Boobs!

Bet that caught your attention, didn’t it, gentle readers? I want to open today’s post with a small note:  anyone is welcome to read this, but the post really is geared more towards women.  Also, if you comment, please try and be mature about it.

When I was younger, I had a lot of health problems that resulted in lots of time spent in hospitals and lots of fun tests and scans.  My mom and I joked that, after all of the tests and scans, I should either be glowing green or have incredible superpowers.

This summer, I’ve decided that I do, in fact, have a superpower.  And it’s not a very good one either.

I have Mutant Boobs.

I was a late bloomer, you see. A very late bloomer.  I don’t think I even started wearing a bra until 7th grade.  It didn’t bother me though. I never stood in front of the mirror, lamenting my lack of chest while stuffing my training bra with tissues; I never asked for a padded bra to make it look like I had something, I was perfectly fine with what I had, even though I didn’t actually have anything.

When I did start, however, it was with a bang. A very, very big bang.

In 8th grade, I started with a respectable jump from an AA to a B.  And I decided I rather liked having boobs, my t-shirts looked a lot nicer with something to fill them out.  I was very happy with my nice, respectable B Cup.

My body, however, had different ideas.  Just before I started Freshman year, I had another outward growth spurt that resulted in my jumping another cup size.  My guy friends started realizing that I was, in fact, a girl.  And were very vocal about it, much to my girly horror.

I spent my first two years of high school with a respectable C Cup.  And, once again, my body had different ideas.  By the time I was a junior, I’d had another growth spurt that resulted in another Bra Shopping Spree; this time for D Cup bras.  The boobs I had come to accept and even grow to love were my most hated feature.

Why?

Because they had become a pain, literally.  Tiny me at 5′ 3″ and weighing in at 120″ was carrying about 8 lbs (according to my doctor) of dead weight on my chest.  It resulted in terrible back pains (not helped by my heavy book bag), neck pain, and headaches.  My only consolation was that, when I consulted my doctor about this, she said there was very little chance that they’d grow any more.

This, gentle readers, is what has lead me to believe I have Mutant Boobs.  You see, my body once again decided to do the complete opposite of what was expected.

My freshman year of high school I started having horrible, debilitating migraines.  They got to a point where, when one hit, I had to shut down all my electronics, turn out the lights, cover my window, and sleep them off in a completely dark, silent room.  I’d had migraines before, but they usually didn’t render me unconscious.

When I consulted my doctor, she suggested I get fitted for a bra, because if The Girls weren’t being held up properly, then there was a good chance my headaches were being caused by muscle strain (which made sense, because the headaches started in the back of my neck and radiated up into my skull with the force of a sledgehammer).

So, I made a trip to Victoria’s Secret and discovered something absolutely horrifying.

My boobs had grown again.  I was now a 32DD.  The back pains got worse, but, since The Girls weren’t pulling down on me as badly as they had been in a D Cup bra, the headaches abated slightly.

My boobs became a running joke between me and my friends, and occasionally my mom.  People kept telling me that women paid thousands of dollars to pump their breasts full of silicone to get boobs like mine.

“Why?” I demanded.  ”Why would someone want to have dead weight hanging on their chest that will only give them back problems and headaches?”

Take Brazilian model and actress Sheyla Hershey, for example.  Hershey set the record for the largest breasts in Brazil in 2008 (maybe even the world, I didn’t look it up).  After eight surgeries in Houston, Texas and a gallon of silicone, Hershey’s breasts were a whopping 34FFF.

And she wanted them to be bigger, something the law prohibited in Texas because only so much silicone can be pumped into breasts so as to prevent implant complications later on, including infection.  But Hershey assured reporters in an interview that she wasn’t done.

Was she successful in making them even bigger? I don’t know.  I can’t find anything online about that.  But I really hope she wasn’t because, if my pain at a 32F (there was another growth spurt just a few months ago; again: Mutant Boobs) is anything to go by, I can’t even imagine anything bigger, let alone a 34 FFF.

In this article, Dr. Andrew Haig, director of the spine program at the University of Michigan explains that the back pain is often the result of gravity saying, “A lot of times the pain is in the back of the rib cage and the spine area is because women are trying hard to arch their back so they don’t fall forward because of the weight of their breasts.”

Well, that certainly explains why my posture sucks.  If you spend so much time and effort trying to arch your back, it starts to really, really, really hurt.  I can’t sit up straight anymore for long periods of time because the pain gets so bad.

So, when women tell me that they’d kill to have boobs like mine, I usually just grimace and say I’d kill to get rid of them.  I get a lot of weird looks and questions, but after I explain the pains of big boobs, they’re usually pretty quick to reconsider their dreams of a boob job.

