I will not eat them on a train. Not in the dark! Not in a tree! Not in a car!

Dr. Suess + High School Musical = Suessical
Suessical ≥ Civil War: The Musical, the last live musical I saw (Broadway, 1999)

The Suessical is about the cutest thing I have ever seen. Beautiful young people singing and dancing so earnestly, illustrating Horton Hears a Who and showing kids to be true to themselves and to harness their imagination. Just so cute. The girl who played Amazing Mazie may have been Reese Witherspoon's doppelganger. And the closing number of "Green Eggs and Ham" was adorable. The whole thing was really well done.

Is it weird the only theater I've been to in about a decade has been with my Little Sis? When I lived in San Diego, we used to go to plays all the time. I had no idea no idea my cultural salad days would peak at age 22. I need to fix that.

Moratorium, please.

I would like it if no characters were called "Mr. Darcy" ever again. Or likened to Mr. Darcy. Or described with Mr. Darcy-like qualities. I would like to see all Jane Austen-related books and/or movies shelved indefinitely. Literally and figuratively.

This well is dry, ya'll, and I have been sent over the edge by a trailer for The Jane Austen Book Club. Enough!

But: more Jake Ryan. More Nick Carraway. More Jake Barnes. More Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love. What ever happened to Joseph Fiennes? Let's bring him back.

In which I read a manga book...and like it!

Now that's one sentence I'd never thought I'd write.

I have a co-worker who is trying to break me of my genre-embracing habits, so he gave me a reading list and lent me a copy of Book 4 of Phoenix by Osamu Tezuka. Going into it, I thought: no way I'm reading this in public. No way I'm going to like it, either. Wrong on both counts. That book was seriously fantastic, artistically and thematically.

I lay down my genre arms.

Ok, not entirely: no troll-based fiction. Ever!

Tasting apples.

This is what I read at work today, which I think you will agree is far more interesting that transitive vs. intransitive verbs:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

--The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich

That was my daytime book. I also just finished my nighttime book, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and it's seriously excellent. Devastatingly sad--in a post-apocalyptic way, of course. His best book by far.

It is finished.

I just finished The Deathly Hallows, and to be honest, I don't know how I feel about it yet. But I'm not going to talk about it and risk giving anything away because I am not that kind of girl. And also, I need to come up for air and rejoin the land of the Muggles.

Mostly I just kept thinking about J.K. Rowling and how it must have felt for her to have written the last line and pushed away from her desk, knowing that 10 years of work and imagination and creation was complete. It must have felt huge and lonely and probably a little liberating.

With that out of the way, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Dirty Muggle.

Is it inappropriate that I teared up at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? Is it inappropriate that I want one of those countdown clocks for Daniel Radcliffe like they had for the Olsen twins before they turned 18?

OK, yes to that second one.

I've got the fever, and the cure is not more cowbell: it's Book 7. I'm not going to a midnight release, and I'm not (ever) going to write fan fiction (though I could go for a spin-off starring the Weasley family), but my goodness do I love HP and J. K. Rowling.

"You will admit that if it wasn't life it was magnificent."

While I'm waiting to learn of Harry Potter's fate, I've picked up Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise again. I read it years ago and am enjoying it in the second read-through. It's not quite as clean and deliberate as Gatsby, but it's engaging and sparkling and intelligent and playful, just as you want your Fitzgerald to be.

One of the reasons I enjoy Fitzgerald's work is wholly removed from his actual writing. He and Zelda--you cannot forget Zelda, an integral part of the image and the reality and everything that came after--were, and I suppose still are, the very personification of promise, of decadence and frivolity, of levity in a world trying to find its feet: the drowning out of reality with champagne and rides in open cars and splashing in big-city fountains while wearing furs and diamonds.

They circled the flame in a way that left their fates certain. Yet it's a beautiful dance until then. And so we watch.

Fitzgerald was America when everything was still possible: "They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the music that eddied out of the cafes. New faces flashed on and off like myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by a wearied excitement."

Fitzgerald is like the moment before the fall.

"But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall 'the world.' Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collasped. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light."

--Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

J.K.: Don't kill off the Weasley twins!

There are only two things I'm afraid of in this world*: the polar ice caps completely melting away, and someone ruining the next Harry Potter book for me before I can read to the end.

*Well...also human-size catfish, geese, and komodo dragons, but "two things" has a better ring to it.