philosophy supernatural nude

Here are some of my Thoughts On Books, you guys. I think books are great. I went years without reading fiction and then in 2009 I rediscovered the art of carrying a novel in my handbag, and now I think I must have been mad for not doing it for so long; so long without that fierce, entirely private joy that there is something special waiting just for me and all I need is a quite place to read. I love books. I think more people do than you think. I worked in a small independent bookshop for years and years and people used to come in and say, apologetically, I don't really read but have you got the latest Tom Clancy, or I don't really read but where's your true crime, and kids would say well I only really like Harry Potter. And I would say, we have those, this is a bookshop, welcome.

(One of my favourite customers was an elderly chap with a cane, always very well-dressed, who would come in and ask me to get volumes of Schiller in the original German. And I would call Penguin and HarperCollins and who knew who else and eventually I'd get them. And then he'd come in for them with his daughter and his daughter's daughter, who'd say things like, "Grandad, there's these books..." and his daughter would say, "Dad, don't you dare, you spoil her", and then she'd run outside to put money in the parking meter, and he and his granddaughter would share a significant look. And a little later he'd walk out of the shop proudly carrying his leather-bound volumes of German poetry and volumes one to four of Rainbow Magic Fairies.)

At school, for World Book Day I used to run the events. There was the book scavenger hunt, when I pinned the invitation to the ball at Netherfield Park to the noticeboard and hung the one ring off the bannister and put a bag of sherbet lemons on the head's door (and was hauled in by said head for unacceptable behaviour, but that is another story) and we ran votes on people's favourites. I used to read the library new accessions for sex and violence, and there are so many good books in the world.

Meme:

The book I am reading: The Wind's Twelve Quarters, a short story collection by Ursula Le Guin. I am about halfway through and I am really enjoying it. She's so good, Le Guin. So good. Listen to this:

But there was plenty of time. The summer evening would stay light; he could count on it. Lenient and sweet in their length are the twilights of a latitude halfway between equator and pole: no tropic monotonies, no arctic absolutes, but a winter of long shadows and a summer of long dusks: gradations and accommodations of brightness, attentuations of clarity, subtleties and leisures of the light.

Isn't that so lovely, so true? I love her: she can carry me home so easily in so few lines.


The book I am writing: Aha, I am never writing a book. I write fanfic. It's ridiculous how I don't write my own fiction at all. But, okay, here's a book I am not writing. I have in my mind not a story, but a setting: a bar, with mostly red lighting, in a city by the sea, in some future place. It's not a utopia and it's not a dystopia, it's somewhere between. It's in an ordinary suburban district with shops and houses and schools, and they're having parish board elections in this city, and for the first time, non-humans are running, and they're new and they have no campaign offices, so they're in this bar. I never write down the novels that live in my head!

The book I love most: I love so many books. Er, Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K. Jerome. But so many.

The last book I received as a gift: Shim sent me Cleaving, the second memoir by Julie Powell, because he knew I wanted to read it.

The last book I gave as a gift: I sent gavagai a copy of Red Plenty, which I haven't actually read myself (which is not like me - usually I make a point of only giving books that I liked!) but it is by Francis Spufford and she's a fan.

The nearest book on my desk coffee table: The First Amendment: Cases, Comments, Questions. Sad but true. But almost as near: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, Aristotle's Nichomachaean Ethics, and, er, a deck of Rider-Waite tarot cards which have an ISBN which makes them a book for tax purposes. My bookcase is just at eye-level, so I can see about another fifty books. (I came to the US with six. Oh, dear.)

I am going to bed! I am so exciting.

I now have a problem, in that when I stop taking the codeine, I start getting dizzily, drowsily dysphasic. I am not going to list today's spoonerisms. There are a lot.

Anyway. Things not to do when you have a headache and mild dysphasia - try to run a bookshop with one phone line and no internet. It basically meant we were trying to run the place from memory, and this works to some extent, but, mostly, I spent the day shouting at BT. Being themselves, and thus very useful, they had sent out an engineer at half eight at night and wondered why no one was there. Cue several conversations trying to explain certain basic concepts to them - "No, this is a business. A bookshop. A shop with books in it. Yeah, we sell them to people..." - we were left at the end of the day with the strange, uneasy feeling that you get when you pick up a phone and don't hear a dialtone. Part of me, somwhere in the hindbrain, wonders if the zombie invasion has already started.

