"The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes..."

It's oftentimes we're too preoccupied with carving out our own particular niches in life, going through the protocol of life, to realize that the point of life is actual living. Each day is a series of exchanges, business and otherwise--signed contracts, verbal agreements, shook hands.  We set aside one group of priorities for others.  For Zinos Kazantsakis, it seems as if that is all he does in Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen.

Harry Potter and the Raiders of the Lost Horcrux, Part Un.

If a sword gets lost in the woods and no one is there to find it, can it destroy a piece of your soul?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The arrival of a new Harry Potter movie is always somewhat of a major film event.  But with the release of the latest installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, it's finally sinking in that we're approaching the end of a franchise as steadily as that train heads into Hogwarts.  Up front I should admit to not being a big Potter-head.  I have not read a single word of J.K. Rowling's original novels.  I have enjoyed every single movie and have loved a couple, but I have also not revisited any of them since their theatrical release outside of catching a scene here and there when it airs on cable.  And even after having screened the first five in a theater, I completely skipped the sixth movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and had to scramble to obtain a DVD to watch the night before having been invited by friends to watch the latest film. So while the world was awaiting with baited breath for the release of the first half of Deathly Hallows, I had a full three years of space in between my own personal Harry Potter experiences.  Needless to say, the enthusiasm had sort of fizzled like a long-distance relationship.  But after watching the sixth movie on DVD and then sitting in a sold-out theater for the seventh, I carry with me a new and rejuvenated affection for the series.

#8: "Well, I say, f*#$ therapy!"

If you've been keeping track, I turned 30 and completely laid this project to rest only 7 posts in.  Around Thanksgiving, I figured maybe I could finished it before the year is over.  I'd have to average a little more than two posts per day.  Unlikely to say the least.

The age of 30 itself is an arbitrary milestone--as random a number as 27 or 44.  And so I will eschew all goals and deadlines for this project and merely write them as time and inspiration permit.  People who think I was overreacting to this birthday fail to realize that dissatisfaction with one's life, i.e. a crisis, can come at any age, that it need not be qualified by mid- or quarter- or other timeline defining term.  As I wrote of in the previous post about "Freaks & Geeks", the trepidation of coming-of-age stories for those high school students resonated with me more fully not until my late twenties.  In that same manner, the sadness of Miles Raymond--a failed writer in his forties, two or so years removed from a divorce--hit me where I lived in Alexander Payne's Sideways.