A Farewell To Old Friends

This past Friday at 12:01 a.m. marked the release of the 8th and final Harry Potter film. For a lot of the world, this didn't signify anything other than the last movie in a series that they felt was split to make sure they made as much cash as possible off of the franchise. For the rest of us, those devout Harry Potter fans, it meant so much more. I'm not sure what everyone's experience has been, but for me Harry Potter has been a life changing series.

I showed up late to the party with the books. The first one was released back in 1997, at the end of my Freshman year in high school, and I paid no attention. Even when I was working in the school library my Senior year and the librarian was posting articles from Time magazine about the phenomenon that was Harry Potter, I didn't really pay much attention. It wasn't until Jason was working for a store run by PBS and preparing for the release of the 4th book that I thought "Wow, this might be a big deal". He bought the books, brought them home and tore through them in just a couple of weeks and said "You have to read these. You have to". So I did, and that in itself was a game changer, because Jason and I had never shared the same taste in books before, but suddenly we had this commonality to work from and this addictive series to discuss and theorize over at length. Harry Potter brought us closer together. That's what this series does though, it brings people together. I can't tell you the number of people I've connected to through a common love of these books. When I worked for Waldenbooks, I bonded with staff and customers time and time again over how these books are not just a kids book series, but a common ground on which people can build relationships.

I don't think I would have gone into teaching if it hadn't been for Harry Potter. I know that sounds strange, but it's true. I spent so much time in the bookstore watching kids get excited for the release of a book in an age where the X-Box and iPod reigned supreme and I thought "It's not that kids don't want to read, it's that no one has made it exciting for them", and then I found myself thinking that maybe I could be that person. I suddenly wanted to be the person who lit that spark of fascination for kids who may not really care about reading. I wanted to excite people about books, and teach them how to think about them and analyze them and truly understand them. Selling books wasn't enough. I needed to teach them. So I went into education. Harry Potter put me on the path to a career that I would not have otherwise thought about going into, and it took my floundering uncertain 24 year old self and gave her purpose for the first time since she left high school. When I had the opportunity to meet J.K. Rowling, I was given about 3 seconds to say something to her. I said "Your books made me decide I wanted to teach" and her advice was "Don't be Snape".

My story is really just one of many, because fans all over the world can point to ways that this book series has changed their lives. Hank Green of Vlogbrothers fame saw his career launched when he wrote a song about the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The people of Haiti received 5 chartered jets filled with disaster relief and medical supplies from the HP Alliance, a charity group formed to carry the theme of the Harry Potter novels out into the real world through charitable deeds. A group of fans, young and old, who banded together to bring more love and good into the world, as inspired by the message J.K. Rowling so diligently wove into her novels. Their motto is "The weapon we have is love". Pretty powerful stuff to come out of a series of fiction novels.

My point is, these books have touched countless people, and changed lives in ways that no one would have initially expected. And now, as we reach the end of the series in its film form, we as fans come to a startling realization that we have nothing more to look forward to. We have nothing left but the relationships we have built, and the undiscovered paths that our lives will take as they have been touched by J.K. Rowling and her endearing characters. We have grown up with these books, these films, these characters. We have laughed and cried with Harry, Ron and Hermione. Now we are left to laugh and cry on our own. There will be no new experiences for us in the Potter universe, but there will always be new experiences elsewhere, and we will have to take what we have learned from Harry Potter along with us, and strive to carry on with creating a better world as we were inspired to do the first time we read those newly minted pages. As Dumbledore has said, "Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open". That is the world we strive for, thanks to the lessons we have learned from a small boy wizard and his friends.

So long Harry, and thanks for the ride.

Lest We Lose The Ability To Wonder

Friday marked NASA's final space shuttle launch, which I've been thinking about off and on ever since the media frenzy began a week or so ago. As much as I think it's sad that we are losing manned space flight, which has been a pretty large part of our scientific history for the past 50 years, and was once a huge rallying point for American morale, I find myself wondering if we're losing more than just the space shuttle. My worry is that we're losing the ability to wonder, and the ability to think "What if?" and then strive to answer that question.