It was an odd day, all told; mostly a day of miscommunications. They delivered a whole batch of mail that wasn't ours - I chased its real owner down a quarter of a mile, waving it like a madwoman - and then round about lunchtime, I heard a jingly-jangly ringtone and waited for Assistant Book Monkey to do something about it. He, meanwhile, waited for me to do something about it. After the penny had dropped very slowly for both of us, I picked up the phone sitting on the desk and said, in my nice, pleasant, lightly Scouse, not-at-all threatening accent, "Hello?"

There was a long pause, and then the woman on the other end whispered, "...who is this?"

Apparently, this was a mother convinced I had kidnapped her only child. Whereas I could've told her that said delightful only child had left her phone behind on our shop's counter. She eventually reappeared for it, and I gave it to her, but not before telling her, "Call your mum!", and wondering when exactly I turned into my own mother.

(Also, in further developments, I took the time to ask Matt today, "How's your harem?"

He said, rather petulantly, "I don't have a harem. I have a girlfriend now."

Assistant Book Monkey, however, was unconvinced. "Don't let Elizabeth in."

"I don't know anyone called Elizabeth," I said, somewhat irritably.

"You know, Elizabeth. She tried to give him her phone number."

I took a deep breath before saying, "You mean, our boss's twelve-year-old daughter tried to..."

They just sort of stared at me. It was a long and precious moment. Chief Book Monkey, who is a very nice man who has at some point in his life swallowed a thesaurus, is in Spain at the moment, and he is indomitable. Last year, he went on holiday and didn't come back even when the hotel he was staying in was bombed by ETA. He's that sort of a person. I just... yeah.)

By mid-afternoon, there was no phone, there was no internet connection, we had run out of pound coins and I'd had to go next door to buy kitchen rolls, one by one, with a twenty-pound note each time, for the change, and the BT engineers weren't coming, and it was too hot, and then a woman came in wanting "a book, it won a prize, it's about a murder", and I was just fed up. So I kicked the computer, tried to ring Crosby, who said "errrrrr", and then I gave up and rang shimgray, on the grounds that if anyone knew, he probably would.

...he did. And we had the book. We sold it. Assistant Book Monkey looked at me and said, "What, wait, you rang your boyfriend... I thought - oh, bloody hell, I need a smoke."

"Didn't you give up-"

"Shut up."

By the end of the day, therefore, I was very tired and very very not-compos-mentis and... yeah. I really would like my brain back sometime soon. Tomorrow, I have to get ready for this interview, find something to wear, find out where all my other clothes have got to, refill my prescription(s), find train tickets, addresses, oyster card, etc., send three letters and a parcel, then I go to London, then I go to Edinburgh, then emily_shore comes to visit, then I move out. (Finally.) In short, I am somewhat harried at the moment. Things to post in the near future - plans, insomnia cures, loneraven and forthwritten's Sooper Secret Project O'Doom^TM, 10,000 words of fic. Argh.

Pills! Then bed.

Quoth jacinthsong: "You're eating mango while you're talking to me, aren't you? You CUNT."

Some time later: "We've spent the last hour talking about kittens, mangoes, and our boyfriends. You know what? I think we might be girls."

In other words, o hai, I miss Oxford like burning, but mostly I miss the people. It is as if this is a surprise or something. Before I go on, some thanks are in order. First of all, I'm a little late in saying this, but whoever referred my post on white privilege to Blogbharti, I'm honoured. Thank you.

Second of all, to all those people who appeared on slasheuse's love meme and left me furtive love: thank you, thank you, and thank you particularly to the person who made me cry, thank you. And, actually, speaking of my missing Oxford, it seemed somehow natural that so many people on the meme should be Oxonians what I have known and loved, and I had ridiculous fun leaving anonymous and not-so-anonymous love for all of them. It seems quite appropriate, here and now, for it to be recorded that slasheuse herself is made of greatness; that everyone secretly wants to marry apotropaios and eat foreverdirt's brains; that I am not the only person who lusts over absinthe_shadow's shoes; that shimgray's most notable feature is that he is "endearingly meerkat-like" and that magic_doors is destined for greatness, possibly in the manner of CJ Cregg. It would be ridiculous to tell you all again how much I love you, but. I do. I do, I do.

