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Nerd Talk: September First is coming, and I’m still waiting

Megan Roth’s weekly column about pop culture and all things nerdy
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September First is coming very quickly, and still, I sit at my desk a fully grown “adult” woman waiting for a special letter that is 16 years late.

While I’m still waiting children are preparing their trunks and checking their lists to ensure they have the right books and enough parchment and owl treats to last until Christmas.

Me? I’m still waiting.

I like to think I’ve grown up and moved on from the heart wrenching reality that I will never get my Hogwarts letter and never take that special trip to King’s Cross Station where I will run through a brick wall and see Platform 9-3/4 for the first time with the scarlet steam engine of the Hogwarts Express beckoning to me.

And yet, every year as Sept. 1 rolls around I find myself waiting and hoping. Still nothing.

At this point I would even take a letter accepting me to Ilvermony - which for those not in the know, is the version of Hogwarts for North America and is based out of the U.S.

I sit and wait each year with my books and wand ready to go at a moments notice. I’m not ashamed to say I even have my own Hogwarts robes. I am pretty prepared to go to Hogwarts.

And then Sept. 1 passes and I have to face the news that once again I will not be attending to most prestigious wizarding school in the world.

Thankfully, Sept. 1 often enough falls on or near the September-long weekend. Which means I have three wonderful days to wallow and cope.

To do this I try to marathon through all eight of the Harry Potter movies, which is a nice way to end my summer as I tend to reread the books over the summer anyway.

However this year will be different, and not only because I have to add a ninth movie to the mix with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

If you add up all eight of the movies together you get a run time of 19 hours and 39 minutes. Fantastic Beasts has a run time of two hours and 13 minutes, which puts the marathon at 21 hours and 52 minutes.

Something that could in theory be done in one day for those with a Gryffindor heart, but easily accomplished over the course of three days.

What is different, for me, this year is that I will be working over the weekend. The life of a journalist is never dull, though it does tend to cut into my Harry Potter marathon time.

Which means I’ll have to budget my time carefully.

I’m sure you are wondering why I do this just about every year? Why is Harry Potter so important?

Well there are a few reasons for that.

Harry Potter was one of the first book series to really, truly hook me and draw me in. The first series to do that was The Bailey School Kids, a mystery series where children try to figure out with someone in their life is a witch, or werewolf, or vampire.

Where The Bailey School Kids were great, Harry Potter was something else. More then anything it was those books and it’s author J.K. Rowling that have inspired me.

The other reason the books are so important to me is the connection it created with my younger sister.

She is about four years younger than I am, and growing up we didn’t have a lot in common. She was rather different than me and we didn’t have a whole lot in common, though she tried her best by copying everything I did.

However, when she first started reading Harry Potter, a few years after me, it was something we could connect on. She was just as enthralled as I was, am.

By the time the fourth book came out, she was all caught up and I demanded we have our own books because I didn’t want to share and wait to read the book I had been waiting for.

Since then we have connected on a few other topics, and have grown closer, but I think it’s because of Harry Potter.

So every year I talk to Em. We don’t live close to each other anymore, she now lives in Vancouver and I live here, but on Sept. 1 we make a point of talking.

If we can we will watch the movies together and either set up Skype to talk while we watch or text each other back and forth throughout the movies.

Yes there are many reasons I love Harry Potter, and connecting me with one of my sisters is just one of them.

So beginning Sept. 1 I will be planning out my Labour Day weekend marathon and talking to Em about how best to coordinate it.

It may sound silly, and maybe it is, but to me and Em, it’s important.