Like millions of others, I saw Harry Potter this week.
But, unlike everyone else, I did not go to a theater, or watch Harry's victory over Voldemort. Instead, it was my first time watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I saw the first two movies when they came out when I was in junior high, but since that time, I try not to watch any TV or movies with profanity, so I haven't seen the others. (I have made no such guidelines with books, so I have read all of the Harry Potter series.)
So what made me watch those two this week? Well, some people in my ward were watching one movie a night up to the new premiere. Ordinarily I would just ignore this, but it just so happened that they were watching them in the apartment where I've been sleeping until my AC gets fixed. (My landlord got my hopes up this week with an email, but it still hasn't been fixed. Tomorrow will be three weeks from the time it first went out.) For the first few nights I waited until I thought the movies were over to go there, because I didn't want to be in the awkward position of being there but not watching the movie, but on Tuesday and Wednesday I didn't like the idea of sitting in my hot apartment, so I decided to go. Besides, I figured if I didn't watch those movies, I'd probably be gallivanting all over YouTube, and potentially encountering worse content--especially if I read the comments.
Did I like them? I guess so. Will I watch any more? Good question.
On Thursday, I had a very embarrassing experience. I was in the library, working on a Google doc study guide I had made, listening to a Pandora station on my headphones/ear buds/whatever. Suddenly, Katy Perry's "Firework" came on. At this point I remembered having heard stories of people listening to music on computers in the library, but their headphones weren't plugged in all the way, so they actually heard the music coming out of the computer speakers, not their headphones, which meant everyone else heard it too. I could tell that I was actually hearing my music from my headphones, but just to be safe, I decided to try to push them in further.
Well, my headphones had been plugged in, but not all the way, so when I touched them, it bumped them out just enough so that it did indeed start coming out of the speakers! I made the thing I feared happen by trying to prevent it! It did not seem to be working to plug the headphones in (at this point I am panicking and very embarrassed), so I just decided to close the Pandora tab. From the time I closed the tab to the time the music stopped was just a split second, but it seemed like a micro eternity.
It could have been a lot worse. It could have been a more embarrassing song, the library could have been busier, and something else could have knocked my headphones out, leaving me unprepared to stop the music.
Who knows--considering that the song was "Firework," the location was BYU, and the week was this Harry Potter week, maybe people thought I was listening to this:
Last evening I had a surprise. I heard a knock on the door (which I had strangely just opened to cool it down), and when I answered, there was a guy with a box. "Does Mark Melville live here?" he asked. I was confused because all packages I had ordered recently had already arrived. He told me that this package had been delivered to their address "a while back." This "a while back" was nearly three months ago! When my textbooks for spring term never arrived, I emailed the seller I bought them from. They never responded, so I filed a claim with Amazon and got my money back. In the meantime, I had been kicked out of the BYU Bookstore for reading, read similar (but different) books in the library, did terribly on a quiz because I had not read the right book, and ultimately had to return to that rip-off Bookstore to buy the books.
I don't know who the dumbest person was in this story. I feel bad for the seller, but they should have known that if they didn't respond to my emails and didn't have tracking info, the blame would go to them. I don't know how the mailman delivered it to the wrong address. It is very clearly the right address, in big letters, bigger than most other packages I get. All my other packages have successfully made it to my apartment, even if the writing was smaller. And I don't understand the people who actually did get it. Most places around me are BYU-approved housing, and he looked like a college student himself. So why did they wait so long to get it to me--either by giving it back to the mail man or bringing it over when it arrived? A letter is one thing, but I know I would feel uncomfortable with a package that didn't belong to me sitting in my apartment for months. Spring classes ended a month ago! There are a lot of people who do spring classes but not summer--I could have been gone before they got it to me!
I've been charged once again for the books because I'm honest. Now I'll have to wait for the end of the term to sell them to the ridiculous Bookstore. (How can an institution run by the Church have such nefarious business practices?)
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