(And, also. The meme is currently at 315 comments. These things max out at, I believe, 5000. There is world enough and time for all of you. Go and demand love. It is, by my time, very early on Monday morning, an excellent time to demand love. Go forth.)

In other news, I went into work today, and, well, the local populace had certainly been eating their crazycakes. I refer you to the woman who came in, looked confused, then said, "I'm looking for a book. It has something to do with the Fonz."

Long, long pause, while I stared, and she pointedly did not tell me the author or title of the book. Finally, I said, faintly, "As in Arthur Fonzarelli?"

Blank stare. I tried again. "The Happy Days character?"

She looked slightly happier. I sat down at the desk computer and wondered vaguely what would happen if I typed "something to do with the Fonz" into TBP. Eventually I did discover that Henry Winkler has written a series of children's books with titles like "The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Came Down: The Mostly True Confessions of the World's Greatest Underachiever". I ordered this book and felt pretty good about life.

Possibly a gesture from the universe to make up for this bout of weirdness, we got a late-afternoon visit from one of my favourite customers, a retired doctor who is endless in his affability and his total failure of recall when it comes to ordering books he wants. (Long-term readers of this journal may remember him as the man who came in and demanded a book called "The Assassin's Boyfriend" - and was delighted when I successfully got him The Time-Traveler's Wife.) Anyway! He bounced in, caught sight of me, drew to a comical halt and demanded, hands on hips, "Well?"

I thought about it for five seconds and said, "I don't know, they haven't come out yet."

"Well, many good wishes for a first - even though you went to the wrong-coloured university, you reprobate."

I thought about it some more. "Dark blue instead of light?"

"Precisely!" he boomed, gave beaming smiles all round and bounced out again.

He's a lovely man, just rather odd. Work this week has been mostly uneventful, as most of the regular staff are on holiday and, er, we don't have any customers. I met the latest of my replacements, a solemn, fluffy-haired boy called Matt, who is plagued by all the other male staff continually referring to "Matt's harem". I found this odd, because a boy less likely to have a harem I never did see. He did the morning shift and I did the afternoon one, so off he went at one o'clock. Watching him pass the window, I saw a girl come out to meet him from next door with an umbrella, and they went off together into the rain. "Oh, you're all being mean," I said, into the relative silence of the shop. "I think he's rather sweet."

Cue rustling and the sound of someone dropping a mug. "How the hell does he do it?" yelled Assistant Book Monkey, storming in and trailing coffee and ash everywhere. "You said, you said you thought he was sweet! He's half your age!"

"He's SIXTEEN!" I yelled back.

"They all said that! All you women! Crazy Al and Deb and Bernie! Even Her Upstairs, and she's a LESBIAN!"

(At which point, the only customer in the shop, a little old lady with shopper, picked up her cane and went out.)

"What..." I started to say, and then saw Matt cross the glass in the other direction, with a different umbrella - and a different girl. "Right," I said.

"If we could only bottle Matt," said Assistant Book Monkey sadly, "that'd solve all our problems."

The shop's problems are pretty considerable at the moment, it must be said. I see it more than the others, because I come back every three months and see the changes, but this time it's really palpable. Every day, the takings are less, every day, the shop gets slightly shabbier because there's no money to pay people to tidy it up, every day, something else breaks and can't be replaced, every day I angst about taking money for a job that I do well. I think this is the last time I'll ever work here. When I come back next summer, it'll be gone. And that breaks my heart, because the cult of the independent bookshop is one of the few things I subscribe to without reservation. I love independent bookshops. I know most of the customers, I know the books, I know the people who come in to deliver, I know the place like the back of my hand. And, well, I've been working there for four years and coming in for ten. It's a long time for something to be a part of your life.

Blah. It's all fundamentally depressing. Once the shop is gone, I have nothing left holding me here at all; all my friends from up here are now in other places doing exciting things, and so it should be, but it makes me feel very remote from everything, a mere transient. I am getting twelve-fourteen-am maudlin. Moving on.

Further things of note. chiasmata and I are trying to get a cat. We're trying, because we don't know yet how the landlord feels about it, but, eeee, cat. I have never had a cat. I am, in fact, very much a dog person - the only pet I have had worthy of note was a long-haired German Shepherd - but I am open to persuasion on the matter. I shall probably be a lot of a geek-dyke-girl cliché, but. Cats are nice. So are geek girls. jacinthsong and I engaged in something of the Lament of the Monogamous Bisexual earlier. Etc.

