Dumbledore is Gay?

According to J.K. Rowling, Dumbledore is apparently gay. I'm not sure why recent information, added after the fact by J.K. Rowling at a press conference-type event, annoys me, but to some degree it does. Maybe I'm just a raving homophobe (I don't consider myself to be one) but this new information just doesn't seem to fit with all the information about Dumbledore we received in the now-completed series. It's as if Rowling just wanted to add in some juicy controversial background info after the fact, just for kicks, even if it wasn't background character material that was in her head from the beginning.

In any case, If J.K.Rowling's version of Dumbledore is gay, that's perfectly fine. The Dumbledore in my head isn't, because one of the wonderful thing about novels is that each reader brings something into it, and half-creates the world in their head alongside the author. The physical picture in my head of Harry and Ron and Hermionie and all the other characters may be quite different from the one in yours (well, until the movies came out, at which point we all probably saw the characters in our minds begin to resemble the corresponding actors... but that's another point entirely), because all descriptive information and essentially everything in a novel is interpreted differently with each person that absorbs it.

Many times, as I read about "extra material" authors put in about characters after the fact, in fact I would say most of the times that happens, I don't care. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say I don't care... that much. I build the characters and events in my mind as I read along. And if I mispronounce a character's name for an entire series, well, in my mind that now IS the character's name. If an author tells me after the fact that a character was abused as a child, or once had a pet dog named spot, or is homosexual, and that information just doesn't seem to jive with the character I've created in my mind, then frankly, I disregard it. On the other hand, if that added information makes me think to myself "wow this explains why character X does Y and Z all the time! It all makes sense..." then I do incorporate that information into my personal fictional world. Still, if it was vital to the plot, that info would be in the book. The fact that it's not, means that it wasn't, so I'm going to continue right along with the character I have in my mind.

Sometimes I'll even go farther than that. I recall when the last Star Trek: Next Gen. movie came out, I personally thought that the film reeked of "fanfic" type plotlines, and (SPOILER ALERT if you care but somehow haven't seen this movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, then don't read the rest of this paragraph!!!) when Data died at the end of it, I was sufficiently fed up with the plot of the movie, and I decided that this movie "didn't happen." In the Star Trek universe in my head, Data is alive. But that's an extreme, when compared to having a heterosexual Dumbledore in my personal Harry Potter universe, instead of homosexual.

For that matter, I don't really have a heterosexual Dumbledore in my head. I have essentially an asexual Dumbledore in my head. One who was so overwhelmed with the problems of the world on his shoulders from a relatively early age that he went without love or physical intimacy for his entire life. A kind of celibate monk-wizard type figure. Kinda like my vision of Gandalf. But that's my Dumbledore. Some people may have had a homosexual Dumbledore in their heads before Rowling even said anything. Some will change their Dumbledore after hearing this announcement, bowing to the will of the author. And some, like me, don't really care what the author wants to throw into the series, after the fact. What's done is done, and the image of my Dumbledore stopped evolving with the last book. She can say Dumbledore was actually a frog-turned-wizard by some magic spell for all I care, it's not going to affect the world in MY head unless I so choose.

Officially Advanced

Something like 6 months ago, my advisor told me I'm ready to advance to Ph.D. candidacy, and I could finish doing it in a week or two, and hopefully we could get it out of the way by the end of the (spring '07) quarter.

Two weeks back I finally asked him when we're going to get around to organizing my advancement to candidacy. In two day's time it was organized and the date was set. Yesterday, I got to stand before a room of 5 professors and give an hour long powerpoint presentation demonstrating a knowledge of the entire field of cosmology, as we know it today, and what I have been researching, in particular, and how this research fits in to the current model, and what I should be focusing on in the future.

I knew I would be fine. I mean, sure I made some mistakes, and felt a little like a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck, but I managed to gather myself together after James would come to my aid with a helpful question to get me pointed in the right direction. Mostly it was the anticipation that was killing me. I was probably more nervous about giving the talk about an hour beforehand than when I was giving the presentation, itself.

But not it's over. I am officially (well... the paperwork is still making its way through the UC system, so more like essentially than officially) advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. What does this mean you might ask? Well, it means that I have taken essentially the only real stepping stone between the qualifying examination and my final Ph.D. thesis defense. One might say it signifies me reaching the "halfway point" between the quals, where essentially you finish classes and begin research, and receiving my Ph.D, where my research at UCI is complete and I go out into the world in search of post-docs.

In short, it's a sort of rite of passage (though nothing nearly so severe as the quals) that I've completed. And it feels pretty good to have done so. Now if those two papers I'm first and second author on, respectively, would just get published already. The research has been essentially done and we've been tinkering with perfecting them for about 6 months now as well.
One day, there will come a time when someone will ask me "so how's that paper you keep talking about going?" and I'll be able to respond with something other than "it's basically done. Any week now, we'll send it out."