Its way of lessening the distance between artists, authors, and other people we admire is my absolute favorite reason for the micro-blogging social network. (A close second place is how it has changed the way I think in my own head. In pithy little statements on life and what’s occurring in mine.)

I have squealed in delight when a respected writer or journalist responds to me on Twitter. It’s like little brushes with fame, or relative fame, and with people whose work you greatly admire but that you would almost never meet in your entire life. Yet here, on Twitter, it’s like they are those living, breathing people, who pass their thoughts along into the Twitter-sphere like the rest of us.

The relationship between authors/writers and social networking is also changing our perception and idea of what exactly makes the writer/artist. And as the title of this post suggests (and the NYT article from which it came), the digital age is transforming the way we understand authorship. I, after all, am also a digital author, this website as my outlet for things that would only otherwise exist in my head or among my friends and family (who can only hear me ramble about some things so many times before tiring, understandably). This blog has changed the way I communicate with everyone around me, and so has Twitter. So it makes sense that it is doing the same thing to professional writers, authors, journalists, artists everywhere, best-sellers or no. Some authors become humorists on Twitter, as it becomes an outlet for personas they didn’t have an outlet for elsewhere. The internet is well-known to affect people’s actual or perceived personas. The fascinating New York Times article on authors tweeting is well worth your time:

At their best, social media democratize literature and demystify the writing process. As Suzanne Fischer tweets of following her favorite author, “It’s fascinating to learn what an unsettling & emotional process it is for her to write characters into the world.” When that mythic author comes down for a chat, she gets followers.

Some of my favorite people to follow on Twitter:

@patricox / Patrick Cox, reporter for PRI’s The World, and creator/host of The World in Words podcast on all things language.

@elizabethlittle / Author Elizabeth Little. She has the best sense of humor. I think we would be excellent real-life friends.

@jenny8lee / Jennifer 8. Lee: Journalist, freelancer, author, Chinese-American. Her real middle name is 8.

1954 sampling of Christmas decorations, which were one way that people made use of electricity in the Tennessee Valley, and the reason someone was paid by the TVA to document and photograph these things.

One day last week, I spent the morning compiling and digitizing documents to go in an exhibit case we have in the lobby of the Archives, and the goal was to fill it with Christmas-y documents that we have there at the Archives. Hard when you’re a non-religious institution that does not keep records of… I don’t know, religious events? So I found some WWI draft cards with names like “Dasher” and “Reindeer” and “Santy Claus” (A REAL PERSON!) and the rest of the reindeer. I also pulled a man named Partridge and a man named Peartree, my favorite pairing.

Another view of those wise men creeping towards that branch thing.

But we used some TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) photos from the 1950s, where someone had gone around and documented what people did with electricity. (It is wonderfully fantastic that someone has this job. I imagine an amateur photographer trying to expand his novice abilities.) One of those uses for electricity was Christmas decoration, in the home and outside the home. It is a fantastic collections of photos, and I was ogling over them, studying every bit of each photo–having just ended an entire semester in material culture class where we studied kitsch, consumerism, and what people buy, make, and keep in their lives. So this set of photos was an absolute treat to pour over, one at a time. I want to digitize some for myself, they are so special. So far I have digitized three of them, the one above, and two that I will be printing and framing for my mom.

They are accidentally artistic. I think whoever was taking the photos was trying to make them look classy and professional, setting up backdrops, and placing each item in a vignette. But the background walls, floors, electricity outlets, and other elements belie all that, making them ironic, stark and cold, and all the more fascinating. The photographer obviously had the rights kinds of professional equipment. Someday, I would love to write some sort of scholarly piece on the kitsch of Christmas decor in the 1950s, using this goldmine of photos.

Snowman couple, with illuminated "snow" behind them

Each one was more mistakenly charming than the last. I was examining the light fixtures, the wall colors, the window blinds, the chairs, the floor tiles, the table designs, and the use of shadows–all elements surrounding the actual focal points. I also found each item to grandly reflect the same kind of kitschy things we have continued to use over the years, and that take on more memory and sentimental meaning for us as the years go by. We realize over time the things we loved as children or adults may have been a bit tacky, or cheap, or downright weird, but this often endears holiday decorations to us more. We keep plenty of things we’ve collected for the holidays that we might not otherwise keep, because of the way we feel around this season, the memories we keep of family members being around us, or of the effort they may have put into making an item. Also, since we don’t have to look at them all year, and they are packed away all that time, they are welcomed back into our vistas each year more cheerfully than if we had had to look at the holly creation atop a dresser all year round.

