My Emotions Wrapped in Vines

Ok. I just finished up my 16 credits that I in a fit of ambitious vanitas thought would be a great idea for my summer vacation. I have precisely two weeks until my 20 credit fall begins, I'm still in the note-taking-research-gathering stage of my symposium paper, my friends are fleeing the area like krill evading humpbacked whales, they still haven't re-released chocolate cherry Diet Dr Pepper (it's like drinking a Tootsie Roll pop! The nation is being robbed of that tantalizing taste bud treasure!), and my haircut refuses to be as punked-out-Zooey-Deschanel as I would like. In essence, today I am a crank. And in the spirit of sloughing off personal improvement for my brief two weeks of academic freedom, I am going to sink into my crankiness. It's going to be like when Mowgli is falling asleep and Kaa makes him the bed of tree leaves that perfectly fold over and snugly ensconce Mowgli into a bed of green bliss, except this time the leaves are discontent and glowering resentment. So, as an outward expression of my momentarily ill-tempered soul-klavier, I present:

THREE WILDLY OVERRATED THINGS*

1. Raisins

Hey, here's a grape. A grape that we deliberately sucked all juice and flavor and delicious grapeness out of. Essentially, the raisin is the bottled water of California. They're just baffled, bemused, and boozing it up over the fact that we keep on paying them for this product.Wanna put it in hot cereal, so that it's withered, dusty, dry skin can get sorta wet and become a mushy insult to grapeness instead of a leathery one? Or hey, you could put it in bagels. Delicious, dense, shmear-covered bagels, which you would typically take luxurious bites of at will, but now you're held up every few minutes by the fact that you're not positive if you just ate an ill-fated potato bug that inexplicably made it into the bagel dough, or a dehydrated fruit whose presence is equally mysterious.

What an alarming way to start the morning.

Or, if you're feeling particularly vicious, you can use these ravaged once-refreshing morsels to trick your friends into thinking that they're about to enjoy a bite of carrot cake or cookie. How sad, how foolish of them to think that you actually liked them and wanted to give them chocolate. That'll show them to try and look after you when you're sick. They've received the message--you return favors by feeding people grapes that have been tortured and violated until they're a mockery of their own form.

Speaking of soulless pretenders to much greater things, let's move on to the second subject on our list:

2. Iron & Wine

First things first: only the best of the best can pull off having a band name for a one-man-show. Take a wild guess on whether I'd put you in that best of the best category. Also, if you notice that most other bands can only pull off having one or two tracks per album that reach your level of mellow non-music tinkering on the banjo, it's because they've discovered that if they pursue that level of non-dynamicism for all their songs people will mistake them for hack jobs who want you to fall asleep quickly before anybody notices that their music really isn't that good. And Samuel Beam, I really can't stress this enough: You must stop whispering. If you don't stop whispering each and every one of your mediocre melodies in a tone that implies that your sub par, vague lyrics carry the secrets of the world, I may have to attack your larynx with the ragged edge of my Diet Coke can. I think it would improve the sound. And maybe provide you with a brief glimpse into an actual range of emotion for your music.

An addendum: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel should be permitted to take turns flossing your teeth with their mandolin strings for having to suffer the indignity of their immortal "Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping" being compared favorably with your vastly inferior "Have I found you? Flightless bird, jealous, weeping. Or lost you? American mouth. Big pill looming." Sheesh. No wonder Kristen Stewart picked you for the Twilight soundtrack. Ohhh, burn.

3. Harry Potter movies

The number of times I read "My Harry Potter journey is coming to an end! *sob*" and various other forms of the same sentiment when the final movie came out made me want to rip my hair out. Well, most things make me want to rip my hair out these days. My hair sucks. But this one made me also want to rip out other people's unsuspecting hairs. And eye teeth. Apparently if I were a serial killer I'd be the type to collect trophies. Not unlike Voldemort. Which brings me back round to my point. You wanna know when yours, mine, and everybody's Harry Potter journey ended? July 21, 2007 when the last book was published. I remember getting off my shift at the greasy spoon diner I was carhopping for that summer, driving directly to Barnes & Noble, and buying two copies so that Alan and I wouldn't sabotage each other to read it first. That was the end of the journey. Cause Harry's scar hadn't hurt for nineteen years, and everything was all right. Finito.

If we were talking about film adaptations that reached the caliber of book adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and The Godfather, I'd be more willing to negotiate. But no director with a sweeping vision or love of the deeper themes of the story came in and crafted an interpretation that stayed true to the characters and narrative while taking liberties that brought out the sweetest notes of the underlying message. The Harry Potter movies are crass commercialization, a capitalization on a truly delightful world of possibility and imagination that got shoved unceremoniously through a thirty-year-old carbon copy machine, emerging smeared with ink and stretched until the paper itself was almost translucent from wear.

Instead of picking apart the entire series, I will highlight one character to make my point: Hermione Jean Granger. Brilliant. Passionate. Idealistic. Loyal friend. Bitingly sarcastic. Feisty. Impatient. Know-it-all. Socially awkward . . . . Hot? Pouty, whimpering, girly? Ew! Stop it. I feel betrayed by the movie franchise. Hermione was the example that people could still like you, that you could be valued on a totally different bar graph, that smarts really did stand alone as a value, that all of these elements were so much better than not having buck teeth and frizzy hair.

Am I over identifying here? Of course I am. Which only makes my criticism carry more weight, because I'm the key part of the demographic who had the most to lose in the movie's desecration of Hermione. If there is so much as one single "but she's hot" comment on this post, I will annihilate you with rubber bands. I don't care how long it takes. I will find a way.


I'mma gonna go watch Some Kind of Wonderful now. And listen to a lot of Heartless Bastards. But not at the same time. That would make no sense.

* I am perfectly aware that I am mortally offending some of my dear friends right to the quick with this list. Know that I still love you, see the above paragraph about how cranky I am, and . . . get over it? Too harsh? Kisses!