The Casual Vacancy

The world was so excited when J.K. Rowling announced that she was going to publish her first post-Potter book. This was to be an adult novel, a very different type of book from the Harry Potter series. It came out awhile ago. I heard sort of mixed reviews from it, so I didn't buy a copy right away. A couple of months ago I decided that I should read it. There was an approximately 15-person waiting list for it at the library...

But about three weeks ago I got a call that it was in. I was a little wary, because I could only have the book for two weeks, as others were waiting in line and I would be heading home for spring break before the two weeks were up. I was going to need to power read to make it through, or be OK with playing late fees. I did manage to finish the book in time and return it before I left :)

Beware that a few spoilers lie ahead: Also beware that I will make completely ridiculous and unfair comparisons between this book and the Harry Potter series. As I was reading and now, I realize that these are not fair, the Harry Potter series is a singular and amazing journey that could never be replicated. However, they are comparisons anyone who reads the book is destined to make.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I looooooooooooooove the Harry Potter books so much and I think that J.K. Rowling is a genius and an incredibly amazing writer.

I was majorly disappointed. I have incredibly neutral feelings about the book. It was fine, but it wasn't anything like her other writing. I went in knowing that it was an adult book with more adult themes and language. I'm fine with that. I read other "adult" books and thoroughly enjoy them, but it was if J.K. Rowling said, "I would like to write a book that is the complete opposite and as different as Harry Potter as I can." If that was her mission, than she succeeded, but I would argue not in a good way.

The story revolves around a small town in England and their relationships and politics. The characters' lives are intertwined and as the story unfolds you discover the various ways characters connect. Imagine, the movies Valentine's Day or He's Just Not that Into You in book form. Sounds great, right? Except, I found it very difficult to keep the characters and their relationships straight in my head. When you're seeing them on screen in those movies, it is easier to keep everyone straight, but there were so many intertwined characters, I was always having to ask myself, "Who is that? Is that so-and-so's wife, mistress, etc?" I had a hard time remembering who was on which side politically and frankly wasn't very inspired to remember these details. Perhaps if the characters had been more engaging, I would have found it easier to keep track of them all.

There was also the fact that I cared little about any of the characters. I was hard-pressed to find a single character that I wanted to root for or who was what I would consider an upright citizen or at all likable character, which made it very difficult for me to feel connected to the book. There were cheaters, liars, drug addicts, kids skipping school to smoke and have sex, nosy senior citizens, people way too wrapped up in boring politics and just all-around jerks. There is one point where a small child dies, usually a tear-jerking moment for Jillibean. While reading, I took a deep breath as if I was going to start crying and realized that I didn't really care and did not really need to cry. And it was a kid, dying. And I felt nothing.

I can't tell you how many times I cried reading the last several Harry Potter books. Mr. Weasley is attacked, sobbing. Sirius dies, many, many tears shed. Dumbledore dies, lots of crying. Fred, Tonks, Lupin die, waterworks. Harry walks to certain death, I am inconsolable. Little kid dies in The Casual Vacancy, I feel nothing.

Besides this, the writing was just not engaging. In Harry Potter, the writing and language are beautiful. "There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them." That line is beautiful and just one of many examples of the lovely ways Rowling composes her writing. I love the way Rowling plays with language and uses such beautiful phrases and sentence construction in Harry Potter. In The Casual Vacancy, that sentence would probably be: "After knocking out a troll, they became friends." It is just such plain, boring language. Now I understand that the magical and whimsical and other-worldly nature of the Harry Potter books probably lends itself to this type of language more than a story about small-town politics. But I came in expecting a very different, more adult story, that I though would at least be recognizable as Rowling's writing style. If I hadn't seen her name on the cover, I would never have guessed she was the author.That was very disappointing. I know she wanted to write a different type of book, but it was a bummer that she couldn't keep the wonderful writing style employed in the Potter books.

Overall, it was a very disappointing read. I never felt compelled to continue reading one more chapter or much of any real emotion. 

AVPSY Feels

Oh, AVPSY. You were just as amazing (if not more) watching you again on my little laptop in my apartment. OK, maybe watching you live with a couple thousand Starkids was better. But I could see and hear a little better via the internet.

Before the show, Darren went sorta crazy on twitter. He was posting a lot about how awesome AVPSY was. He doesn't normally post much about Starkid, as not all of his Glee fans care, but he didn't care that night.

1. 
   
2. Darren Criss ‏@DarrenCriss15 Mar

   Yeah, that's right, I'm replying and retweeting the shit outta this biatch... What can I say, I'm excited for tonight! Who's got questions?

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3. 
   

   Darren Criss ‏@DarrenCriss15 Mar

   If any of you following me don't know what AVPSY is- look it up, along with TeamStarkid. You won't regret it. It's a big deal for me.