Ye gods, I am dull. I leave you to go proof-read an eighteen-page guide to transvaginal ultrasound. (No, really.)

Last night at twenty-five past five, a customer came storming in and howled: "WHERE'S YOUR MANAGER?"

Assistant Book Monkey and I both looked up, startled, and chorused: "Manchester."

The man took a deep breath and yelled, "My daughter ordered her book and you BLOODY FLOGGED IT!"

( cut for me ranting about three days of people shouting at me )

Okay, enough of that. Things about which to be happy:

1. Every time I refresh my flist, another story pops up on hawkfromhandsaw. So far, this ficathon has been much more painless than the last one (touch wood), unless you count the person who blithely told me to give everyone a week's extension. Er, horribly-rude much?

2. The shop printer ran out of ink today. I rummaged in the tea-and-coffee drawer for the spare cartridges and bemusedly discovered £120 in assorted cash. Some detective work later, it would appear that this is the same money that went missing, presumed stolen, six weeks ago.

3. The horrible books have actually arrived from THE. At least when people come in to shout at me, I'll have books to hand over.

(THE are a book wholesaler. In the continuing saga of my recent stupidity, ABM asked me today, "What's the website for THE again?"

"Why don't you google for it?" I asked.

He gave me his best what-is-wrong-with-you? look and said, "Why don't you try it and see?"

Er. I am stupid. Also today I fell off the kerb.)

4. Contrary to all supporting evidence regarding my intelligence, my LSAT score has apparently leapt by eight points. Whoop.

5. Thanks to a demented three hours last night, I actually have a story for my own ficathon.

6. And, finally, I'm going to Berlin on Friday to see the_acrobat, in what I am reliably informed will be the Visit of OMG 1.75. I've never been to Germany before. I can't wait.

So, yes, on balance, it was a good day. Hell, it's always a good day when you find money in your teabags.

Dear self,

That thing, where you keep increasing Firefox text size? And the way your head hurts in the morning?

YOU NEED NEW GLASSES.

yours in breathless stupidity,

you.

Ahem. In other news. I am very stupid. I rolled out of bed at half twelve and only then remembered I had to be in work by one. Following which, I was sitting in the shop in the late afternoon, getting error messages and pressing refresh obsessively when the nice people who run the website rang the shop. "Hi!" they said. "Your servers are down!"

"I know that!" I said chirpily back. "I am trying to run a bookshop! Without a computer!"

"Uh-oh," said Assistant Book Monkey's voice behind me, and I turned around to see our thirty-year-old till creak open, shriek impressively and spew almost an entire receipt roll at the ceiling. "I think I broke it."

At which point two annoyingly loud girls opened the door and demanded to do some vox pops for the local paper about the closure of the local police station. Okay, we said, seeing as we have no till and no computer and no customers and indeed, no purpose in life, we'll answer your questions. Of course, I chose this moment to say, dozily, "Formby has a police station?" and before I was quite aware of what was going on I'd been quoted, had my picure taken and been informed that I was going to be in the paper being idiotic.

Sigh. I went back to the computer, which was still emphatically unfunctioning, and banged my head against the window. Over the noise, ABM told the newspaper girls, "She's not always like this. Actually, when she's not here she's at Oxford."

They looked at me and my head-against-window and yards of till roll and said, "You're kidding."

"Yeah," I said, "he is."

Eventually the till was fixed, the servers came back up, a woman came in and bought £120 of book tokens, someone came in and gave us some chocolates, life got better. Things could be worse: I could be at school right now. But I'm still feeling distinctly frazzled today, and I'm not sure why.

Anyway. Enough of me being weird. likethesun2 tagged me to come up with seven odd/quirky things about myself, and here they are:

( seven things about me )

The train to London from Liverpool Lime Street is probably the busiest service in England. It's usually on time. So I was surprised when it jerked out of the station on the appointed minute, went approximately six metres and rolled to a stop. After a second there was an announcement, somewhat apologetic: "Ladies and gentleman... er... the brakes have failed."

This is a Pendolino tilting train, for reference. It goes at 125 miles per hour round corners. Um.