I can’t understand why women would want to undergo the pain of surgery to have bigger boobs that will most likely cause more pain later on in life.  I’ve read that not all big bobbed women have pain or medical problems because of their boobs, but everyone I’ve talked to who’s in the same boat as me agrees:

Big boobs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Tobie James and the Harry Potter Series

When I was in the third grade, a literary phenomenon swept through my classroom.  Everywhere I looked, someone was holding a copy of this book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  Kids that I didn’t even know could read were flipping through the pages with incredible speed.  Everyone loved this Harry Potter, whoever he was.

Me? I stuck to my Sherlock Holmes anthologies.  I never really liked reading books that were deemed “grade level appropriate,” so I skipped anything and everything my teacher recommended and headed straight for the “Big Kids’ Books” in the library.  Looking back, I was a bit of a snob.

Ok, a big snob.

As the years went on and 11^th birthdays approached, kids were joking about waiting for their Hogwarts letters and, occasionally, some disappointed student came to class moping that they weren’t Muggleborn like they’d hoped.  I consoled my friends as best I could, having no idea what the word “Muggleborn” even meant. They were wishing Quidditch was an actual sport in PE, eating jellybeans that tasted like puke (someone offered me one of those Bertie’s Beans once and it was vomit flavored.  I never ate another one, not even when someone assured me they knew it was a “normal” flavor).   In middle school, we had a horrible substitute teacher for a month who never showed up on time.  To signal her arrival, the class appointed look out would clear their throat in an annoying high pitch voice and say “Hem hem.”  All activity in the class stopped, and I couldn’t figure out why (after starting the fifth book, I will say, the woman really did bear a remarkable resemblance to Umbridge).  After the release of the 6^th book, I saw people walking around in black and wearing RIP DUMBLEDORE shirts—I had no idea what the hell was going on.

So, my freshman year of college, I decided to remedy this and added numbers 65 and 69 to my list.  I was going to read all the books and watch all the movies, without fail. W atching the movies proved easier than reading the books, thanks to the ABC Family Harry Potter Weekend Movie Marathons, but eventually I scrounged up a copy of the first book, thanks to my friend Victoria, and read it.

The first book got me through a very dark period—the one where I was in journalism school.  First semester midterms were fast approaching and I was bloody miserable with everything.  The book had been sitting on my desk for almost a week before I decided to take a break from studying and do a little recreational reading.  It was a good thing too, because I’m pretty sure my brain would have exploded if I hadn’t.

I liked it well enough.  The concept of an 11-year-old with a horrible life being plucked out of his abusive home situation and being whisked into a magical world where fantastical things happen and he has a famous history he didn’t even know about is brilliant.  What kid doesn’t, at one point or another in their life, wish that they could be someone else or that they could have magical powers?

Harry Potter got both.  People, for the most part, love him in the Wizarding World and he’s a Wizard.

Plus, he managed to get a way with a ton of stuff no child should ever have in a magical castle, temporarily prevented an evil megalomaniac from coming back, saved the Sorcerer’s Stone, and made a couple friends along the way.  Even though he had to go back to the Dursleys in the end, a part of me went “awwww” when I was done reading.

The other wondered why I couldn’t have been lucky enough to receive a Hogwarts letter on my 11^th birthday—then I wouldn’t have to worry about journalism midterms.

I have to say though, I kind of like the movie better.  I don’t know why, but it was more enjoyable for me than reading the book.  It was the same with the second book, which I managed to pick up a year after reading the first.  Again, I liked it well enough.  Professor Lockhart’s character in the book was so much better than in the film.  And Dobby—I love Dobby.  Who couldn’t love a House Elf (except maybe Kreacher)?

But I liked watching the movie better.

Then, a few months later, I found a copy of the third book, which I only finished last week.

I loved it.

The characters are growing up now, which you can really tell in this book.  Hermione especially.  Her character, in my opinion, is starting to grow from “useful but kind of annoying” to “pretty cool.”  While she didn’t really appear to often in this one, she was crucial to the end of the book with her Time Turner and logical reasoning.  And I loved that Rowling introduced characters that could actually tell Harry about what his parents were like when they were in school.  Remus Lupin and Sirius Black are two of my favorite characters at this point.  It was a hundred times better than the movie, especially the scene in the Shrieking Shack, where Remus and Sirius explain their rivalry with Snape, why Snape hates Remus so much, and what really happened the night Harry’s parents died, thanks to Peter Pettigrew (whose animagus form is very fitting, I think).

After finishing the third one, I could wait to read the next; which I finished the other day.

If I wasn’t into the series before, I’m completely hooked now.

I’m finally starting to see what others love about this series.  My friends, and everyone else from my generation, were growing up with the characters.  Everything is becoming much more “real” for everyone, especially where the new dangers and threats are concerned.  Harry and his friends are maturing like their real world counterparts reading through the adventures would have (and still are, if the kids sitting at the next table over in the library are any indication) and they’re starting to have the same adolescent problems that readers would be facing; especially Hermione, who’s dealing with appearance issues and, what every 13/14-year-old girl has trouble with at one point or another, boys.  It’s clear that she likes Ron, but Ron’s completely clueless because, being an adolescent boy, he can’t really figure these things out yet, even if someone spells it out for him.  The same can be said for Harry, who doesn’t really figure out why Ginny can’t talk around him and couldn’t work up the courage to ask Cho to the ball before Cedric did.  Poor guy.

