First up: a little bit about me. I'm a twentysomething lawyer with a large energy company in Houston, Texas. I have a husband (an engineer with a large oil field services company), two cats (that I'm allergic to), and a miniature dachshund named Olivia whom I am often accused of being completely obsessed with.
But wouldn't you be obsessed with something this cute?
I thought as much. Moving on. As an undergraduate I majored in Classical Civilization and my favorite poet was Catullus (and not just because his poems were short, relatively easy to translate and typically bawdy). His shortest poem is actually only two lines and is the inspiration for this little blog's name:
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
This roughly translates as follows:
I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happening to me and I am tormented.
A wee bit dramatic? Yes of course, but at the age of 19 it seemed like Catullus was reaching through nearly 2,000 years of history and speaking directly to me in that way that only teenagers can be self-centered enough to believe that they are the first to experience love and loss. I chose to name my blog after this poem because the central theme (if you can call it that) of this blog will be to discuss all the people, places, and things that both hate and love (typically not at the same time, but sometimes a girl is that torn).
In any case, I used to think that blogs were just a forum for intellectual masturbation. Of course, that was long before I'd ever bothered to read any. When I left my demanding job at a large law firm last July, I found myself with significantly more time on my hands. After tiring of limiting my web surfing to shopping or "news" sites, I stumbled upon the first blog I ever got hooked on (Elements of Style). A few days later, I'd exhausted its archives and began branching out to other blogs (Urban Grace, Making it Lovely, In(side) the Loop, and Door Sixteen being my favorites). Within a month, I was visiting a dozen blogs during my breakfast and lunch breaks. I was hooked.
Once you start reading blogs regularly, I think it's inevitable that you want to start your own. Not that you think you can do it better. Just that you start wanting to put your ideas out there, too. It seems unfair to expect others to share their opinions, their advice -- even their lives -- without being willing to reciprocate.
And so, here I am. I'll do my best to keep things interesting, fresh and fun.
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