The importance of "Harry Potter"

Last night we went to see the last movie of Harry potter series. You might hate everything related to harry potter and it’s blockbusters and the whole craze about it, then you can simply skip this post. But if you read on, I will tell you why I like it and why I have to argue with some of my friends when I keep defending harry potter everywhere I go. One of necessities of life besides food is the world of fantasy for me. I cannot imagine a world without it. If you are a fantasy freak like me, you know there are a few great fantasy book have been written and also been successful worldwide. So little, that you can almost count them by fingers. I’m not going to list them all here and act as a Wikipedia entry. I just mention some of them, which had a deep impact on me and my way of thinking. When I was at high school, I was so bored with the mathematics classes that I always found refugee in the school library, which I was lucky to find some treasures such as Homer’s “Iliad and Odyssey”. I kept reading without knowing that I was reading one of the greatest fantasy book ever written. I didn’t know how the hours passed when I was going trough the pages and that is how I survived the high school. Before that, when I was younger, there was ”The never ending story” by “Michael Ende”. I read that book so many times that the pages split apart and had to bind it by myself. Not an easy job I confess, for a five hundred pages book. I asked my father for help and he made a very lovely leather case that I still have it in my library, in a good shape. It was truly a never-ending story to me. I never liked the movie they made based on this book, because such imagination and those details can not easily fit in a two or three hours movie. If you know a child about ten years old, please be an angel and give him or her this book as a gift. Although this a hard time to encourage children to read books, when there are easier kinds of entertainments out there. That’s one of the reasons I want to tell you about the importance of Harry potter. It made these Xbox generation children to read and if you have read it or at least seen the books in a bookstore, you will admit it’s not an easy read. It’s a wonder that children all over the world read over 5000 pages and loved it. Of course I’m not going to count the adults and how much they enjoyed it as well, at this matter. Then there was the word of “Narnia” and “Aslan”, who made me think about religion in an entirely different way. And years later, a real fantasy, almost near to perfection with “The Lord of the Rings” made me think of all these great minds who gifted our world with such delight and wisdom. With heroes who keep our hearts warm in the darkest times. What would we do without them? I kept thinking about those great names: Homer, Shakespear, Tolkein, C.S.Lewis, Ende … but deep down I had this feeling that the world of fantasy, so dear to my heart, belongs to the men. They have created the beloved heroine, but imagine if a woman could write a fantasy, and how would that be? And then one day a friend whom we shared same interests in books came to me and gave me the first harry potter book and said, read it. I confess I wasn’t that bewitched with the book till the third one, and when I found out that the author was a woman, as I was reading more and more I became excited about the fact that I discovered another fantasy world which all the elements go together in details and it gives you such great characters and all written, at last, by a woman. I cannot say how much it grieves me that the hero is not a girl or “Hermoine Grenger” is not the name of the book. But after this huge success, I’m sure Joanne Rowling will proudly write her complete name on her new books with the main character as a girl. Well, that is something to cheer me up. Until then I will enjoy living in a time when I could read these great fantasies and enjoy the fun of watching them being made as a movie on a big screen, where everyone, no matter what age they are, can experience a fantasy world on a Sunday afternoon, even as little as 120 minutes of their lifetime.

Epiphany in supermarket

Living in a diverse city like Toronto is quite a new experience for me. A valuable experience and I really like it. I like the way people talk with different and sometimes weird accents, but everybody understands. I like it when you are in a streetcar; you hear at least five languages at a time. And when it comes to food, you have access to nearly all the cuisines of the world.
When I first came here, I thought there are no sour cherries in Toronto. But that was because our nearest supermarket, in this case -Loblaw’s- didn’t have any. Then I figured out, you just have to know where to look. I even found fava beans.
After a while, finding a new place for groceries shopping became one of our hobbies. We went discovering new foods in new neighborhoods. In one of our expeditions, we came by a Pakistani supermarket, which had halal food. The place was huge and had everything. You could find a variety of spices like nowhere else. Meats with every cut you’d like and fresh vegetables. As I was walking down the isles and looking at different cans and bottles with ugly packaging and no information on them, I had an epiphany. I said to myself, this is probably what Middle East looks like. The place can offer you everything, and sometimes more than those fancy supermarkets across the GTA, but there is no order or discipline to it. They don’t care about the appearances and customer services. Because there are more than enough people to buy their goods and there is even no need for competition or advertisement. And if anyone from the outside look at it, they probably think, what on earth these people are eating? Strange bottles and dirty canes, Meat cuts in grocery plastic wraps. But what they don’t know is, by looking down their nose at such place, they may miss the most delicious tastes of their life.
I remember our first days here and our excitements when we entered a supermarket. We were astonished by the arrangements and orders and beautiful packaging and I felt dizzy sometimes, because I couldn’t decide what pasta should I choose for dinner? I had endless options, while back home I knew the only brand that worked among those three or four. But after shopping, always came the disappointment. Despite the fancy package, the taste was not what we’ve expected and we had to throw it away. Maybe we didn’t get used to the taste yet or we didn’t know how to cook it to make the most of it. This is probably our life here for a while. We are excited and bedazzled by the options we have, but sometime we find them strange to our taste and it will take us a while to figure out how to cook it for the best results.