When author Francois Rabelais died, his last words were "I go to seek the great perhaps". I feel like that's what our first voyage into space was, it was a deep need to go seek the great perhaps. Or, as my Star Trek geek husband would say, "to boldly go where no man has gone before". We did not go into space because it was easy, or because it was necessary. We went because we were spurred by that basic human need to reach for more than what is at our fingertips. We reached for the stars, and when they were too out of reach to come to us, we found a way to go to them. We went because we wondered what was out there, and we knew we would never be satisfied until we found that answer. Now, as we lose the ability as a nation to continue those voyages, I find myself saddened that we may be sacrificing our ability to wonder. I think about how there will be no elementary school children talking about how they want to grow up and go to space, because we won't be doing that anymore, and I feel infinitely saddened. I remember going to Kennedy Space Center with my family when I was 12, and my dad getting us up at the crack of dawn to drive out and watch a space shuttle launch, which didn't happen due to weather conditions, but I remember sitting there thinking about how exciting it must be to sit in that shuttle and blast through the atmosphere into a place that almost no one can say they've gone.

Space is one of the few things left in this world that we can explain, and yet remains a mystery. It inspires wonderment, and it inspires people to think beyond the world they know into the great perhaps, and it is quickly fading from our grasp. I don't want to lose that feeling, and that sense of pride at knowing that we have been able to accomplish putting people into space for so long. We were able to put people on the moon. If we weren't losing this amazing program, we could likely be putting people onto other distant planets, or traveling beyond our own solar system into the great unknown. So, what we lose is so much more than a tangible space program, we lose the ability to dream that something more is out there for us, and that we need only seek it and reach high enough to grasp it.

On Relationships

I've never been one of those people who talks a lot about how in luuuuurve I am, or about how Jason is the greatest "hubby" ever or anything like that. This is, primarily, because I feel like people who are always gushing about how in luuuurve they are or how they have the greatest spouse ever are either trying to prove to themselves that things really are that way, or they're trying to prove to others that they totally win at relationships. This might not necessarily be the case, but I generally feel that people who are actually in love and have good healthy relationships rarely ever have to talk about them. In general, I feel like if someone is happy in their relationship, it should be obvious and apparent without someone needing to tell people how incredibly happy they are.

I bring this up because I find myself reading a lot of Facebook statuses and blogs lately where people are talking about how AMAZING their relationships are, or how in luuuuurve they are, or how much they have struggled through to come out "stronger" on the other side and I find myself thinking "What makes you think you're different from any other couple on the planet?" I mean...think about it. Most "couple problems" are completely typical. Short of one of you having a horrible life threatening disease, or if you're dealing with serious infidelity and for some reason decide to remain together, there aren't a lot of problems that every other couple isn't also having. And I really hate the phrase "marriage is hard". No, ALL relationships are hard, but because marriage tends to be less disposable than other types of relationships, people think it's more difficult than any other relationship. Marriage does take work, just like any other relationship, but it doesn't have to be hard. If the person you married understands you, and cares about how you feel and what you want or need, then it's not nearly as hard as people think. I mean, I think back on all that Jason and I have "gone through", first living with my parents and sharing a room with my 2 sisters while he slept on the floor for a year, then living in our apartment with a roommate, then living in a cramped and cluttered house with his mom while we both worked full time and went to school full time, then moving into our own house with uncertain employment situations, going through various periods of one or both of us being unemployed, and I could say "Oh wow, we're so strong because we've been through so much without splitting up" but all I really think is "Well....that was life". It's not about going through stuff and coming out stronger for it, it's about just being strong in the first place and then the crappy stuff that happens doesn't matter. And, feeling like you have to go through things to make you stronger means that you can't be in a strong relationship without shitty things happening. If you can't be on the same page, or in the same place from the start, why be in the relationship at all? Why does anyone date/marry/befriend anyone who has to work really hard to be on the same page as they are? It makes no sense to me. Good relationships take work, but they feel easy. That doesn't mean that they don't have their bumps along the way, or are without conflict or argument, but the fixing process shouldn't feel like work. If it does, maybe it's the wrong connection to make.

So.....I guess what I think is that if I ever start talking excessively about how much I luuuuurve Jason, or how awesome he is, or how great and amazing and strong a relationship we have, that might be the time to start worrying the actual state of our relationship. For now, I think that being able to say "It just works" when people ask about the two of us. I don't need to give or receive mushy cards, or see Facebook statuses about how much Jason luuuurves me, or hear about how he can't live without me. We aren't that couple. I know he loves me, because he married me, and tells me at least once a day, and he puts up with all of my annoying BS. That means so much more than constant public affirmation. I find it so strange that other people feel the need for all the rest of that nonsense.

