Day 02 - Your first love
My first serious romantic love was Tini. (For those of you who've read her entry, this might get a little repetitive) We dated a little bit in high school, broke up when I went to college, and got back together again a few months later. The fact that we spent so much time separated over the vast majority of our relationship was very humbling and invigorating, knowing that there was this person out there that you only saw for about four days out of the month, but spent those other days calling, thinking about, and missing you.
Things went south, and I spent a good, long while despising her. We both eventually managed, through a shitload of effort, to come to terms and start being able to be friends again. Years since, she and I are some of each other's fiercest friends and I was her husband's best man at their wedding.
My first literary crush was Artemis. I was in third grade and thought it was really cool that she was a girl that liked archery and running around in the woods. I thought that "virgin goddess" just meant she was holding out for the right man.
My first recreational love was and still is Latin. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it's both aesthetically pleasing and incredibly logical. I started taking it in college on a whim and decided to make it my major. When I got to the higher levels and started translating Vergil's Aeneid, I found it a little silly that the greatest poet in the Empire was basically throwing out (at most!) six lines a day. After getting into the meat and bones of the translation, seeing the eloquence with which he wrote, the depth of meaning behind his diction (a lot of Latin words that we would consider synonyms have very subtle connotations that makes choosing one over the other very telling in meaning), the sheer art of it all made me realize that I was working with one of history's greatest masterpieces and that six lines a day was really only the six best out of the likely countless discarded others. Every so often, when I'm bored, I'll go back to it and translate a line or two.
Things went south, and I spent a good, long while despising her. We both eventually managed, through a shitload of effort, to come to terms and start being able to be friends again. Years since, she and I are some of each other's fiercest friends and I was her husband's best man at their wedding.
My first literary crush was Artemis. I was in third grade and thought it was really cool that she was a girl that liked archery and running around in the woods. I thought that "virgin goddess" just meant she was holding out for the right man.
My first recreational love was and still is Latin. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it's both aesthetically pleasing and incredibly logical. I started taking it in college on a whim and decided to make it my major. When I got to the higher levels and started translating Vergil's Aeneid, I found it a little silly that the greatest poet in the Empire was basically throwing out (at most!) six lines a day. After getting into the meat and bones of the translation, seeing the eloquence with which he wrote, the depth of meaning behind his diction (a lot of Latin words that we would consider synonyms have very subtle connotations that makes choosing one over the other very telling in meaning), the sheer art of it all made me realize that I was working with one of history's greatest masterpieces and that six lines a day was really only the six best out of the likely countless discarded others. Every so often, when I'm bored, I'll go back to it and translate a line or two.