We didn’t talk extensively about holiday fare in my class, but we talked about style, kitsch, memory items, family heirlooms, items associated with loss, love, memorial, and all of these things influence our relationship to and meaning applied to the holiday season, and Christmas.

A tad scary-looking tree taking over this door

I know there are particular things I will never forget in homes that have been the backdrop to Christmas memories: I have vey specific memories of my Auntie Nessa’s house from the early and mid ’90s, plush carpets, low lights, Amy Grant playing, a very tall Christmas tree, and villages set up with snow and a pathway across one of her long tables. (This is a strange memory to keep, since we have not been to that house since this era, she no longer owns it, nor hosts Christmas events.) My grandma and grandpa’s houses, both the Maple Street and Birch Street locations, in Kingsford, harbor Christmas Eve memories too, warm lighting and protection from the outside cold, so many cookies–the best gingerbread–I could never begin to eat them all, or fathom recreating the amount. Loving family around me, socked feet, Christmas clothing, taking pictures. Grandma’s tree with the ornaments we’d all made for her decades ago by now. And my parents’ homes through the years, always filled with happy decorations, numerous themed trees gracing corners and cozy spots throughout. My mom often did up a few together, a little Christmas tree forest, including the Happy Meal toy tree that took us upwards of 15 years to collect toys for, and took a few years in construction itself as well–this tree continues to make children happy and joyful, even as my Mom’s own children have grown and moved out of the house. I always loved how very tall and thin it is, taking on a caricature nature that reflects all the playful toys that grace its branches; some of those ditties are from the late 1980s, my earliest days of youth. Vintage!

I have wonderful memories of Christmas holidays across many homes, northern and southern locales. Some have been frozen and snowy, others bright and downright sunny, and they all mean something to me, combining to create my own meaning of the season, and adding to how I create my own space in my adult homes each year.

Anyway, these historical images got my rejoicing about Christmas decorating of days gone by, when my Dad was a small boy and my Mom was not yet born. I don’t know how prevalent these pieces were back then, in 1954, but it’s worth investigating, in a future project, and definitely worth having kept, for the moment.

Super-shine reflects back in this first in a series of table-toppers on a bookcase/side table combo piece.

The shadows, the plug, fantastic unintentional artistry.

Another tabletopper

At some point I'm not even sure these use electricity. Or if they do, it's less clear how. TVA documentation getting a bit arty?

A cozy corner, with illuminated tabletop branches and vintage home decor magazine.

Candle pieces, wreath, framing '50s long table and blinds and curtains

The back-end of a reindeer hangs in the middle of the door's wreath...

And the front-end of the same reindeer, on the other side of the door.

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season, spending time with family and good friends, recalling years past, and making new memories. This includes creating your own craft, art, and yes, kitsch, to add cheer and spirit to this lovely time of year.

The photographer took several shots of this quirky, mod-style Mary and Baby Jesus scene. Rightly so, it's quite fantastic.

We’ll call this the requisite commentary-on-the-anniversary blog. Probably every American is reflecting on that Tuesday, September 11 ten years ago, in their own way, to many different degrees of emotion and disconnection, both and neither at once. It has been a decade, and what made it perhaps most poignant was a story posted on Public Radio International’s website, on the difficulty of teaching 9/11 in high schools now that so many kids who are in high school recall the event only in vague and foggy ways–if at all.

The story tells of the teachers interviewed for the piece and their experience year by year: how in the years just afterwards, classroom discussions “were much more visceral.” The 4- to 7- year olds mentioned in the story, who are in high school today, remember reactions of their parents and other very responses very near to them, but not the same way many who are older (adults, now, like me) remember the images on TV clearly–even if, as in my case, I didn’t see them until I got home from school. (At the middle school where I was attending eighth grade at the time, someone higher up made the decision not to tell any of the students what was going on. By lunchtime, teachers around us were in tears and we all detected something was not right. I went home on the bus that day knowing only that “someone had bombed the Pentagon.” For real)

Looks like it’s history, now, really and truly. I remember in the wake of the tragedy, people saying this would be the moment for my generation that would long be recounted as a universal American experience. The endless and epic tale we each, we all, have. Where You Were When It Happened, much like President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. But really, here it is, a whole decade later, and it has become a part of history, and event that marks a clear delineation in this nation’s history: a Before and an After. Strange to be at a stage, in adulthood, where things I experienced are “history.” Guess this is what growing up feels like, right?