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4. 
   

   Darren Criss ‏@DarrenCriss15 Mar

   Alright all you Starkids- now that it's March 15th, who's pumped for the long-awaited release of #AVPSY ? TONIGHT's the NIGHT! @TeamStarKid

   
   

It made my little Starkid heart so very happy!

As this is a Starkid show, AVPSY was about 20 minutes late being posted online, but after 7 months, what's 20 minutes... Lil Sis and I got about 3 minutes off from each other while watching, so she would text me between videos and I wouldn't be there quite yet... I got two pieces of Red Vines stuck in my throat at various times during the evening and even my Squirt couldn't get them out.

The taped show lasted about 3 1/2 hours instead of the almost 4 1/2 it was live. Lil Sis and I did notice a few things that were cut from the posted show (Damian, Tom Riddle's Anti-Christ Friend; part of the flashback scene at the Riddle's house; Harry picking Ron as his campaign manager; the Candy Lady's campaign sign, etc.) but nothing major.

It turned out that the technical difficulties that so delayed the posting online were Darren's mic not working. They literally had to crank up the volume on other people's mics to get his audio and then splice that in. His audio sounded off and there was a lot of background noise, but you could hear him, so I think they worked miracles!

During the live show at Leaky Con the first couple of scenes were hard to hear, but things got much better as the show went on. I'm still not quite sure that I can organize my thoughts into any kind of organized post, but here are some of my thoughts, links to other people's thoughts, etc. that is saved in a word document on my computer as AVPSY Feels.

I loved that Evanna Lynch, the "real" Luna from the movies, played Luna in AVPSY. I can't believe she was allowed to :) She's friends with some of the Starkids.

I loved that so many jokes and lines were brought back from old shows. I loved when Draco talked about going to Pigfarts during their third year and when other characters would start talking about  the years between the other shows and this one, but it would just fade out.

The joke about how Hermione looked different now (since it was a different actress) was great and Meredith did a nice job, but I couldn't help missing Bonnie.

Sure some of the songs (The School is Mine, especially) were pretty rough, but dude Darren and Joe blew I Was out of the water as did Joey with Sidekick. Considering the time they had, it was fantabulous!

I loved the times that they broke character or messed up. Brian as Hagrid, bouncing Darren and Darren not being able to hold it together. Perfection. The whole mess with the tie. Upon re-watching, I'm still not quite sure how Darren managed to get his tie so mangled, but he did and we all loved him for it. It's enough to make you want to buy this shirt.

One of my favorite lines from the show, which Dumbledore says to Tom Riddle. "Sometimes you accidentally kill your family. You know who killed his sister, while fighting with his boyfriend? This guy."

From about Act 2 Scene 5 till the end I was in full tilt ugly cry mode. The scene when Ron tries to convince Harry to come back to Hogwarts and starts getting all emotional, ah, it slayed me.

"Cool doesn’t come from other people, it comes from you." Also Joey killed it on Sidekick. Amazeballs.

The Marauders coming back onstage and singing to Harry. The revelation that Lily is with Cedric in Heaven. While watching it live, I was so excited because I thought Snape was going to come out and then it was Tyler as Cedric and I just died. All of the find jokes "If it's not broken, don't find a way to fix it." "I guess I'm your Heavenly Father, eh Potter." Tyler as Cedric is awesome. Then Snape did come out and gave that great speech about choosing how you go and making choices because it's the right thing to do. So great.

Harry reprising "Going back to Hogwarts" was so great! I was so hoping that they would pull it out again and it didn't disappoint. And then Days of Summer with all of the actors crying real tears. The Langs in a Post-AVPSY interview said that the end was designed to make you cry and the rest of the show was setting up the end. :)

Darren standing alone on the stage, facing the audience, saying "It's been totally awesome" not in his Harry Potter voice, but in his own voice. I am dead.

But then he comes back out with his "son" and sings "You Get to Go Hogwarts" and any semblance of calm that I had gathered at the video change was gone. The way he pumps his fist and can barely get through those lines/song. His eyes filled with tears. No fair.

Then Quirrell and Voldemort come back and give their speech about how sometimes you have to move on from even Harry Potter. OK is wonderful. So is bawling your eyes out over an internet musical.

“Harry Potter gave me a new family. He taught me how to love and I guess that’s kinda what Harry Potter’s all about. But you know, there comes a time when you have to move on, Quirrell. A time when we have to let even Harry Potter go, and that’s okay.”

Here is a note I found on tumblr:

Dear All Fandoms.

You may think you’re crazy for crying over fictional death. But at least your not crying over the fictional death of a scarf.