Once Upon a Time, I Wanted to be a Teacher

For me, one of the most frustrating things about my college experience was that I spent so much of it having no idea what I wanted to do. As a result, I spent a lot of time floundering, and a lot of money switching majors. I didn't graduate college until I was 27, where most of the people I graduated high school with were done when they were 22. They were on to careers and lives that I couldn't even begin to think about because I still hadn't managed to finish school. But then it happened, I had this great breakthrough and realized that of all the things in the world that I had bounced back and forth between, I always went back to this thought that I could be a teacher. It was the only constant in all of my floundering, and after spending a LOT of time with the kids in the drama department that I spend time volunteering with, I realized that it wasn't just what I could do, it's what I wanted to do. So I set out to teach. I literally put my nose to the grindstone, working 40 hours a week while going to school full time and finding space in there to sit down and do all of my reading and homework so that I could graduate with honors in an astounding 3 years for what should have been a 5 year program. I poured my entire life into this one goal, and when I received my diploma I thought to myself "I have finally accomplished something worthwhile" and from there I got.....nothing. No job in my field. No prospect of a job in my field. In fact, my state was cutting budgets left and right for schools and I found that instead of applying for open jobs, I was watching jobs get cut down to nearly nothing.

So there I was, a teacher with no one to teach, and I found that what few jobs there were within my area were being snapped up by teachers from other districts who had tons of experience and were laid off due to their own budget cuts. I found new teachers I had befriended constantly worried that they were going to be laid off at the end of the school year and left with no job prospects at all. I found myself wondering, why does anyone go into this field? Why was I so keen to go into it? I can't think of any other career where the low men on the totem pole have to worry every single year that they'll be laid off, and have to go to another school and start over where again, they'll be worried constantly that they'll be laid off at the end of each year. It's a thankless job, and at times it can be just as frustrating and difficult as it can be rewarding. It isn't a 9 to 5. It's a 24 hour a day job. It's a job where calling in sick is actually a luxury because you can't always get a sub, and if you can you still have to get up and write lesson plans for them so that your class isn't in chaos all day. It's a job where you watch your colleagues buy shoes for the underprivileged students in their classes, while parents and outsiders call them "lazy". It's a job where one or two bad apples ruin the reputation of the entire profession, and instead of parents asking "What can I do?" they ask "Why aren't you doing enough?" so that the uphill battle never ends.

And yet, I still wanted to be a teacher. A part of me still does, but when I look at the state of education, and the lack of value placed on being an intelligent and productive member of society, I'm not sure I have it in me to fight that battle for the rest of my life. Normally I'm a "Rise up, Fight the System!" sort of girl, but I've been unemployed or precariously employed for the past year and a half, and the idea of going right back into that where every year is a question as to where you'll be working the following year....I just can't take more of that instability. Plus, I watch my friends who are teachers constantly trying to do more with less as their funding gets cut to the bone, and at some point they're going to be teaching without any supplies at all and no one will fight for their sake because no one values education as an institution anymore. It's like every generation is more and more apathetic about the importance of knowledge and eventually it'll just be people lobbying against all forms of schooling. I want to fight the good fight, and I want to pursue the one goal that got me through college despite all of the work and exhaustion. I want to say "System be damned, I'm going to be what I set out to be", but the truth is.....I can't. Not only do I not have the opportunity, as more and more teaching jobs are slashed every day, but I don't have the capacity to tolerate the constant accusations of laziness, or delinquency, or a system that wants to pay based on how well your students perform on standardized tests despite the fact that the tests are biased and don't take into account disabilities of students. And beyond that, they don't take into account the sheer APATHY of students. The students who care so little about education that NOTHING any teacher does can pull them out of it, and their parents who feed that apathy. I've had students who do the bare minimum to be able to play a sport, or who don't care about anything outside of their iPod and their video games. No one talks about those students, who are fully capable but simply don't give a shit about anything. But my pay might be based on whether I can change that attitude in the mere 12 weeks I have them in class each trimester? I can't imagine such a world.

