6 December 2002: Offstage

Two weeks to go in the semester; three final projects to complete.

Two hours ago I finished reading the fourth Harry Potter book.  I love the Harry Potter books.  I know some people who don't, but they're wrong.  Many of them are robot rebels, programmed to reject anything that becomes too popular.  But sometimes even really good things get popular.

I am fascinated by Severus Snape.  He's not supposed to be a likeable character, but my imagination keeps trying to turn him into one.  I imagine that offstage, in all the parts of his life that we're not reading about, he's much cooler; that the glimpses we catch of him in the books are the very worst facets of a complex and perhaps heroic man.  I picture him spending his summer vacations gathering new potion ingredients through the most spectacular swashbuckling adventures.  Kind of like an ill-tempered magical Indiana Jones.  This is the fault of the movies.  It's because he's played by Alan Rickman.  Now Snape looks like Alan Rickman in my mind, and how can one not like someone who looks like Alan Rickman?

I brought Dragon Lady to Vegas to meet my mom and dad.  They loved her.  Said I could keep her.  Came as close as two such determinedly non-directive parents can come to saying I had to keep her. 

I sure enough aim to.

Geminica writes of wanderlust.  She listens to Scottish and Irish music, quotes lyrics in her journal entries.  She yearns to travel again, to have adventures.  She yearns for freedom.

I overdosed on freedom long ago, and decided that it was an illusion, a devilishly addictive distraction of smoke and mirrors, just like control.

Now I know better.  The illusion of freedom is not like the illusion of control.  The illusion of freedom is the illusion of control.  The Devil's got a lot of ways to wrap it and pitch it, but he's only ever had one drug to sell.

No ballads of the green hills of faraway lands for me this fair December. I'm listening to Leonard Cohen's album The Future, over and over:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

And what do I yearn for?

For a hot new groove where all the machinery is just a little more transparent.