Sincerely,
The Starkid Fandom

Yes, we all cried when The Scarf of Sexual Preference, aka Scarfy, died. He's such a poor, defenseless scarf and he didn't deserve to die :)

The whole ending when "Harry" aka Darren was saying good-bye to all of his friends was so real. Everyone was in tears, but then I see this gif with Joey in the background tearing up and I lose it.

Here's another note from tumblr "I’m not crying, I just have a Starkid musical in my eye."

This pretty much sums it up.

I was in a little bit of a post-avpsy depression the next day, but I chose to adopt Dr. Seuss' wonderful advice. Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened (and that you got to see it live and again on youtube).

Now we can start getting excited for Twisted, Starkid's new show which is opening in July!!!!

My life per my phone's dictionary

I found myself scrolling through the personal dictionary on my phone today, where I add words that I've typed that aren't in the dictionary, but that I want it to recognize. I think that words included are a pretty good representation of my life (besides a couple of boring ones like centers and favorite that are there because my phone likes to be British...)

Albus 

AVPM

AVPS

AVPSY

Baconukkah

A celebrated holiday in a dream I had once. It sounded so good in theory, but upon waking I realized how offensive it would be...

bowtie

bullpen

butterbeer

Christmasy

Coldstone

Coolio, def, OMG, rando, probs, sorta, tix, totes, yup 

(aka random slang)

Dumbledore

Everwood

Freakin'

himym

Hogwarts

hoodie and hoodies

ICEE

Inge

Katniss

Klaine

livestream

Malfoy

I was planning to use a picture of the very attractive much older version of Tom Felton as Malfoy, but then this one came up and of course I had to use it.

McDonalds and Meijer

Mockingjay

muggle

Newsie(s)

(Less than two weeks!!!!!!!!)

Panera

Peeta

Pigfarts

quesadilla

Rumbleroar

Starkid

sweatpants

Topanga

Weasley

This ended up being a super long post, but it was really fun to put together :)

I'm Grateful For... AVPSY

Last night AVPSY premiered on Youtube. 

I finished watching it around midnight and had a lot of feelings. It will be a little while before I can organize my thoughts well enough to write them down.

 For now I am so grateful to have been able to see the show live and now again online. (Next weekend, Lil Sis and I are going to watch it again together :)) 

Today I decided to follow Dr. Seuss's wise advice: "Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened."

Don't mind me as I curl up in my sock drawer for days...

AVPSY

The time has come, the walrus said to detail Lil Sis and my epic adventures at Leaky Con and seeing AVPSY. As AVPSY is (finally!!!) being released on youtube on Friday, I figured it was as good a time as any to revisit our fantabulous weekend in Chicago.

It started one day last July when I was perusing twitter and saw a tweet that Starkid would be performing A Very Potter 3-D: A Very Potter Senior Year at LeakyCon in Chicago in August. I immediately texted Lil Sis at work. Chicago is not far from where I live and I knew that we must be there to see it live. Not satisfied when she didn't respond immediately I also left her a voicemail. She called back shortly thereafter and we ordered tickets right away. It was seriously such an exciting day; this show has been years in the making and Darren's fame and schedule just didn't make it possible for them to do the show until then. (Darn you G.L.E.E.) We didn't care that it was only going to be a "staged reading," we were psyched. We would get to  see Darren and our other beloved Starkid's perform live in the roles that made us fall in love with them in the first place!

The show as set to be performed on Saturday, but we decided to head out Friday and spend the night because we didn't want to run into traffic or something and miss the show (and yes we're paranoid like that). We rocked out to Starkid tunes all the way to Chicago, managed to find our hotel fairly easily and get checked in. Then we decided to do some shopping downtown, which was just down the road from our hotel, except we went the wrong way the first time and ended up going at least a half a mile in the wrong direction before we realized it... But we managed to find the shopping and perused some stores; the American Girl Doll store was a must!

After walking around all afternoon, we decided to get dinner and not at some place we could eat anywhere, an only-in-Chicago type of place. Except we were really hungry and the first place we passed that looked good was a Bennigan's, so we stopped there. But we did sit out on the sidewalk, which we couldn't do back home, so we claimed that as a victory. It was fun to people watch all of the people dressed in their Harry Potter and Starkid gear.

Then we went back to the hotel and decided to check out the merchandise. As chronicled in my Denise Donovan blog, we took a long time deciding what Starkid merch we wanted and met Denise Donovan! I ended up with a Granger Danger T-shirt, JMOMS DVD and powder blue sweatband.

This was our first taste of living in a world where people loved Starkid. I got lots of compliments on my Keep Calm I'm a Starship Ranger t-shirt. It was so fun to be surrounded by people who got all of our random Starkid references and geeked out over powder blue sweatbands. We overheard someone saying that their mom saw Joey Richter at the ice machine, so of course our eyes were peeled for Starkids whenever we left our room ;)

We also checked in to the Leaky Con (since we only had passes for the conference for Saturday) and got our Leaky Con swag.

