"Part of me wants to hide. The part that's burned" - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, Once
I have a house guest this week. Next month, she'll no longer be a guest. We'll share this apartment that's well sized for one but not quite there for two. I spent much of this past week preparing for that coming change: creating space where there is little; clearing shelves; imagining the things we'll need; envisioning what our lives will look like shortly.
Together.
Her paintings sit on chairs whose purpose just a few days ago was collecting dust. Her dresses hang on the side of the closet that I've always thought of as mine even as I've lived alone. The other one has always been intended for someone else, I suppose, but it never occurred to me that it was probably better suited for my things. And so we change, adapt, and adjust. These are things I'm good at. The possibilities are starting to appear. A new cabinet will be acquired to add pantry space. My workspace will need to be reconfigured for two. I'm going to have to figure out what to do with all these damn comic books. She's laid claim to a corner for her easel and I can already see it there even though it won't be here until Christmas.
I'll be watching more Animal Planet and Real Housewives soon.
Together. Together like today when we shopped at the farmer's market picking up more fruits and vegetables than I ever do. We tried the African Sammoussa stand that I never try. We let our minds race and wander through Bookstar that began as a futile search for Decoded (sold out...twice this week) and ended as debates about how many books and magazines we should actually buy.
Together. Together like this evening when she joined me at the annual Friends' Early Thanksgiving Dinner. Together like before this evening when she watched me utterly fail at cooking. Together like coming home full of food and drink and good fellowship. Together like falling asleep on the couch on a Sunday night watching TV.
Together.
I could get used to this.
- The Best Thing I Saw This Week: Easily, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part 1. Runner-Up, Pit Bulls & Parolees.
- The Best Thing I Heard This Week: Last week's Mayer Hawthorne remains tops but that encouraged a listen to other Youth Soul artists like Eli "Paper Boy" Reed and Kings Go Forth.
- The Best Thing I Read This Week: I didn't read much this week but I am enjoying this Batman, Incorporated storyline in the Batman Books
- The Thing I Read This Week That Most Resonated:
My great love is for Hermione Granger, one of Harry’s best friends, a girl born to human parents with magical abilities, who I believe is perhaps the greatest and most progressive popular romantic heroine of a generation. When makeover narratives were the single most prevalent romantic storyline in popular culture, Hermione got the guy in the library, dressed up for the Yule Ball, and returned placidly to her regular routine. Hermione didn’t transform herself because she never particularly felt the need to be transformed.
Her concern for house elves—magical creatures who are essentially wizards’ slaves—started out as comedy and ended up as the early articulation of the novels’ great moral concerns for equality, as well as one of the most moving sequences (and some of the best writing) of Deathly Hallows. Ultimately it is she, rather than Ron or Harry, who undergoes real and prolonged torture at the hands of the Death Eaters, and it’s she who survives that torture with her dignity and her friends’ secrets intact.
The things that make Hermione a scold, a nerd, a pain, a victim in the early pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone are the things that make her a heroic, lovable woman. What changes is how she expresses her intellectualism and her social convictions.
Why? Because Alyssa Rosenberg succinctly captures all that is awesome about Hermione and why she is my favorite character throughout the books and why that's less true in the movies (except for The Prisoner of Azkaban).
