I'm Normal, I Swear! (no promises)

“Calm down,” he said, raising his hands, and every Jonathan felt a sudden tranquility slip upon them. “I do suppose you deserve to know why you’re here. The lot of you, I regret to say, are changelings. Babes swapped into human cribs at birth. Sleeper agents for the goblin race.”

A murmur overtook the crowd. “Yes, yes,” the wizard said. “There are thousands of your kin, all across the world. But I had my spirit scour the land and bring every changeling named Jonathan to me. For you see,” he said, and reached into his robes, bringing out a medallion on a chain. “I’ve bound you all by your true name.” He grinned wickedly. “Hee-hee! Clever, isn’t it? The ritual’s costly, hardly worth a single goblin servant. But in one simple stroke I’ve bound ninety-nine of you! How common names are after all!”

“Um, excuse me,” said a voice from the back. “But I believe there’s been a mistake.”

The wizard glared. “Who - who was that? You - you’re all bound to my will! Who dares speak against me?” 

“Well, that’s just it,” said the man at the back. “I, um, I’m not a Jonathan. Mitchell’s my name.” He wrung his hands. “Not sure what I’m doing here.”

The wizard’s eyes narrowed, and he gestured in the air with one hand, trailing plumes of sulfur, and a horned figure, black as shadow, took shape and form. “Spirit! How’d you foul things up this time! What is this … Mitchell doing here?”

The spirit peered at Mitchell with glowing coal eyes. “Sorry,” it said eventually. “Made a mistake.”

“Made a -” The wizard’s face turned red. “This ain’t the first time you’ve screwed me over, you moron! I’ve had this whole spiel planned out, and now you’ve embarrassed me in front of my minions!”

“Um,” Mitchell said, “so if you don’t need me, I might as well go…”

“Oh, don’t be such a drama queen,” the spirit said huffily. “You had me running all over the land in a single night, snatching people out of their beds, I think I’m entitled to make a single mistake.”

“Ain’t like I asked for much!” the wizard said. “Just find every changeling named Jonathan, that’s all I wanted you to do. The most common name in the world, Jon! And you bring me back this-”

“He’s a changeling too!” the spirit said. “I got confused! And I don’t see what it matters anyway. You’ve got near a hundred of these goblin bastards, I don’t see what difference it makes, they’re all practically the same anyway…”

I have a theory that the valued quality of each of the four Houses isn’t really about the personality of its students.

The valued quality of each of the four Houses has to do with how they perceive magic.

Stick with me a second: Hogwarts is a school to study magic. Magic as Hogwarts teaches it can be seen as many things: a natural talent, a gift, a weapon, etc.

So how you believe magic should be used will both reflect your personality and change how you handle that power.

“Their daring, nerve, and chivalry set Gryffindors apart,” Gryffindors perceive magic as a weapon. Gryffindors tend to excel in aggressive forms of magic, like offensive and defensive spells, and they are good at dueling. But a true Gryffindor knows that the power is a responsibility, and so they must always use their powers to stand up for what’s right. They are the sword of the righteous, which makes them as good at Defense Against the Dark Arts as they are at combat magic.

Hufflepuffs believe that magic is a gift and that the best gifts are to be given away. Hufflepuffs, “loyal and just,” would naturally abhor the idea of jealously guarding magic or using it to hurt someone else. So Hufflepuffs share their magic to benefit of Muggles, like the Fat Friar, to protect the overlooked, like Newt Scamander with his creatures, or to oppose those who would use magic to torment and bully, like the Hufflepuffs who stood with the DA and the battle of Hogwarts.

Slytherins are the opposite: they believe their magic is a treasure that they have been entrusted to protect. The Slytherin fascination with purity, with advantage, with cunning and secrecy–all of which were perverted by the Death Eaters–comes from the idea that people with magic in their veins have been given something special that it is their duty to protect at all costs. And perhaps they aren’t entirely wrong: power in the wrong hands can be dangerous. And power interfering at will with Muggle affairs is a gross presumption that could turn the course of history. Though the series shows some of the worst that Slytherin can be, “evil,” is not a natural Slytherin tendency. “Cautious,” is.

Ravenclaws believe that magic is an art form, one that is beautiful and should be appreciated and studied for its own sake. If “wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure,” then asking what magic is for is useless. It’s more important to immerse oneself in magic for its own sake. Ravenclaws push the boundaries of magic to see if they can, hence Hermione’s spell experiment on the DA coins being dubbed a Ravenclaw quality, but like Luna Lovegood in the pursuit of extraordinary creatures: they can also be content to plumb the depths of what already exists.

I did okay majoring in Political Science and American Government in undergrad though. I graduated summa cum laude so I figure I must have learned something?

Law school also went alright I guess? I did somehow manage to get an article about the constitutionality and modification of excessive force laws through out the 50 states placed in a national publication. And I also managed to pass the Bar Exam. 

When I was a teenager, I got really fed up with people asking me what my plans were for school and where I wanted to go to college. It was relentless at every family gathering, and my family is all pretty well off, making it a bit anxiety-inducing. So I made one up. I just invented a college. I wasn’t trying to fool anyone, I just wanted people to stop asking about it, so I gave it an absolutely ridiculous name; “The Velociraptor Institute of Chicago” - worth mentioning that I lived nowhere near Chicago at the time.

This evolved into a rather large joke between my aunt and I. We would occasionally hang up “school fliers” in my room - one of which being an “X Days Since Last Dinosaur Related Incident” and making bad “school sweaters”.

One day, I decided that it would be hilarious if my all-too-boring voicemail message was something related to the reptilian fallacy.

I went to Google Translate, English to English, and typed out a message from the school staff, something along the lines of; “Hello. You have reached the Velociraptor Institute of Chicago. None of our operators are available at the moment due to dinosaur related incidents. Please remain calm. This is not an emergency. Leave your name and number and we will return your call shortly.”

This was a hit among my aunt and any friends or relatives that happened to call, but as most jokes do, it faded out into the back of my head eventually. I don’t really like phone calls so I essentially forgot about it completely.