There was another truly interesting–and also disturbing and crazy and wholly logical given the world we live in today–report on the ten-year-later mark in this world: on the technology of facial recognition, and its birth in the government funding that allowed its remarkable development in the post-9/11 scared, reactionary, and technology and internet-savvy environment. NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the stunning course it has taken, as two enormous events dovetailed in history:

Fred Cate is a law professor and privacy guru at Indiana University. He says after 9/11, two independent trends dovetailed and reinforced each other. The federal government was investing hundreds of millions in surveillance technology and research to try and keep us safer. And companies like Google and Facebook were remaking the digital landscape. There was a data-collecting revolution.

FRED CATE: 9/11 and the sort of huge growth in social networking and in profiling and collecting Internet traffic — those events are really parallel with each other.

And Cate says:

FRED CATE: We have gotten more used to more surveillance. And it’s not clear that that’s just attributable to the events of 9/11. But particularly when you think of the types of security we all go through now — would have been pretty close to unthinkable a decade ago.

What we have created, as the story reports, is technology that fairly easily recognizes your face and identifies you based on photos it draws from the internet, and several other features both amazing and scary at once. The creepiest part: new technology can actually take a stab at what your social security number is, if it can determine from internet sources where you were born. Rest easy, though, because this stuff isn’t on the market, and there are no intentions by its creators to put it there. As it stands, as I understood anyway, is that this is for governmental purposes. (You can decide if that makes you feel better about this.)

How interesting to think our post-9/11 perspective has provided the incubator for things like this, and our Facebook pages have fueled the flames, made it all the more possible. We are willing participants, at some degree, of the worlds we create. Ten years later, look at us now. To be honest, I have little memory of what adult life was like, even in a purely observational point of view as mine was, prior to 2001. And now it’s a part of our past. Huh.

A week or so ago he took on Fox News’s claims of “class warfare,” in response to Warren Buffet’s claims that the “super-rich” are “coddled” with their low levels of taxes. Stewart’s response is fantastic, hilarious, and with many underlying nuggets of truth. “All we have to do to raise $700 billion is cut 700,000 NPRs. It’s almost too easy!” Stewart joked.

Watch both parts, I swear you won’t be disappointed.

Part 2:

Sometimes (OK, oftentimes), it is because I am thinking about something else that is not related to the topic of my paper or the project at hand, and I am overcome with the need to write down my thoughts on something. I can easily pump out a big essay during this larger weekly routine of writing, and it somehow feels much easier than it does now, in my current state, where I have been asked to write very little (and read even less) for my summer coursework and in my duties at work.

What I have been doing is writing a few papers about Cuba and Caribbean tourism, museums on an international perspective, and a few other strains of similar topics, and learning more than I ever cared to know about the kinds and styles of chairs in American and European interior design. The History of Interior Design class was my first foray into the other half of my graduate program–the half that I am not in–historic preservation. With the basis of this class being on preservation, we studied much of the architectural styles that impart themselves on the interior fashions and furnishings we have used throughout history–and we also covered exciting things like wall plaster (hint the sarcasm).

For a lot of people in my field (many of those being fellow members of this class), that actually is exciting stuff. Me, I’m always more interested in the people. The material culture aspects of interior design fascinate me, because I care most what people were doing with their things and why they used what they did. My professor did a fantastic job bringing this element of the field into our class, too. But there was a whole heck of a lot of architecture involved along the way, and a lot of design terms I did not know (and many which still elude me).

For six weeks, I trudged through Classical, Greek, Federal, Victorian, Rococo, Queen Anne, all the various Revivals, and plenty others that I have forgotten, and then Craftsman, cottage, and various other late nineteenth century styles to arrive at the twentieth. Ah, the twentieth century. I love many aspects of early twentieth century design, and more of midcentury design. And it all comes together in my love–my adoration–of that which I once loathed: the midcentury ranch home. 

Mantel-less fireplaces with rock as its container, sectionals, wood-and-glass coffee tables, and an open-space floor plan: all things that make me swoon over midcentury interiors.

 Ranch homes evoke in me visions of my childhood, visiting friends’ houses, ranch-styles, that sat on streets with dozens of other ranch homes, and inside, layers of brown, and thick carpeting, and wall-size windows that take over rooms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, there was an added element of water outside, the windows offering a view of the lake that was nearby, or just in the backyard. I remember thinking about those homes, in my young mind, about how frumpy they seemed, very unpleasing and cottage-y.

