Surviving Penn Station During the Holiday Rush Is on Par With Any Triwizard Tournament Task
^ after passing on the stuffing, a nosey relative behind you showily asks why and you quietly offer that gluten doesn’t sit well with you, to which you are viciously attacked by your “celiac is a myth and millennials are the root of all of the evil in this country” uncle
1. “I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost . . . but still, I was alive.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 35
- You arrive to Penn Station at 3pm, the day before Thanksgiving, where the only option is to sacrifice your body to the writhing mosh pit of travelers, all like-minded in taking the “every man for himself” stance for survival, and when the track for your train appears on the screen, you’re sucked into a high-anxiety, panicked scramble, like a real-life Squid Game challenge
2. “Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 7
- You go to your local bar, against all better judgement, where you know some folks from high school are meeting up; fast forward, you’re going on hour 2 of Alicia, who sat behind you in Spanish 203, pitching you very hard on her new “empowering business” where she works for herself (which you’ve been watching her stories and it’s *definitetly* a pyramid scheme for some weird tea), and how if you join her team, you too can experience true independence and she’ll give you 50 flat stomach powders if you say yes today and finalize your commitment with both a blood pact by the dumpsters out back and a $7,000 wire transfer
3. “Come seek us where our voices sound, We cannot sing above the ground, And while you’re searching, ponder this: We’ve taken what you’ll sorely miss, An hour long you’ll have to look, And to recover what we took, But past an hour — the prospect’s black, Too late, it’s gone, it won’t come back.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 25
- You tear yourself from Alicia only to come face-to-face with your class Valedictorian, who is hammered beyond belief, sweating profusely, talking way too close to you, all in poetic prose, personifying the meme stocks that have ravaged his finances and expressing the emotional toll that the volatility of cryptocurrency is having on his mental state
4. “The fridge had been emptied of all Dudley’s favorite things — fizzy drinks and cakes, chocolate bars and burgers — and filled instead with fruit and vegetables and the sorts of things that Uncle Vernon called “rabbit food.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 1
- You’re so excited to have access to a fridge that isn’t solely foods that are most economical, will take the longest to expire, and the lightest to carry for 8 city blocks in torrential downpour from Trader Joe’s but your parents apparently just decided to embark on their new “Keto phase of life”, which was 100% your mom’s idea, sending the entire household into a perilous state
5. “Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 36
- You leap frog the aperitifs and red wine and go straight for the scotch neat after you starting telling your family how you’ve really gotten into cross-fit and your waify aunt who has never left her hometown tells you that you look like the Bass Pro Shop of women
6. “For that was the terrible power of the dementors: to force their victims to relive the worst memories of their lives, and drown, powerless, in their own despair. . . .”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 14
- Every time you walk into your house you’re greeted by the family portrait taken when you were in 9th grade, fresh in the elastics phase of braces, blind to the magic of makeup and deep in the teenage acne trenches, layering 4 different Hollister shirts and ignorantly thinking that the sun-in you used against your mother’s wishes makes you look like Marissa Cooper
7. “No, I’m fine,’ said Harry, wondering why he kept telling people this, and wondering whether he had ever been less fine.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 20
- You cognitively turn off any innate propensity to react to the questions: are you single, are you thinking of getting engaged, do you want to get married, do you want kids, are you freezing your eggs, do you think you’re fertile, when are you going to try for another, do you think you’re being too picky, are you worried you’re getting too old?
8. “Dudley had reached roughly the size and weight of a young killer whale.”
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 3
- You return back to your apartment and assess your physical well-being after an excessively long weekend at home with unnecessary amounts of wine, dark liquor, whatever the main ingredient in gravy is, heavy cream, all cushioned by drinking beer conversationally at all hours of the day, while your daily step count remained at the single digits due to you having access to a car and really no reason to leave the comfort of a fully stalked, empty nester’s home
Since I’m currently on a violent cocktail shrimp kick, the perfectly plated shrimp cocktail at yours truly’s favorite, Dante in the West Village:
