Third life crisis

I am 28 years old.

I own a house and a car. I pay bills for electricity, water and sewer, sewer capacity charge*, cable internet and television, voice over IP phone, mobile phone, rubbish collection, mortgage, property tax, and homeowner’s association dues. They are all automated except for the water bill and the capacity charge. If I forget to pay the water bill, the city will cut off my water. I don’t know what they will do if I forget to pay the capacity charge.
I have been in the workforce for longer than I was at university. I have been a Subject Matter Expert in three technical areas. I have presented on one of those subjects to an audience of 200. I have trained my colleagues in my areas of expertise.
I have been in the same relationship for 2/3 of the time since I became sexually active, and married for half of that time. In the past 6 years, the longest we have spent without seeing each other is 2 days. I cannot imagine how I would live without her.

I am 28 years old.

Most of the “books” I read are comics about wizards. Many of the non-comic books feature people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, or pan-dimensional spiders.
Today I spent 4 hours virtually positioning guns to shoot aliens, preventing them from stealing my stuff. After the first 3 hours, I discovered a sneaky trick which made it a whole lot harder for the aliens to steal my stuff. This made me feel inordinately pleased with myself.
I spend an obscene amount of time watching television. I wish I could tell myself that it’s some form of high art, but 90% of what I watch is crud. I wish I could tell myself that it’s a social tool, giving me something to talk with my friends about, but I watch far more TV than any of my friends. I wish I could tell myself that it fulfills a critical role in my relaxation process, but I don’t have a relaxation process.

I am 28 years old.

When Seth MacFarlane was my age, Family Guy had been cancelled and renewed. Twice. When Freddie Mercury was my age, he wrote Killer Queen. When Johnny Depp was my age, he had played Edward Scissorhands. When Morgan Freeman was my age, he was an extra. When Jim Morrison was my age, he had been dead for a year.
I don’t have a clue what I want to be doing in 5 years’ time. I’m iffy on what I want to be doing in one year’s time. Not being entirely sure on where the apostrophes were supposed to go in that sentence made me feel uneasy.
I thought of myself as being 15-and-a-bit for years. Then I was 22-and-a-bit. I don’t think I can be 22-and-a-bit any longer. Midori says I’m 40-minus-a-bit.

I am 28 years old. I am an adult. And I have no idea what that means.


*My house is in a new development, so the city had to lay a new sewer pipe. To cover their costs, they charge a fee to residents for the first 10 years.

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More Harry Potter

I'm probably spending too much time and energy on this, but something further occurred to me about one of my earlier points. Specifically, this:

No-one loves their kids. The story starts with Harry miraculously surviving a murder attempt, and it’s revealed later that when his mother threw herself in the path of the spell, the force of her love for him caused it to rebound. But… the killing spell has been around for centuries. Surely in that time SOMEONE would have noticed that sacrificing yourself to protect a loved one causes rebounds?

What this means is that when Lily sacrificed herself, she had no idea that the curse would bounce back to Voldemort, banishing him and so setting up the major plot of the series. To her, she was buying Harry the 4 seconds it would take Voldemort to cast another curse (slightly more if he's a slow speaker). There was nothing apparent that would stop him just killing Harry afterwards - no-one else was around to interrupt him, he wasn't going to run out of bullets, and it wasn't likely that he'd just change his mind. 


I understand that faced with the imminent death of a child, a parent will do anything that has a chance of saving them, no matter how unlikely. But as far as Lily knew at the time, it was very unlikely.

Easy targets

Using the internet to make fun of inconsistencies in a children’s fantasy story isn’t clever or funny. It makes me feel like I’m in the skit where Dana Carvey asks The Shatner what the combination was for a safe he opened in an episode of Star Trek, 20 years previously. I would have embedded the clip, but it is nowhere to be found on YouTube. But picking holes in Harry Potter is cheap and easy, so I’m going to do it.

This post contains spoilers from all 7 books. Bite me.

1. No-one loves their kids. The story starts with Harry miraculously surviving a murder attempt, and it’s revealed later that when his mother threw herself in the path of the spell, the force of her love for him caused it to rebound. But… the killing spell has been around for centuries. Surely in that time SOMEONE would have noticed that sacrificing yourself to protect a loved one causes rebounds?
2. No-one minds slavery. It’s tradition in the wizarding community that non-human sentient beings are not worthy of equal rights and status. The worst impacted are the house elves, who are kept as slaves. Everyone just accepts it, because that’s how it’s always been done. (The house elves seem to enjoy it, but then they live in that same culture too.) But… every year, at least a 3rd of the new kids at Hogwarts were raised by non-wizards. And Hermione is the first one to ever do anything about the whole slavery thing? 
3. Everyone is far too naïve. Polyjuice Potion allows anyone to appear to be anyone else, and it’s something that most 13-year olds can make with easily obtainable ingredients. The kids exploit this multiple times through the series. Super-secret groups have passwords, but most buildings are completely insecure – if the doorman knows your face, he’ll let you in.
4. The Sorting Hat/House system. In order for the school to run smoothly, the number of kids in the houses, in each year, need to be roughly equal. Each house has to have fewer children than dorm beds, the class sizes have to be manageable, and you want each house to be able to field a Quidditch team. Most real schools do it randomly, or by an objective way to divide the student body into 4 (or 6 or 8 or however many houses they have). Hogwarts works on the Sorting Hat principle, by which each kid gets into the house that they want to. (We know it’s desire-based because Snape got into Slytherin, despite not meeting one of the stated requirements). So in order for the school to work, every year the new kids need to WANT to be equally divided – otherwise the system doesn’t work. And it’s been said before, but… who chooses Hufflepuff?
5. Someone hired the Dementors. Dementors are floaty wraith creatures that hate you. Interaction with a Dementor ends one of two ways – it sucks out your soul, or you cast a Patronus spell which chases it away. We first meet the Dementors in the 3rd book, where they’ve been hired to guard the wizard prison. Various characters question whether it’s a good idea to have nightmare monsters as guards, but no-one ever explains how they were hired in the first place. How did anyone negotiate a contract without getting their soul devoured? And more worryingly, how are they paying the Dementors?

There are several other things that make very little sense in the books, but these strike me as being the most egregious – and I haven’t seen them called out elsewhere. (I haven’t looked very hard.)