Quotes from the Depths

It’s too much.

He gets a flat in London—Muggle London. Hermione and the Weasleys give him space. Kingsley ensures the wizarding world gives him privacy. Not that some aren’t reluctant. Rita Skeeter releases articles every day, wondering when their Boy Who Lived will return.

But Harry doesn’t see those articles.

He tries to forget who he is for awhile.

His flat is cozy. He stuffs it with plants and paintings and books. He has a cat (or three). He wears sweaters and blazers with corduroy pants. He goes to the market every morning to buy fruits and vegetables. That’s where he meets the kindly old woman who lives down the street.

She lived through World War II and so many other wars, wars that Harry has never experienced but can only imagine.

She goes to his house and she goes to hers. There’s always tea and small cakes and dinners and cocoa—apparently she believes that a teenager needs cocoa—and baking and reading and knitting.

Harry uses magic to brew the cocoa one day, not realizing that she’s standing in the doorway. She calms him by telling him that she knows all about magic. 

Their conversations shift after that. They talk about their favorite creatures and how hard it was to watch them perish before their eyes. They talk about the wall that seemingly gave way to let them enter the magical world. They talk about lions and friends and family and love and betrayals and life and death.

“When did you leave?” Harry asks one day.

She pauses, a hand resting on his cat’s head. After a moment, she looks up with a heaviness in her eyes, a heaviness that Harry sees when he looks in the mirror everyday. 

“I was young,” she says. “Younger than you are now. But I had already grown up. I didn’t want to leave, not really, but it became too much.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Some days I do, some days I don’t.” 

“Yeah…”

It’s a few months later, when he’s helping her shovel the first snow from her walkway, that he asks, “Did you ever try going back?”

“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t,” she says, shoving a cup of cocoa into his hands. “I was shut out as soon as I hesitated.”

He pauses, nearly dropping the cocoa, before whispering, “That’s horrible.”

“What about you?” She escorts him inside, her cane tapping against the floor that he’s magically heated to warm her feet. “Would you be welcomed back?”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry says. “Til they turn on me because they don’t like the color of my shirt or because I sneezed the wrong way or because—you name it.”

She laughs and he smiles.

“Imagine that,” she softly says. “Rulers of our worlds and we’re not even allowed in them.”

“Imagine that.”

Until the USA confiscated them in Bangkok and redirected them to the USA. Nice.

Apparently the same has happened to the French government.

The problem with the Imagine video wasn’t that “celebrities are rich people!” --we already knew that. 

The problem was a group of random celebrities--many of whom are decidedly NOT singers--put out a presumptuous collab that absolutely dripped with the patronizing assumption that it was what we all wanted. 

No one asked for it. It wasn’t their song, they didn’t do an especially good job performing it, and it didn’t impart a particularly relevant message (in fact, one could argue it’s almost inappropriate to sing a song about imagining no heaven when people are dying, and many of the survivors are trying to take comfort in their faith). 

It’s false sentiment delivered by a group of people who are presuming that a syrupy rendition of a well-known and important (or at least important sounding) song performed by well-known and (in their minds) important people would make all of the unimportant little people feel better during a global pandemic.

It was tone deaf (sometimes literally), it was condescending as fuck, and it painted an unintentionally embarrassing picture of inflated self-importance that was really just a bunch of celebrities trying to stay relevant in this time when they’re not getting the amount of attention they’re all used to. 

Backstreet Boys, on the other hand, are a music brand. This is their product. This is what they DO. And the tone of their video is one of “haha, hey, I know we’re not those kids anymore, but here’s some nostalgia we can all laugh at.” They hammed it up, some of them brought their kids into the video, and it was clear throughout all of it they weren’t taking themselves too seriously. They let themselves be the butt of the playful joke, rather than trying to impart a quasi-profound message that wasn’t even theirs to deliver (and didn’t even apply to our current circumstances in any meaningful way).

Musicians offering us their products in videos like this one already have proof that it’s something we want, and they’re doing it to help boost morale and give disappointed fans who are missing out on concerts something for free. 

The Imagine video, by contrast, gave us a steaming heap of nothing so a group of celebs could feel self-important and significant during a time when everyone is suddenly realizing that they aren’t. 

We needed fun and normalcy, they gave it to us and did something good in the meantime. (And also agreed to cover Toxic by Britney Spears.) There was literally no message there beyond “please stay safe and also, if you can, these kids need help.”

One of my least favorite parts about being a middle school history teacher is the bullshit “Living History” assignments we give at the end of every school year. Kids are supposed to sit with their grandparents and video tape, voice record, or transcribe their oldest memories for posterity (and for an easy way to bring up their GPA).

I have been doing this for seventeen years, and when I collected the projects this time around, I assumed they would be as dull, if not duller than usual. This had not been a particularly bright class.

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.  

I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.

Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.

The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.

-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.

-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.  

-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.

-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.

-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.

-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community. 

A lot of folks in the comments are talking about writing on themselves or setting phone/calendar reminders. Your mileage may vary on those. You may also want to consider ways to set a habit of referring back to a planner or similar every day/hour.

To get those brain juices flowing, check out this Buzzfeed article on different ways folks with ADHD stay on top of things.

VISUAL BACKGROUND NOISE?!