I imagine this is because the few that I do recall specifically–most are fuzzy in my memory, with me left searching my brain for who even lived in the house I picture in my mind’s eye–are poor examples of ranch home style, with the innards of the structure not at all reflecting the midcentury flooring, furniture pieces, lighting, window decor, and built-in bookcases that appear in photos of the ranch homes that now make it into modern design books and are featured in large, glossy spreads of home decorating magazines. And rightly so; I can’t imagine those friends’ homes had much worth plastering in a magazine or book in the states they were in–after all, those published materials are to serve as “what-to-do” guides more than “what-not-to-do.”

There are so many things I love about this room, not least of which is the way it connects to the room above it. Can I just say: I am enamored with cement, tile, and ceramic floors. I also admire greatly admire the ironing board and iron in the front there, because we are all human. This image is published in The Elements of Style, edited by Stephen Calloway.

I know that when I present my project this week, many people will meet my passion with crinkled noses; the ranch home, they will think, that hangover from the post-war era when we first became addicted to consumption. Yes, I will also think, but before we had to build McMansions with dozens of closets to store it all. This was the era when function and clean lines, minimal clutter, a few strong furniture pieces, and built-ins everywhere, was the height of home fashion. Maybe not for everyone, there will always be those who want their homes filled with Rococo Revival–some of those people are in my class–and to each, his own. I was self conscious about classmates thinking my ranch home project is unsightly for about half a second, until I remembered how many Victorian and Federal-style homes I spent the summer looking at for hours in each class, and how I crinkled my nose numerous times at those.

The Ranch: ugly, to some, yes, and in my childhood, I vividly recall thinking I would never want to live in a ranch home, just as I was positive I would never wear loafers or high-waisted pants or voluntarily tuck in my shirt. Wouldn’t you know it, taste grows up, and things you once thought so grandmotherly and out of fashion rise again into the aesthetic, and you realize just how fashionable your grandmother really was.

This happened to me when I read The Kite Runner. I would find myself laying on my bed, engrossed in the story of two young boys whose lives were forever impacted by the wars, conflicts, and tragedies that have befallen Afghanistan, and I would suddenly weep thinking of its enormity. I would literally cry for Afghanistan, big and small. It happened as well in the movie True Grit–which still kind of mystifies even me. I mean in the last sixty seconds, when the little whippersnapper girl, all grown up, visits a ruff and tumble landscape and inquires about her old travel partner, Rooster Cogburn, and it is established that he has since passed away. Their whole story culminated in my mind, and I was overcome, to tears.

I guess this is why, from a young age and with a big imagination, I have always been drawn to good stories, and long wanted to create them myself as well. I adamantly wanted to make movies–write, direct, etc.–that was what I told people in high school. I also wanted to be a journalist. I now have a history degree and want to tell stories in museums, and hopefully in books of my own. These are all careers, ways of storytelling, coming from this same spout of emotion that rests inside me, ready to well up anytime some sort of meaningful conclusion, resolution, decision, gesture, or tragedy has been proffered in a story. And in the grand tradition of learning, we discover more of the world that we just can’t begin to fathom; we know that in fact, the more we learn, the less we can really ever know. I claim to know a little bit about a few things, but man, the world is big.

I just finished reading a perfect summer book. I have referenced it several times lately, because it is about a 22-year-old fresh college graduate who takes off for China in 1986, and discovers a lot of things about herself–and many of those things mirrored in stark and hilarious ways insights I had about myself when I traveled to China as well (but in 2007, to a vastly different country). Susan Jane Gilman has gone on to do a lot of awesome things since her mid-eighties escapades, working as a journalist and living abroad now.

But her recounting of the life of a Chinese woman that she met on her memorable trek, and reunited with on a visit in 2005, brought the tears. She writes about how even when they bonded in the ’80s, she knew (she assumed) that Lisa, this young woman the same age as her, would have a very linear life, one that had almost none of the potential that her own, Gilman’s, could have, because of where she lived in the world. As it turns out, Lisa grew her small restaurant into a series of businesses in Yangshuo, China, and is now referred to as “an institution” in Lonely Planet guidebooks on China. She had coffee with President Clinton when he visited her restaurant and served on a delegation that welcomed him to China in the late nineties. She has gone farther than Gilman ever expected or could have dreamed. But she has still not the opportunities as this visiting American; as of 2005, she still cannot travel independently abroad, say, perhaps to visit her friend Gilman in Switzerland. Her whole story brings me to tears. And what makes me the most emotional, I think, is our own assumptions, the things an American might think or assume about anyone else. Assuming that a 22-year old Chinese woman would be destined to live out her life in servitude to her husband, with one child, cooking pancakes for foreigners and backpackers in Yangshuo with no foreseeable economic or lifestyle opportunities beyond that.