After a bit, they decided to reset the train, whatever that means. "It will take five to six minutes," said the man, "and all electrical devices on the train will cease to function. We repeat, all electrical devices will cease to-"

The lights went out. There was a pause, and a burst of laughter. There is, I think, a particular type of Scouse humour, and this is it. (On the way back, what sounded like the same guy made an announcement to say: "To the young lady trying to buy wine with a credit card - I've just given the machine a bang with a hammer! Come and get your wine!")

The train actually made up the delay, and I wandered into Euston a few minutes early. I was in London to do some philosophy teaching for a friend - basically, I was helping introduce a bunch of fifteen-year-olds to the subject for the first time, which has its good points and its bad points. The main bad point is, of course, that no one is actually interested in philosophy. It's not something you do at school or see at television, it's not something that ever gets talked about from day to day, and it's very, very hard to get vaguely bored teenagers to care about the nature of mind or whatever.

The good point is that I get to talk about philosophy to a captive audience. I don't think I'm a very good teacher - certainly the yawning could be blamed on the humidity, but maybe not in so much excess - but still. I do love my subject, which has to count for something.

Yesterday night I did something kind of crazy. Sort of, anyway. I guess I should have asked earlier if anyone in London wanted to meet up, but I completely forgot I'd have a free night. I was kicking myself, because it was a beautiful summer and in the last month I've been dying slowly of loneliness, and I was wandering in solitary fashion down the Charing Cross Road and yes. I don't know if I ever mentioned it, but I tried to get rush tickets for Rent in New York - I know, I saw it already, but I loved it so much I wanted to see it again - and failed. I didn't know if the same idea existed over here, but I wandered into a theatre to find out and sort of bemusedly ended up with a ticket for Avenue Q. (Not rush, apparently - tickets for students and OAPs. I'm definitely not complaining.)

Is it kinda weird to see a musical on your own? I guess so. But I ended up sitting next to a girl who was also seeing it on her own, and we got to chatting, and that was nice. I loved the show. I didn't think it was laugh-out-loud funny, unlike, er, the entire rest of the theatre, but I enjoyed it. (And even a crap musical - which this certainly wasn't - would've beaten an evening sat on my own.) For some reason, Sesame Street only with porn really, really works. I stopped finding the puppeteers distracting and started finding them impressive, and I actually found bits of the story really poignant. The internet is for porn, it's true. (Which is not to be read as an either an enrdorsement or critcism of LJ's current policy, just to be clear.)

One thing about Avenue Q, though - someone, probably Ben, told me that the West End and Broadway versions are different. Why would this be? The only thing I noticed was that the sign indicating a 15-minute intermission had been scrawled over - "-mission" crossed out and "-val" written in, which amused me, as I just had this picked up in a beta last week.

So I'm glad I did that. Today I was helping teach just war theory, which is interesting enough, and talking about PPE and philosophy in general, and the humidity in the room was killing. Afterwards, I didn't know what to do so I went to Forbidden Planet, which probably sums up my entire life.

Er, what else? I spent the beginning of the week with hathy_col and tau_sigma, and had just a really lovely time. We watched Heroes, and ate so much pick 'n' mix it was getting silly, and then, because it was a lovely summer's day and we were in Britain, we went to Southport and had an authentic seaside experience. Seriously. We went down the pier! We played on ancient arcade machines that told all our fortunes - apparently I'm a romantic (huh!), Colleen's an expert on everything and Tali needs to make better friends(!) - and ate chips with ketchup and mayo, and ice-cream, and wandered through the crappy rides at New Pleasureland and Colleen extolled the joys of Southport. Apparently, allegedly, Paris was based on it.

To which I say: LIES. But it is on the tourism website, which of course has no reason to lie to attract people to this crappy town full of heroin addicts. So I stand corrected.

But, you know, it really was fun. We ended up eating fruit and cheese pizza (advertised as Vegetable Deluxe - but it had olives, cheese, pineapple, tomatoes and peppers on it, and these are ALL FRUITS OMG, and mushrooms are FUNGI) and looking up rubbish on YouTube and Wikipedia, and trying to find the best bits of the Star Trek movies, and watching Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in varying states of utter ridiculousness.

