.

I love that Harry Potter exists in this world and is such a major part of culture. I think a lot of fantasy books geared towards young people today tend to be either wildly unbelievable or just poorly written (I'm looking at you, Stephanie Meyer. But I'll save my Twilight rant for another blog post.) Harry Potter books are neither of those things. The characters are so developed and the world they live in so intricately detailed that you'd believe it was nonfiction. This is probably why all the deaths have hit me so hard. I was legitimately depressed for a long time after she killed Fred in book 7 (This may have also had something to do with my literary crush on him.)

Now we get to the part where I address the title of this post. Yes, I am saving my Harry Potter books so I can read them with my kids. I plan to start when they're eleven and keep going until they're seventeen, just like those little chaps at Hogwarts. I want my kids to know things that these books talk about. Like how you can be happy without having a lot of money (If I make a living from writing books, they're going to have to learn this for sure), how when people die, they can't ever come back but you can still keep them in your memory, how you don't have to go into dark rooms by yourself to be brave (Looking at you, Neville Longbottom.) If I have a daughter, I want her to know that like Hermione Granger, you can be smart and pretty at the same time and as long as you just be yourself the guy of your dreams will eventually come around.

I'm getting a bit sentimental, I know. But these books mean a lot to me, and I've got them on the brain now because I'm going to my first Harry Potter midnight showing tonight. It'll be an excellent night and I can't even stand how excited I am right now. But I'll probably have to look away when Hedwig dies, because that is going to make me cry hard.

The perks of staying in.

That's me, stumbling around with a case of the giggles. Just another Thursday night at 51, thank goodness. Sometimes, living here is more than alright.

I didn't realize until this year that when you go out and try to find a decent party to crash, you miss things like a rerun of Hugh Jackman hosting SNL with musical guest Mick Jagger. Heaven on earth, people.

OH MY GOD THE JARRET'S ROOM SKETCH IS STARTING. It's supposed to take place at Hampshire, you know? After ignoring a few factual details, I realized that Horatio Sanz's character looks like every single lovable stoner here. So basically everyone here.

In other Hampshire-y news, one of my professors played a video montage of World War One doctor W.H.R. Rivers set to that Sarah McLachlan song from the ASPCA ads that I always have to change the channel during. Yup. My professor is a fangirl for a World War One doctor, and so I had to sit through a montage of pictures and video clips from the biopic set to a song that usually accompanies sick kittens. I have a Pavlovian response to it. It makes me reach for a remote. But there was no remote. So I just had to sit uncomfortably while stifling a case of inappropriate giggles. You can't make this shit up. Even if you're a creative writing concentrator.