Harry Potter Fan on the Harry Potter Craze

Avada Kedavra!

Ah, yes. That’s just one of the curses I’ve learned from reading the Harry Potter books. As many of us have known for eons, it’s the killing curse. It kills a person instantly with a flash of sickly green light. That was why it had been tagged as one of the three unforgivable curses. The other two are the Cruciatus curse, cast by chanting “Crucio” and pointing one’s wand at another, which inflicts total torture to the poor victim, and the Imperius curse, chanting “Imperio” now, which causes the victim to be completely under the command of the caster, who can make him do anything he wishes.

Sounds cool, huh? I wish it were true, really. But then again, there would have been more deaths than ever. And more and more evil spreading throughout the entire country. Imagine the possibility of killing someone cleanly, and I mean cleanly, without the slightest bit of evidence that would count against you. No more nutty professors giving out 5.0s here and there. No more know-it-all assholes from other colleges looking down upon yours. And the best of it all, no more meatheads causing the terrible traffic jam along Katipunan Avenue so unbearable that you would rather wanna walk instead of drive your way to the university which is what, only a kilometer or less away from where you’re stuck. The possibilities are endless. You could always break your wand and get a new one at Olivander’s, just in case you feared your wand would betray you. You are limited only by your own imagination. So think hard. Utilize your brain cells. Do yourself a favor.

Yeah, I admit. I am a Harry Potter fan and I am sooo afflicted by this Harry Potter fever. I have all five hardbound books in my shelf, which I’ve read like, 5 times each already. I think I’ve almost memorized the more important parts of each book. And still, I’m rereading Goblet of Fire now. It’s really fun reading the “Task parts” of the book. They’re so action-packed that you’d think you were in the scene, watching Harry use his Firebolt to fly around that dragon and get the egg thingy, fight all those spear-and-lasso-armed merpeople, and save Ron and Hermione and that other veela girl down that river with that infamous I’ve-saved-another-person’s-ass look on his face.

Do I own the home videos? Now you ask. Of course I do. I love the special effects. They seem very realistic. Too realistic to be true, in my opinion. I love Emma Watson too. Such a lovely face to be seen in a children’s movie. I’ve played the DVDs so many times that I can’t get the DVD player to play them anymore. Talk about the unreliability of digital media-on-disc. I swear I’d rather have a copy of these movies on video cassette.

I also surf the internet for updates, press releases, and stuff about the upcoming movies and books. From what I’ve read, the new director of the latest film “Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban” is Alfonso Cuaron. He was the director of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (And My Mother Also), a movie about someone, filmed in a language I don’t even bother to understand, and became a hit somewhere in the world, probably in Latin America. Big deal. Like I care about this movie.

I am 18 years old now and yet I still feel like an 11-year-old. I will never last a day without playing my Chamber of Secrets computer game, flicking a page of one of the books, and checking out Mugglenet.com for the latest HP news. I know I’m sure I’m still a child inside, finding refuge in this little story about a [physically and emotionally] scarred boy. Still imagining. Still hoping. Still wishing. That one day in my life, I would receive an owl or a “fellytone” call, informing me that I would be taken out of this technology-driven Muggle world, and into the world of magic, where I could swish-and-flick my wand at something and say “Wingardium Leviosa” without the fear of being seen or heard and thought of as a delusional Harry Potter wannabe.