Fred and George also show a lot of growth that some of the older readers can relate to.  Pretty soon, they’ll be done with school and they’ll need to do something, anything, with their lives.  Their situation mirrors my senior year of high school:  you’ve got an idea of what you really want to do, and you know you could do it; but certain family members have another, completely different idea.  And then “senioritis” starts to kick in and you could really care less about anything even remotely related to school.  I like the idea of a joke shop for them;  it’s right up their ally.  I really can’t picture them doing anything else.

Rowling also addressed two really big motifs in this book that I found interesting:  equality and slavery.  The House Elves, which are an integral part of Wizarding life from the looks of things, are essentially slaves.  While some are lucky, like the Hogwarts’ Elves who clearly love what they do and have a good environment, some aren’t, like poor Dobby when he was living with the Malfoys.  I’m really happy Rowling brought Dobby back in this book (I love how he thinks that socks should be mismatched!) and that he’s the oddball in House Elf society that absolutely loves his freedom and galleon a week paycheck while the other Elves think that being free is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to them (poor, alcoholic Winky).   The situation with the House Elves also touches a bit on cultural differences and progressive thinking.  Hermione, coming from the Muggle world, has the same view of slavery most everyone in the world does: it’s wrong and a violation of basic human (or creature, in this case) rights.  Since the House Elves are human-like in the way they walk, perform tasks, and talk (even if their speech is a little weird) is very humanesque, so their enslavement and poor treatement is a problem in Hermione’s eyes.  People who’ve grown up in the Wizarding World don’t see House Elf enslavement as a problem, something that really irks Hermione who wants to try and change the system.  Then there’s the difference between human culture and elf culture, because the elves don’t see a problem with serving Wizards because that is what they are meant to do, whether they get paid or not.  It’s their lives, and it’s what they enjoy.  Even Dobby said that he didn’t want too much free time, when Dumbledore offered him vacation time as a benefit of working at Hogwarts, because elves aren’t meant to do nothing, they enjoy working.  He also accepted less money, because there’s really no need for him to have it.  So while SPEW is a creative idea on Hermione’s part, I don’t think it will really go anywhere, unfortunately.  I do, however, think that it could influence her future career—perhaps Wizarding Law is in her future after Hogwarts.

Like Prisoner of Azkaban, I enjoyed this book much more than the movie.  I especially liked the beginning, where the Weasleys tried to get through the fireplace in the Durselys house and got stuck because it’s an electric hearth.  Even better was the Ten-Ton Tongue Toffee scene where Fred(?) dropped the candies on purpose so Dudley would eat one.  I don’t remember anything like that in the movie, and I really wish it had been because it was one of my favorite scenes.

So, that’s where I am with the books.  I’m halfway through The Order of the Phoenix, so I might post something about that so far.  Overall, I think I’m going to like the last couple of books a lot better than the movies, especially because this is where things in the series really start taking off.

While I may not have been swept up in the Harry Potter Phenomenon in the third grade, I’m certainly caught up in it now.

Better late than never, right?

Tobie James and “The Prisoner of Azkaban”

Item number 65 on my Adventure List is to read the Harry Potter series.  I never really got on the bandwagon as a kid, which I’m sort of regretting now that the final movie is coming out this week.  It seems like some kind of right of passage for my generation to have followed Harry through his adventures in all 7 books, and now the movies.  It really is the end of an era for a lot of people.

Well, better late than never, right?

I read the first two books last year and liked them well enough.  I still wasn’t really that into it though.  I can’t really figure out why, but something just didn’t seem to click for some reason.

The third book however kind of changed that.  I couldn’t put it down.  I liked the third movie when I finally saw it, but the book was so much better.  There was so much background in the book that wasn’t given in the movie that I found myself liking the characters a whole lot more.

I think that’s one of the biggest problems in doing book to film adaptations.  So much characterization can be lost between the manuscript and the screenplay that, at times, likable characters are only just that–likable; and you find yourself caring a lot less about them on the screen than you would in print.  Hermione’s character in the books is a lot like that for me.  On screen, her character is likable, even funny at times (I’m thinking specifically about the polyjuice potion in the 2nd movie and the potions class in the 6th movie where hair/makeup did a fantastic job giving Emma Watson “Medusa Hair.”)  But her character in the books is almost completely different, there’s a whole other dimension that Rowling put into the character.

It seems this way with a lot of the characters, actually.  I can’t put my finger on it yet, so I guess I’d better start the fourth book and try and figure it out