So I did....I wanted so badly to be a teacher. Now, with the state of the world we live in, I just don't know that I have it in me to do it.

The End of an Era

Anyone old enough to remember the morning of September 11, 2001 can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. For people like me, who were just out of high school at the time, September 11th was the Pearl Harbor of our generation. It too became a date which would live in infamy. The difference is that while Pearl Harbor marked our entrance into a war we had been staunchly attempting to avoid joining, it brought with it a sense of purpose and for our brothers in arms who were already fighting the good fight, it brought a sense of hope that renewed forces would soon end this bloody war. Our experience in the aftermath of September 11th did not bring hope for a faster end to our conflicts in the Middle East. Instead, it brought new fear that we were buckling down for a long battle with no real end in sight. And it has been a long battle. The "War on Terror" has surpassed the time the world spent fighting during WWII, and the victories have been few. The nation, who rallied around their troops during WWII, questioned the purpose of our missions overseas. While Pearl Harbor produced what we have come to call "The Greatest Generation", September 11th has produced the most fearful generation.

After the President's announcement last night that the White House was confirming the extermination of Osama Bin Ladin, I started thinking about what that really meant for the American people. I started thinking about my 8th graders I taught last year, and how young they were when all of this began. For those kids, who were 4 or 5 back in 2001, there is no real memory of a world prior to September 11th. They don't know that you used to be able to greet your loved ones at the gate in an airport, or that there was a time when you could fly somewhere without having to remove your shoes. They don't know of a time when the NBC Nightly News didn't have at least one update a week involving "The War on Terror", and they don't know of a time when it wasn't normal for the government to be able to tap your phone lines. For children who have grown up in a post 9/11 world, they have known nothing beyond the nation of fear we've been living in for the past 9 years. It boggles my mind that we have been searching for Bin Ladin for as long as my goddaughter has been alive. So I begin to wonder, what will this world look like for these children who have known nothing more than a life peppered with terror alerts? I do not presume the alerts will end any time soon, but with this shift in the chess game that is the war could mean a world that looks very different for these children, a world that may be more relaxed for the first time in their living memory.

While thinking about this impact on the current generation of young people, Jason mentioned that we were lucky to grow up in the 90's, in a time of economic prosperity and a fairly mild political climate. It seems that the 90's are set to become an idyllic era, much like the 50's, where we look back and say "Those were the good days" despite the fact that everything wasn't necessarily as picture perfect as it seems in retrospect. But last night, after we got the first real piece of decent news relating to this exhausting war, I felt for the first time a spark of hope that maybe...just maybe things were taking a turn for the positive. I am not silly enough to think that taking out one man can turn everything around overnight, or that it will even turn things around at all, but now I have the small glimmer of hope that maybe things can change.

I would be remiss if I did not also offer credit to President Obama for the speech he delivered late last night. His very demeanor began to swing the tone of this conflict. No longer were we in the "War on Terror", but instead we were in the "War on Al Quaeda". One line that took the terror away from the American people and replaced it with a being that seems real. A human force, which we could have hope of defeating. By fighting "Terror" we were fighting a nameless, faceless entity, and how does one begin to defeat a ghost, especially when that ghost is housed within our own personal fear centers? Now we have a force to recon with, and in one sentence he made that sound possible. While the American people rejoiced in front of the White House, our President called this only a "Significant Achievement", not a victory. The way this was handled by the Oval Office was with poise and dignity. We are not through the woods, but it seems we've found a brief clearing.

Some Days, We Are All Princesses

It seems that since November, the media has been abuzz with gossip, speculation, and excitement over the impending marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. There has been press about the preparations, the ring, and the dress, along with nearly any other minute and seemingly meaningless detail that may be related to the wedding. And we ate it up. We, as a general human populace, fell in love with the idea of this wedding just as the groom fell in love with his bride. Sure, there were a ton of people who whined and complained about the news coverage and held fast to the opinion that it was just a wedding and shouldn't be awarded so much attention, but I think on some level, everyone was curious about it.