In the whole book, there is so much drama, so many insane travel antics that occur, yet here I am bawling at the very end over a small reunion of two fleeting friends, and over the complicated and sometimes tragic things we assume, learn, and discover about one another in this wide world. The larger plot line of her time in China, actually, has not ended in resolution, and is rather bittersweet. But in this little subplot, here, we can rejoice in the wonder, in the sadness, in the immense emotion that real, raw, and meaningful stories provide us.

I believe they are the lifeblood of our existence as humans, propelling us forward, reminding us to believe that we can be part of incredible things. Incredible stories.

(Even if, sometimes, they are made up inside out brains. Fiction has such enormous ability to transport us. I am jealous of people who can write it.)

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is the son of the wealthy CEO of the “big bad Fox Books superstore,” and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) is the owner of the independent children’s bookstore Shop Around the Corner. His newly-opened location just up the street from hers forces her out of business, but little do they know that these real-life enemies are each other’s online crush. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve understood elements and little quips that I had missed in years prior. Kathleen’s boyfriend Frank (played by Greg Kinnear) fully supports a neo-Luddite movement, for example, a term I learned once I got to college. He hates technology with a quirky vengeance.

Anyway, it is one of my all-time favorite movies. And I wanted to share a lovely quotation from Miss Kathleen Kelly herself, that really rings true in my own life and my memories of childhood and books. Beyond her comment, though, I think the same holds true in a life-long reader’s experience; each book I read becomes a part of me, in some way making me the person I am. Those of my childhood hold particular warm spots in my heart, as images and stories from them can bring back a rush of emotions and memories when they resurface in my world sometimes. My love of books as a child has translated into the same kinds of emotion with and while reading today, though I can’t say whether it was the chicken or the egg that lies at the start. (As in, Do I like to read because I had and read books, or did I keep reading because of my own interest?)

Kathleen’s rant comes over her frustration with the newly-opened Fox Books, and her insistence that it won’t affect her negatively. But she wanders from there in her characteristically charming way…

You know, the world is not driven by discounts, believe me. I have been in business forever. I mean, I started helping my mother after school here when I was six years old, and I used to watch her. And it wasn’t that she was just selling books. It was that she was helping people become whoever it was they were going to turn out to be. Because when you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does and I… I’ve gotten carried away.

"Storybook lady" reads to guests at her children's bookstore, in one of my favorite movies of all time.

Walt and Mickey Mouse, watching over the Magic Kingdom in Disney World

Mike Wallace’s Mickey Mouse History: And Other Essays on American Memory earns its title from the chapter on Walt Disney’s and, later, Disney Enterprises, Inc.’s interpretation and execution of the historical narrative, in “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World.” Walt Disney’s approach to the history that appears in the Magic Kingdom echoed the historical interpretations of the consensus-inspired 1950s, but translated into a theme park, took an extreme step further for the sake it tidying up the past for visitors. Says Wallace, his “approach to the past was… not to reproduce it, but to improve it.” The excuse, that it’s only a theme park, not a museum, hides below the fact that many may never know the difference. People who take in the past via a Disney presentation file this away in their brain as part of history and as a bit of knowledge to recall later, promulgating  misinformation, and making it harder for people to accept more accurate histories when they are confronted with them.

Disney's famous audioanimatronics, here inside EPCOT's Spaceship Earth ride, which recounts a version of the "history of communication and technology."

EPCOT has an array of complications all its own in terms of historic interpretation, being–as it has long been–backed by corporate sponsors who at their best explore the challenges and triumphs of a world that is ever marching forward and improving technologically, and at its worst, ignoring the fact that man’s technology has not always had positive impacts on the progression of mankind. (And it would, of course, never be the corporation’s fault; they would instead be the ones seeking to find solutions to problems). Each pavilion stands as a tribute to technology and the future, as a permanent World’s Fair. Then across the waters lies the World Showcase, where countries’ marketable goods are for sale and each destination has been designed to demonstrate the distinct features of its culture.

As Wallace points out, “all historical interpretations [done by Disney Enterprises] are necessarily selective in their facts, but [in EPCOT] the silences are more profoundly distorting. Consider, for example, that in all EPCOT’s depictions of the past as a continuous expansion of man’s possibilities through technology, there is not a word about war. Nothing about the critical impetus it provided through ages to scientific development, nor about the phenomenal destruction such “development” wrought.”

