So I’m sitting in class today, and the professor is telling us about a meeting of the Honors Club that she’d like us to go to. She’s very excited about it, and then drops what she apparently thinks will be the big draw: the subject for discussion at the meeting will be . . . wait for it . . . HARRY POTTER!!!!! I’ll wait while you seethe in jealousy at the fact that you won’t be able to attend. Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.

Oddly enough, I lost all interest in attending at that precise moment. I mean, seriously, this is college. This is where you’re supposed to get educated, to learn about new ideas, big ideas, and discuss them, and solve all the problems of the world, and harness all of our youthful enthusiasm (and I’m writing as a typical college student here, and not the crusty old fart that I actually am. What can I say, I got to the game late. Very Very Late.) to go out and set the world to rights. And the Honors Club (Arguably, perhaps even dubiously) the best and the brightest that the campus has to offer is meeting to discuss HARRY POTTER!!!!!

To be honest, I found it to be more than a little disconcerting. Can anybody please explain to me what is the big deal? Now I’ll admit that I’ve never actually read any of them. I did watch the first movie, and I’ve seen bits and pieces of the others. Nothing that I’ve seen has made me think that I’m missing anything. And yet, I’m surrounded by people, intelligent people (or at least people that I consider intelligent) and they freaking’ looooove HARRY POTTER!!!!! (Note. Please understand that the exclamation marks are an attempt to mimic the enthusiasm that otherwise normal people feel for HARRY POTTER!!!!! They are not meant to affect the entire sentence preceding the name HARRY POTTER!!!!! Please also note that I am using 5 exclamation marks, and all capital letters, both universally accepted signs of a diseased mind.)

Why are all these otherwise reasonably intelligent people so worked up about a series of children’s books? Is there anything actually original in them? Anything that hasn’t been done before about a thousand times? Or is it, as I suspect, just a matter of packaging and marketing? The special effects are SOOOO good!

Honestly, HARRY POTTER!!!!! isn’t the only aspect of modern popular culture (and I’m using the term loosely) that I don’t understand. Take the Hunger Games. Please. I took this kid I know to see one of them, and he was so excited. When it was over, I asked him what the big deal is. He started going on about how new and fresh it was, how it had never been done before, etc., etc. He was pretty much unfazed, even when I told him that it had been done before, in the Richard Bachman stories The Long Walk, and The Running Man, and that they had even made a movie out of The Running Man, with Arnold Schwarzeneggar, complete with people killing each other on a game show with a flaky host in a dystopian future, and it was done 30-40 years ago. Ok, I’ll grant you that Jennifer Lawrence is a whole lot hotter than Arnold, but still. Why did they need three books to basically cover something that Stephen King (Bachman was a nom de plume) did in two short and unrelated novellas?

Why does everything have to be so epic? Look at The Hobbit. One of the greatest and best-loved adventure stories of the 20th century. Then Peter Jackson gets hold of it, and it becomes a 9-hour epic. Of course, he had to make up a ton of stuff that wasn’t in the book in order to pad a great adventure into an epic. Granted, the movies are well made (as are the HARRY POTTER!!!!! and Hunger Games movies), but that’s not the point. My dad had a saying, “10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag” to describe a situation where too much stuff is crammed in. These epics have the opposite problem, “5 pounds of gold in a 10 pound bag of shit”. There is lots of good stuff, even in these movies, but it’s completely overwhelmed by all the pointless, repetitious, and just dull filler. And seriously, what’s the deal with the freaking Elves defying gravity and skateboarding across everything? That looked stupid, even in the Disney animated version of  Tarzan.

It’s not just movies, or movie series either. This epicization extends to individual scenes. The interminable fight scenes where, 5 minutes into it, I’m thinking, don’t any of these bad guys have a gun? Somebody please take two steps back and shoot Bruce Willis (or Stallone, or Jason Statham, or Jet Li, or whoever’s kung-fuing his way through hordes of bad guys tonight), so it can end. I don’t care if the bad guys win, I just want this fight to end. Then there’s the ever-popular chase scene. Those have gotten so endless that I don’t even pause the movie to go to the bathroom. Frankly, they’ve gotten so big they’re just dull. Everybody is so busy making things bigger, better, louder, (insert your own favorite _____er here).

It’s really kind of silly, but we just keep buying it. Literally. We bought the DVD, and the video game, and the movie-tie-in version of the book, and the soundtrack, and then the Blur-Ray, and then the Director’s Cut, and then the 10th anniversary edition (because it’s got all those cool “special” features), and the DVD’s and Blu-Rays of all the sequels, because, even though they weren’t really as good as the first, and the last 2 or 3 sucked, it would be aesthetically wrong to not have the whole epic.

It’s even affecting real life. People can’t just like anything any more, they have to be “obsessed” with it. I know people who are “obsessed” with this book, that author, that director, that movie series, those shoes, that tv show, the new flavor at Starbucks. Just liking it isn’t enough. Even loving it isn’t enough. Of course, maybe those people need to become obsessed briefly with a dictionary.

Now I’ll grant that when I was a kid, I got pretty carried away with a lot of things. Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings were my big things. But I got over it. I still really like them, but I’m certainly not obsessed with them. Honestly, I’ve still got a few things like authors that I get carried away with, and will buy pretty much anything they write. I like them a lot, and recommend them to everybody. But I also realize that they’re not everybody’s cup of tea. Frankly, I’d feel a little silly enthusing over a book or movie like a 12 year-old girl with a new copy of Tiger Beat with a fold-out of Justin Bieber (speaking of things I don’t understand).

I think it probably concerns me most because it makes me feel more mature in comparison to those overly enthusiastic fans of anything. Honestly, anything that makes me feel like the adult in any situation concerns me because I know how phenomenally immature I really am.

I just don’t understand.