Dec. 7: Life of a typical Hufflepuff at Hogwarts

This will be hard.

I know nothing of Harry Potter. I have read none of the books. I watched the first four movies but I walked out halfway through the fifth one. I guess Harry Potter started getting boring when the main characters entered puberty. 

Google, as always, is my friend. Let us Google Hufflepuff and see what we get.

Hufflepuff House is one of the four Houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and was founded by Helga Hufflepuff. Hufflepuffs are known for being trustworthy, loyal and hardworking and blandly nice. According to J.K. Rowling, Hufflepuff roughly corresponds to the element of earth.

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JK Rowling says that Hufflepuff corresponds with the element of Earth. This means that if I was a student at Hogwarts, I would most likely be a Hufflepuff because I am a Capricorn and Capricorns are Earth signs. I know that Deborah, who gave me this title, is also a Capricorn. So is Kelsey. This means that we would all be Hufflepuffs. (Deborah's older sister, Kat, would be a Griffin Door. There is photographic evidence of this.)

I'm not sure how a person can be blandly nice. Probably you have to be from Great Britain to be blandly nice. You also have to be above the age of 55 and wear nothing but grey. And serve tea.

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I remember when the whole Harry Potter phenomenon started. The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997 but I didn't hear about it until 2000 when it became fiercely popular in the school in the town where I lived. I went to cover something at the school and saw a whole bunch of kids reading the exact same book. I asked if it was a school assignment and the teacher said no, gosh no. They'd all been turned on to Harry Potter.

The franchise exploded over the next two decades. There were seven books altogether and all of 'em were made into movies. The last one was so long that they decided to split them into two movies. I have not seen them. I know that Dumbledore dies in one of them. I think Dumbledore is the principal of the school. I do not know that for sure.

Dumbledore is gay. JK Rowling announced this once somewhere. The announcement came after all the books were written. It is interesting and wonderful that she never felt compelled to mention Dumbledore's sexuality while she was writing those books. The reason is that it wasn't important to the story. It probably would have been important to a whole lot of special interest groups who have rainbows in their logos, but they don't matter. All that matters is story. Story trumps everything.

It would totally suck if JK Rowling and Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and I and Ian Fleming and Ray Bradbury and all the great writers of history felt compelled to suck up to special interest groups as they wrote their fiction. 

Don't believe me? Try this.

Exhibit A: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Exhibit B: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, or a husband, or several spouses of unspecified gender if he/she/they/xe/them so desired...

I kinda like the first one more.

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There's a minor character named Sheriff George Bannerman who appears in a few of Stephen King's books. In The Dead Zone, he enlisted a psychic named John Smith to help him find a serial killer. Sheriff Bannerman was killed by a rabid dog in another Stephen King novel called Cujo.

The point is that Stephen King knew some things about George Bannerman's personal history. For example, he knew that George lost his virginity in the backseat of his dead father's car. That detail never made it into any of the novels because - and I reiterate - it just wasn't important to the story. Story trumps everything.

Hey, this is true for my kingdom as well. Jane Austen might have said it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in  possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. I can tell you that it is also a truth universally acknowledged that no pastor can preach a sermon from the book of Esther without mentioning one very curious fact - that God is NEVER mentioned, not even once, in the entire book.

The writer of Esther (probably Mordecai) doesn't give us any asides. He doesn't talk about Esther praying to God (though she probably did) or mention that God was displeased with Haman's scheming (though He probably was.) But you don't come away from the book of Esther thinking any less of God than you did in the book of Kings, when He sent drought on the land and then sent ravens to feel Elijah. God isn't mentioned in Esther for one reason - not important to the story. 

The Holy Spirit compels me to add that Yahweh's presence can still be felt in the fabric of the story itself.

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So far, I have not even touched on what li
fe for a typical Hufflepuff would be like at Hogwarts. Perhaps I can do that by creating a sort of itinerary, or a timeline of a typical day. 

6 a.m. - Wake up.
6:02 a.m. - Pee.
6:03 a.m. - Cast magic spell that makes pee turn into porridge.
6:05 a.m. - Eat pee porridge.
6:12 a.m. - Be blandly nice to people in your dorm as you prepare for the day's studies.
6:30 a.m. - Potions class with Val the potions teacher. Today we learn how to make a potion that can induce nausea in anyone. (Potion also known as V8.)
8 a.m. - Go outside and play that game where you ride on brooms and try to knock balls into hoops or something like that. (I think it's called Kid Itch!)
9 a.m. - Win or lose, be blandly nice to the other team.
9:30 a.m. - Go for a walk in the woods. Remember to bring manticore food for the manticores.
10 a.m. - Get interrupted on walk by a bunch of protestors who are angry about something JK Rowling said once.
10:05 a.m. - Cast magic spell to make this note really funny.
10:06 a.m. - See? It worked.
10:07 a.m. - Cast magic spell to make the Toronto Blue Jays win the World Series so Deborah's sister, who is a Griffin Door, will be happy.
10: 08 a.m. - Oops. Wrong spell. The one you cast made Cleveland change the name of its team to the Guardians.

I think I will stop now because I feel the temptation to make a bunch of inappropriate Dumbledore jokes. Let's not go there today.