July 24, 2007

The Healing Power of Potter (Spoiler Free!)

As you might know, this blog has a strict NO SPOILERS policy. This means that you won't be subjected to the (possibly) untimely revelation of crucial plot points of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. You won't even learn who, what or where the "Deathly Hallows" is or are, if it or they even exist. So there!

But this no spoilers policy grows out of my own experiences having many, many books, movies, and TV shows spoiled for me. I've learned that I cannot read book reviews anymore, and I can only read the first (and sometimes the last) paragraph of movie reviews in Entertainment Weekly (which does surprisingly reputable movie reviews), because even good reviewers today mistakenly and horribly believe they have a sacred duty to summarize every surprising element in the plot of these stories before you even have a chance to pick up the book or get to the movie theater.

Grrrrrr!!!

On Saturday, my elite, super-special, boxed, color-illustrated, and much-more-expensive-than-the-rest edition of Deathly Hallows arrived in the mail. The Spouse and I had spent the day geocaching with a huge group of friends, and on the way home had dropped by the movie theater to grab tickets for the evening show of Harry Potter and the Order of the University of Phoenix. There was no time to read between showering and heading back out to the movie. And when we got home, we were both exhausted and a little sunburned from hiking and navigating and GPSing all over Essex and Colchester Pond. No time or energy to read.

On Sunday, I woke up with a headache. A bad one at the base of the back of my skull. But I had no time for pain, because we had already committed to going to brunch with friends. And we needed something brunch-foody to take with us. This meant that I was up and baking cinnamon crumb cake before showering and then heading to brunch. With a headache. A bad one.

On the plus side, once the cake was in the oven, I could start reading. And read I did. This was a good and bad thing. I became so entranced in the book that I forgot to take the massive doses of analgesic I needed to banish my headache. And then we were late for brunch and running out the door. And then the brunch was really loud, which didn't help.

By the time we made it home, my headache was starting to move from the back of my skull to the front, and I was sick to my stomach (from the pain, not the brunchy food, which was very good). I've had worse headaches (I used to get migraines), but this was one of the worst non-migraine headaches I've had in years. So I dosed myself liberally with Ibuprofen and gently crashed on the couch with Potter.

I understand a lot better now why doctors use virtual reality when treating patients with serious pain. By keeping myself immersed in Rowling's story, I was able to give myself the time (quite a lot of time, it turned out) to get rid of the headache and to start to feel like a human again.

It also gave me the time to finish the book, which I did later that night. The Spouse (a very light sleeper) was amazingly selfless and let me continue reading in bed while he tried to sleep. I finished the book before midnight and went to sleep, tired and feeling lots of complex feelings. (More on that tomorrow.)

Now I can read blogs, watch TV, talk to colleagues and students, and otherwise engage in the real world without fear of having the plot spoiled for me.

But there's a difference between inadvertently letting something slip in your enthusiasm, and intentionally setting out to ruin something for as many people as possible. That's why "Mays" is the recipient of Digital Digressions' First Annual (or as needed) Out the Airlock Award.

Mays is a DJ on local Burlington-area radio station 99.9 The Buzz. Yesterday, as I was driving downtown to a meeting with a colleague, Mays announced, apropos of nothing, that he was going to save us all months of reading and then revealed the end of the book. Twice.

AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!!!

That's just horrible and cruel and senseless. And so...

HAL still have the utmost confidence in the mission. And you should read the last book before someone spoils it for you. Really, you should.

Posted by reparent at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)