(I have this lovely memory of staggering around likethesun2's flat in Chicago, killing myself laughing at William Shatner doing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I like the themes that reoccur in my life.)

And after that, just talking and talking and laughing at rubbish and talking some more. It was lovely. And London was okay, too. I just feel rubbish now, partly because my very busy week is over and partly because I just am rubbish lately. Everything is getting tasteless and plastic again, and the sun highlights everything's edges and doesn't help.

I walked past one of those lovely, antiquated second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, and went in and bought a battered copy of The Truth, and as I was paying I noticed a sign advertising a job. I thought to myself, I'd have a pretty decent chance of getting that job - I have five A-levels and three years of very relevant experience - and almost asked for an application form. Because wouldn't that be lovely? To just... work in a bookshop. I know I already do. But sometimes I wonder if I haven't already found my calling, and all the rest is silence. Do I need a career? Can't I just work in a bookshop and hide from the world forever?

Clearly it's the part of me that always wants to hide from the world forever that's talking. And I shouldn't spend so much time on my own, because that's how I get like this. But the rest is not silence. I need to start coping.

This Friday night at half past nine, I am going to dress up in my gown and witch's hat, host a barbecue, hand out drinks, take pictures for the Southport Visiter and then be responsible for a hundred and eighty people getting their copies of Deathly Hallows.

And? I get paid for this. I love my job.

Well, no, I don't get paid - my three hours' work will just about pay for my book. But it's the principle of the thing. Before that, unfortunately, comes the hard work. Today was spent alphabetising most of those hundred and eighty people, dealing with the last minute pre-orders and serving the few customers left in the world who, indeed, want other books. But I still love my job, because, hey, selling books, and every time I come back I'm reminded of how much I believe in the glorious ideal of an independent bookshop. There's a cartoon in today's Metro about the Asda/Bloomsbury fiasco with the caption "...and everyone lived happily ever after, except small bookshops." Cue wry laughter, because it's only funny 'cause it's true. The shop is still making no money, and honestly, it needs to sell those hundred and eighty books at full price. The discount we're doing isn't much, but creative - £15, and a quid off the next seven books you buy. More than the shop can really afford, but the whole event is designed to stop them running off to Tesco's, so we're going with the flow.

Anyway, more pleasant things! A new Harry Potter book does, of course, bring the geeks out of the woodwork - I was flirted with by a sweet indie boy who shamefacedly asked if he could pick up ten copies for all his friends - as well as small children who've heroicially got through the first six just recently. (My favourite of the HP contingent was an old lady who asked me to find a particular name in the notebook I keep the pre-orders in, and then gave me a handful of cash so I'd mark it as paid. "Tell her Grandma's taken care of it," she said, and disappeared.)

We also had a visit from one of my favourite customers today, a retired local doctor. The first thing he did was to park his elderly mother and her wheelchair right in the middle of the space - "She's ninety! Everyone else can get out of her way!" - and then gasp in surprise at seeing me after such a long time. Last time I saw him, I said, he was trying to buy a book when he couldn't remember the title.

"Yes!" he said cheerfully. "All I knew was something and someone's relative. The Assasin's Boyfriend. No, The Time Traveler's Wife."

"Was it the right book?" asked his mother.

"Right book," I said. "Wrong universe, maybe."

Delighted at this suggestion, he chortled his way out. There are lots of customers that I'm fond of, but he's near the top of the list. He wears Descartes T-shirts, which would dispose me favourably towards anyone.

Anyway! I am getting distracted. This seems a good a place as any to set out my Harry Potter spoiler policy, which is as follows: don't spoil me. Simple as, and thanks, everyone, for having used cuts so scrupulously until now. I'm usually not fussed about spoilers, but this time it matters to me that I stay unspoiled. And as this is the last Harry Potter book, this'll be the last time I'm ever worried about them.

Right. I'm going to be away for a couple of days - I'm going to London tomorrow for the BBC Power to the People aftershow party, and I'll be back on Friday afternoon, at which point there are barbecues and local newspapers and Harry Potter will take over my life. So I guess I'll be absent for a wee bit, but before I go, I should say: I've decided to go ahead with both the Slings & Arrows and Altered Mental States ficathons. I'll open sign-ups for both of them after the weekend, once we've got back all the people who are holed up somewhere reading Deathly Hallows. See y'all on the flipside.