But why do we, a nation of people who fought against the rule of monarchy, find such fascination with Royalty and all of the pomp and excess that comes with it? I blame Disney. Are there any of us who have not been raised on the fairy tale stories of the Grimm Brothers as presented through the saccharine sweet filter of Disney films? Of course we are fascinated with royalty! Our childhoods were built upon it! I can't think of any little girl who did not grow up wishing she could some day be a princess, or any little boy who did not dream of daring sword fights and far off adventure. The fact is, the British royals are the only connection we have to a romanticized time long past, a time that fairy tales were made of. And perhaps that's what makes this particular wedding so appealing. For once, it feels like the living of a real fairy tale. A normal girl with no claim to nobility somehow growing up to meet a prince and live a happily ever after that every little girl dreams of. Of course there is a clear understanding that happily ever after exists only in fairy tales, and the reality of a royal life is bogged down with duty, tradition, and a public scrutiny that few would envy, but we can't seem to detach ourselves from the pure fantasy of it all. We get to see fairy tales played out in front of us, and in some way it allows us all to imagine "What if that were me?" for just a short time. So on Friday, as so many sat glued to their television and watched the most talked about wedding of the decade, every girl young and old became a princess for a few hours. Every boyfriend, fiance and husband became a prince, and for a short time the fairy tale became real for us all. Maybe that's why people couldn't seem to tear themselves away from it. Plus, who doesn't love a good wedding?

And they all lived happily ever after...

Procrastination and Projects Don't Mix

All right, so remember when I was bitching about needing a project and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to accomplish that goal? Yeah...me too. Although, it's not entirely true that I didn't do anything to accomplish that goal. I bought paint. I bought it, and then I felt deeply accomplished in my paint purchasing abilities. I then proceeded to allow the cans of paint to sit in the rooms they were intended for and collect dust. They were AMAZING at that. They collected dust like it was nobody's business. Normally I have more follow through with things like this, but for some reason the motivation died shortly after that paint purchase. I'd like to say that I was busy, or that I was caught up in something important, but the truth is that the reason my motivation died can be summed up with a simple math equation: me=lazy.

But, sometime back in the middle of January, we did paint the bathroom. This was partially because Jason got tired of me whining, and partially because Jason was annoyed that the closets downstairs, as well as the one in our bedroom, desperately needed to be painted to rid them of the weird musty smell they had when we first moved in. We hadn't been able to find a way to get rid of it no matter what we did, so we decided to paint because it was the only thing we hadn't tried yet. So, I said we should just make a day of painting and I could work on the bathroom while he did the closets. This was enough to make appease him and convince him to let me paint. So we did.

And the bathroom went from this, a dark room with gross pinky-brown paint and the darkest blue accent wall ever.

To this, a much nicer and calmer green, complete with new bamboo shade. I was pretty disappointed with the color, because it was more minty looking than I really wanted, but in comparison to the dark blue and brown, it's a HUGE improvement.

Then, a month or so later we were waiting around the house to go catch a movie with my cousin, and we had about two hours to kill before we could leave so I got bored and decided to start cutting in around the trim in the bedroom in hopes that it would motivate my lazy butt to actually do the rest of the room. I got most of the cutting in done, except for what I couldn't reach because I didn't have the time to move the furniture. I'm not sure if it's absolutely necessary to say this, but it didn't really work. For the most part, it did nothing other than leave me staring at a weird band of blue that was ringing my room. I guess the partially painted room finally wore Jason down, because today after we had mowed the lawn and cleaned out the garage, he came in and announced that we should paint the bedroom. So, after months of having a partially painted room, we finally got it done.

So the bedroom went from this, big giant dark room with the same navy blue and same ugly pinky-brown as the bathroom. The worst part about the original paint job was that no matter how clean the room was, the brown always made it feel like it was dirty. And it always felt so dark and closed in, which didn't exactly make it inviting.

To this. The blue photographs paler than it actually is, but it's a nice blue-gray that makes the room look much bigger and brighter. The white furniture and all of the trim looks nicer against the walls, and most importantly it looks clean. And, my green duvet cover doesn't look out of place in the room anymore, which is awesome because I love that duvet cover.

So there it is. The culmination of both my whining and my procrastination. The final product of the stirring of some amount of restlessness in me months and months ago. Now I'm glad I did all of the whining back then, since I'm really happy with the result now, but it probably would have been nice if I'd actually done it sooner. Oh well. Live and learn.