After making our purchases we decided to hit the pool, with about half of the other people there :) But it was fun and we got to relax our muscles that were sore after a day of a lot of walking!

Here we are rocking our homemade A Very Starkid Summer T-shirts. Mine says "I'll see my friends, gonna laugh til we cry" from Goin' Back to Hogwarts and Lil Sis' says "We've got these days  of Summer" from Days of Summer. The back lists the dates for Apocalyptour and Leaky Con.

The next morning we got up bright and early to attend some conference sessions before AVPSY which was "scheduled" to start at noon. They had said that if you attended a session from 11:00-11:50 you would be let in before people who just stood in line, so we had planned a full morning. We also packed our nifty Leaky Con bags full of snacks because there would be no time for lunch! 

Rumbleroar!

Our first session stared off pretty humorously. First off all, the wrong lecturer showed up. He started trying to lead us in yoga and we were all like, "What?!  Isn't supposed to be about how no one in Harry Potter has any parents or parental figures or something?" Then they got that straightened out and our lecturer never showed up. But being the true fans we are, a few people just started running it like a panel. 

Then we went to a simply fabulous session about Snape and whether he is truly good or evil. The place was packed! But what made the whole thing, was that a Snape impersonator showed up and started taking part in the discussion, in character! It was so much fun :)

I think the next session was the 11:00 that we really had no interest in, but we had to pick something so that we could get into AVPSY first... I felt bad for the guy because, seriously, no one really wanted to be there and everyone was counting down the minutes to noon. Lil Sis and I munched on some snacks. Then some workers came to get us in line... and we stood in line for like at least half an hour... It was excruciating, but we had some lovely Starkid sing-a-longs to tide us over. Then they marched us through the Chicago Hilton like a giant conga line! I'm sure we looked crazy to the legitimate guests. When we got closer they made us put our badges on our foreheads so it was easier for them to check. At that point we would have done whatever they told us!!

We finally got seated, discovered some lovely 3-D glasses under our seats and tried not to freak out! I won't spoil the show, yet, except to say that it was amazing. Very few people left without tears in their eyes (cast included). It was funny, touching, full of amazing songs and clearly more than a staged reading. Yes, there were tons of goofs and everyone read from the script, but it wouldn't be a Starkid show without mess-ups and they really only had like 48 hours to rehearse. It was amazing to see Darren (and everyone else) perform live. It was perfect.

We got out and realized that it was after 5:00! A show that was supposed to go from 12-3, went from 12:00-5:00! Again, not a Starkid show if it wasn't super long, and to their credit it didn't start until at least one by the time everyone got into the room.

Since the schedule was all out of whack, Lil Sis and I just skipped any more sessions and headed to get food. On our way to McDonald's, we got several really strange looks and possibly a comment about us being hippies, when realized that we had re-entered civilization while still wearing our sweatbands :)

We took our Mickey D's to Millenium Park to eat and debrief on the awesomeness that we had just experienced.

Next we went back to the hotel and took part in a rockin' Starkid sing-a-long. So fun to be around people who had the words memorized just like us!

Then there was the ball. We hadn't really been sure if we would attend, since we were driving back home that night, so we didn't bring any ball type clothes, but we still went anyway. It was so much fun to just dance the night away, even if we were carrying around our large bags the whole night! The DJ played "I Wanna Be" and some Disney songs! I saw Dylan Saunders wandering through the crowd and we said hi and gave him hugs.

After awhile a bunch of the Starkids came out and were dancing, which was fun to see.  We were sort of far away and it was dark, so my pics aren't very good... Some of the Warblers were there and started dancing when some of their songs from Glee came on :)

Oh, Joe Moses (wearing the hat)

Joey is in red on the far right of this pic and Darren's a tiny bit right of center wearing a blue short sleeved shirt and black vest...

We were pretty pooped from a seriously long and emotional (very, very exciting!) day.

Around midnight we had to decide, were we going to stay until 2:30 for the traditional singing of Total Eclipse of the Heart or leave then. We decided, you only live once; we were staying. This is also when we saw Matt Lang, but decided he looked uncomfortable enough that we didn't approach him.

So we stayed and rocked out to Total Eclipse of the Heart with a few hundred of our people and then hit the road. They usually play the song several times, so after the first playing we left to beat the rush. Which led us to meeting the adorable Nick Lang in his purple tracksuit. One of our biggest regrets is not asking him for a picture, but we did tell him we loved the show and he thanked us for coming. 

Then we almost didn't get let out of the parking garage, but thanks to a nice garage attendant we did and were on our merry way!

It was an epic and, dare I say, magical weekend!