Two other things struck me about the interpretation of the past that we find all around us in a Disney park. First, it presents history as unidirectional, that in fact there was no point that the trajectory could have taken another path. “There were never any forks on the path of Progress,” he writes, “never any sharp political struggles over which way to go.” The other fault in the clean, unoffensive, and vacation-ready historic package is that it makes the past into a “pleasantly nostalgic memory, now so completely transcended by the modern corporate order as to be irrelevant to contemporary life.” We can consume the stories so long as they entertain us, and move on to the next thing. “This diminishes our capacity to make sense of our world through understanding how it came to be,” says Wallace.

When the only versions of history people encounter are commodities–theme parks, but also docudramas, Hollywood movies, and even historic fiction–I fear it becomes the norm for them, deepening the chasm between people and their pasts and their understanding of the world. This seems to be OK for people when they can draw intelligent conclusions and have a grounded base of knowledge, but it can by no means be ignored as an insignificant influence on a people’s vision of their history, in the midst of a thousand museums that don’t draw nearly as many visitors.

For me it is something to ponder on a personal level as well, because, while I can dig through the cleanliness and disregard the stereotypes in the narratives, I highly doubt that is the mental lens that everyone else brings with them to Disney World. And on the other hand, I love the magic of Disney World. Far beyond the history that entrenches it, there is the imagination, the dazzling effects and the ability it has to transport you into another world–not to mention, back a little bit into your childhood. It is a place I will surely take my children someday, although what I do with the historic interpretations and how I explain them might be a little different than the approach others take.

One of my most favorite Disney pairs: Mary Poppins and Burt.

Leaving no opportunity to capitalize on my generation untapped, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios created The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to make the snow-capped shops of Hogsmeade and the flavor of Butterbeer quite real. I waited six months after its opening to make the trip down to Orlando to see Hogwarts castle for myself, giving the crazies enough time to see it first. This had the added benefit of wintertime, which meant the fake snow looked much more believable than I imagine it did to those July visitors, cursing the heat and peering wistfully at the white stuff. When I dipped into the Three Broomsticks for some shepherd’s pie, it was an unusually chilly day in Florida, and I was grateful for the warmth of the fire and the cozy, dark pub atmosphere.

I devoured the first three books in the Harry Potter series in a matter of weeks, checking them out in succession from the Shuman Middle School library (Savannah, Georgia). I was twelve. When Tom Riddle reveals his true identity to Harry inside the Chamber of Secrets, I was absolutely blown away. I have a vivid memory of laying on my bed, flipping the page over and back again, taking in the revelation that Tom Riddle was the younger version, the memory, of the man who would become Lord Voldemort. I had never in my life read such literature, with so many wonderful twists.

Fast forward to 2007, when the seventh and final book was published, and we Harry Potter kids knew much more about the arch-villain of the series. We knew he and Harry shared a strange connection, and we were about to find out just how big. I recall feeling so anxious imagining how J. K. Rowling would end the series, as pundits predicted both Harry’s death and survival. Harry Potter’s death would be the better literary ending, and would certainly solidify his place as hero and martyr. But I honestly didn’t know if she could do that and survive (maybe literally) the angry fan backlash. Yet the option of Harry surviving seemed much too… fairy tale, and depressingly “happy ending,” kids’ story cop-out.

I won’t spoil the ending, but Rowling blew me away. In the midst of some very, very high expectations, as well as many anticipating a let-down, she wrote an ending that went so far beyond anything I could have imagined, I almost couldn’t believe it. At the end of it all, I loved the series even more, more than I thought was possible. Even with some of the predictions spoiling certain aspects, and with all of the speculation surrounding it, she managed to surprise and entertain, and bring plenty of tears. She certainly proved Severus Snape to be one of the most interesting literary characters in the modern era.

Without dragging this too far into a nerdy tangent, I simply felt awed and blessed to be able to walk through a city that had existed only in my imagination since that twelve-year-old girl laid on her bed and was transported. Eating one of Hagrid’s rock cakes and visiting Zonko’s Joke Shop were utterly blissful, and I was an unabashedly happy consumer of the created worlds that thrive on imagination in Orlando.

Strolling through the wizarding Hogsmeade

I tried regular butterbeer, frozen butterbeer, and the Hogsmeade house brew (that one was actually beer).

Hogwarts Castle, where you cannot bring a camera, but where you can visit Dumbledore's office and chat with the famed talking portraits.

The twelve-year-old in me nearly bursting out