It's My Birthday!

Turning 18 is super cool. It’s the greatest birthday ever, because I can do all this really cool stuff now. Such as… well, something will come to me.

 Actually, this is the first birthday I have really been home for since I started high school. So I get to have a birthday party! This is really exciting, because my mom has already agreed to break out the Disney princess plates. For the rest of the day, I’m really tempted to add “like” between every three words I say and to make every statement sound like a question, because if I experiment with that a few years from now people will probably look at me oddly.

I’d like to discuss my 18th birthday in reference to something magical: Harry Potter. Yes, pun intended. And I know, this is getting old, and I should be running out of references, but I’m not. The reason I can justify referencing Harry so many times this summer is because last Friday (on my little sister’s 12th birthday) something happened that was tragic and wonderful all at the same time: Harry Potter ended.

Sure, we could all go spend the next time years watching and reading spin-offs and fan fiction. But Harry Potter as we know it has ended. There’s nothing more to look forward to: no more book premieres or midnight movies.

As someone who has just officially been deemed an “adult” and now has to get a beautiful new vertical license from the DMV to inform those that can’t add that I’m under 21 (while simultaneously enabling me to drive after midnight), the end of Harry Potter coincides nicely with me graduating from high school and making my parents officially feel old.

My friends and I really remember first picking up the books in second or third grade. It depends on how interested we were in reading and who first told us to read them. I sinned: I didn’t read any of the books until I had seen the first movie, because my Grandma had recommended them and I didn’t trust her taste in literature. After seeing the first movie with my older sister, I raced upstairs to where she had the first three books, and read them in a single weekend. The release of Harry Potter books spans all through my grade school years.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was released in 1997. I was 4 years old. Today the first copy of it that we own sits on my bookshelf. It’s torn, dog eared, and well loved. I’ve never been a gentle book reader. You can tell my favorite passages and pages by how bent the side of the page is from my running it between my thumb and nail while reading.

We judge people based on whether or not they have read these books. We consider it a sin for our friends to have missed out on them, and force them to borrow the books and start reading, because to not read Harry Potter seems like missing out on something that has defined a generation. We grew up with the books and the movies. And people who graduated with me are some of the youngest people who can say that. It was a rite of passage for us all.

 The good news is that I’m only 18, which means I can still read through those books and watch the movies a few million more times in my lifetime.

Now that I’ve discussed the importance of Harry Potter in the lives of those who share similar birthdays to my own, I can move on to referencing other works of fiction, such as The Emperor’s New Groove.  This is very important; I have always wanted to somehow to work “Why do I even have that lever?” into a conversation.