Pet Peeve - People who misspell "lose" and/or "loose" or use them interchangeably.

Read a very good book yesterday - Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. Besides being an achingly beautiful love story, it is also contains great observations about growing up Gen X. In particular it captures the feeling our entire generation had that the 90's were going to be the decade that changed everything - we were tearing down the Reagan years and remaking the world in our own image. Through the mirror of the music we made and listened to, he has captured what it meant to be 20-something in the age of Nirvana and Biggie Smalls. Good read. Funny as well.

Another old love of mine was the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and art movement of the 19th century. I fell in love with the imagination of little, crazed A.C. Swinburne as a young girl muddling through puberty and confusion. I only had an ancient, beat up anthology that my mom had probably bought for 25 cents at some garage sale to read, but man, did it fire up my imagination. I did my senior honors undergrad thesis on their views of women (it's a rather funny read now). As with most everything else that had given my life richness and meaning however, I packed it away when I finished college, sure that it was pointless because it wasn't worth any money. Now, as with lots of other things I once loved, I am dusting off those memories and interests and finding their true worth all over again. Just today I had a vision of myself in grad school, perhaps, set on a course in Academia to pore over Rossetti and Swinburne and their father, John Keats, for all eternity. If that sounds like Hell to you, it sounds like Heaven to me.

31 January 2007