The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

It's July 2019. I'm at Baekyangsa Temple about two hours south of Seoul up in the forested mountains. It is a Buddhist monastery, open to the public for temple stays where they can meditate, commune with nature, learn how to prepare kimchi in the traditional way from the resident monks, and train in Korean martial arts. I didn't come all this way to learn how to make kimchi. "Are you well?" asks a sister monk, her head shorn of all hair as she sits on the wooden floor across from me. The dialogue catches me off-guard as the first two hours of the day had been spent observing and respecting the order's vows of silence as they start their day before reciting ancient prayers and striking traditional drums. She notices I'm perspiring, with Korean summers always running hot even in the mountains, the heat radiating through the rice papered buildings. " 예" I respond in my broken but serviceable Korean. "Thanks for letting me stay with you for ...

Man, I really wish I had something interesting to tell you guys about this past year. No, I mean of course this was the year when the levee finally broke wide open in ways I honestly could have never imagined. When I walked into 2019, I had some things I knew I wanted to happen, an impending trip to Europe (which you can read all about in the last blog post) and a burgeoning writing career. But what actually happened was this weird, wild adventure that spanned five continents, eight countries, and fifteen states. This was the year that I got to set foot in the Sahara, walk the Great Wall of China and ruins of Ancient Rome, reconnect with both my paternal and maternal origins, reintegrate music and travel back into my life after such a glaring long time away, and actually become pretty prolific with my writing/translating career; this is the year when that all happened. This is why that matters...and why it can never happen again. Let's get the travel stuff out of the way fir...

I was having coffee with a friend shortly before taking this European trip. He asked if I had ascribed any themes and deeper meaning to the upcoming trip. I took a long sip from my cup of coffee, sighed, and waited a beat. “Well, yeah.” I shrugged without looking up. I’m always gonna to put a little extra attention into stuff like this. My overthinking/analyzing is where my ADHD is the most apparent (that, or when I song recognize comes on the background). Everything gets a little extra, even the movie blog recaps. Hell, the title to this thing alone is a direct nod to the second novel in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, when the gunslinger’s adventure really starts, itself a tarot reference. Similarly, I had assigned a tarot card and song to each destination on this trip before realizing how hopelessly pretentious that was and discarding (no pun intended) the premise. If you’ve been following this blog, you know my 20s were dominated by international travel. Coming out of grad...

The final act of  The Deathly Hallows  really is a shift for the entire book series. There's an apocalyptic intensity to the Battle of Hogwarts with beloved characters that are occasionally killed with little more than a passing line of text. It's a numbing experience in some ways, emotionally, and certainly unrelenting. But, through it all, Harry himself remains steadfast and constant. That's both the strength and tragedy inherent to the scarred protagonist: To garner a reputation as The Boy Who Lived means that said boy has to be surrounded by death. I think the reason why something like  Harry Potter  could only really come from the United Kingdom is how it was never really afraid to lean into the macabre and not in that try-too-hard Tim Burton kind of way. There's something distinctly British about that, the frankness about discussing death that is often a relatively uncomfortable topic in American discourse. The real underlying theme to the  Harry Potte...

The final Harry Potter novel came out approximately a month before my 21st birthday. I was visiting a friend in Raleigh when it came out in July 2007, freshly back from a study abroad trip in Costa Rica. The cool thing (?) about the South is that a lot of those Wal-Marts are open for 24 hours so, rather than wait outside a Barnes & Noble, I just swung by a Wal-Mart at midnight and pick up a copy relatively hassle-free. I was only on this particular North Carolina trip for a couple days after that, stopping by my college on the drive home to officially move in to my first apartment but, by the time I reached Newport News, I had completely finished reading The Deathly Hallows from cover-to-cover. I think that's a testament to the story; there's a strong argument that the final Harry Potter novel is the very best in the entire series. The first half of the novel, which would get adapted into its own individual film by David Yates, is part-road fiction, and part being-on-...

By the end of The Order of the Phoenix , the battle lines between Voldemort and his Death Eaters against the rest of the wizarding world had been firmly set. His return now public and Harry beginning what would become his final year at Hogwarts, The Half-Blood Prince is a final bit of setup and a final bit of housecleaning before the grand finale. There are loose ends Rowling needed to tend to before the seventh and final novel in the series and this book suffers a bit because of it, laying the foundation for something bigger in sacrifice of its own self-contained story. But at least she turns most of her cards. The sixth installment of the Harry Potter series was published that last magical summer in between high school and college for me, that kind of lazily surreal period where you've just completed that lengthy major stage of your teen years and make final preparations to go off on your own academic adventure hopefully somewhere new and with its own new cast of characters...

I remember reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the first time back in high school, incredulous that the Ministry of Magic would try to keep something as devastating as the return of Voldemort so vehemently under wraps. Given the state of affairs these days, from the suppression of the truth to malicious leadership, it actually seems pretty par for the course if a bit restrained. That's a whole other thing; let's dig into the text and the film. Order of the Phoenix explores consequence, more specifically the consequences left from The Goblet of Fire 's earth-shattering climax. Harry is suffering from PTSD after watching Cedric Diggory killed before his eyes. His father's old allies are scrambling to reorganize and they're doing it working against the wishes of the Ministry who install a puppet headmistress at Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge, one of the most effectively reviled literary antagonists in modern fiction. And the Death Eaters are still o...