Something to share

I had some discoveries recently that I like to share with my girl friends that are living far from home and sometime find their situation unbearable। Before you put that self-pity, miserable, losers look on your face and start hating your new life, check the following symptoms:
Dehydration: sometimes a glass of water can do wonders.
Hunger: If you are feeling you’re about to cry over the stupidest thing, like when you are finally home and can’t find your keys and you are sure that they are somewhere in your big handbag. Best thing might be to make a decent meal. If you have nothing in the fridge, just call for a pizza or make yourself a grill cheese. Suddenly things aren’t that bad after you eat.
If after easting, you are still down and feel depressed or you need to cry a bit, check your period date, it might be a sign of PMS.
Try putting probiotics in your diet. They can easily be included, by eating yogurt daily.
And finally exercise is always recommended.
If all the things failed, go buy yourself a new pair of shoes. This will never fail.

SOUNDS

There are times in our life that we miss someone, something, or some place. I think it is a perfect time in my life to miss my home. The home I left with anger, despair and riot. The home I hope I will go back to it and see it different.
But how do we miss a place? How is the process of missing shaped within our feelings? Is being in a special spot means that much to us, or is it the feeling we had at the spot that counts? What did I feel there in my home that I do not feel here and therefore miss it? What is the exact experience, I can’t recreate here? I’m sure it’s different for each individual but mine I guess, is the sounds.
Last night I was trying to go to sleep and I couldn’t. I tried to remember how would I fight a sleepless night back home and I remembered a series of sound effects in a row, exactly like a recorded sound track. It made me so excited all of a sudden and the same time made me feel so far away because I don’t hear those sounds in Toronto anymore.
It was a narrow brook near our apartment which you couldn’t hear the sound of it until midnight. When the alley was dark and no car or motorcycle passed, you could hear the water flowing down the brook and feel like living in a cottage in the middle of a forest. The wind blew through the trees and sometimes an empty can of soup would make such a joyful song flowing along the little brook that you would have missed it if some nights, it didn’t came along.
And Then there were crows. Yes! There are no crows in this city. I can’t believe I’m missing their ugly sounds. You think it’s scary to wake up in the morning by the crow sound, but I actually liked it. Their sounds meant that morning is here, or maybe rain is coming soon. Some how early morning in my memories mixed with black crows flying over the sky and dark clouds preparing to shower rain on you which was a rare thing in my city and therefore very special and happy time for me.
I went to a university with big tall trees and thousands of crows nesting on them. They were old and surely they've been witness of generations after generation graduating and changing their lives.
So the crow sound is my joyful sound. All my good memories come with it, all the good time of college. …
And just now, I remembered I had this weird habit of recording the sounds around me by my cell phone. Wish I still had that phone. I had sounds of river. Some old man called “darvish” who came in our alley every Saturday, singing and blessing everyone with his powerful voice, the man who sold flowers door by door, the other guy who sold salt and would buy the extras of breads.
Comparing now, it seems I lived in chaos, a noisy city and of course this quiet nights in Toronto freaks me out. There is nothing but the sound of airplane passing in the sky and frequent sirens that makes me think someone is feeling bad right now. And here there are seagulls. I have nothing against seagulls but I don’t share any memories with them, not bad ones anyway and maybe I’m in luck!

Who knows maybe someday I will miss these sounds of Toronto specially the wind.

Happy new year!

Another no-rooz is coming and our persian year turns 1390. I hope it will become a good year. happy new year all invisible friends :)