Reflections on a T-Shirt Selection

 Why was my post yesterday nearly nonexistent?

It was late at night and I had gone to an academic expo where I acquired a shirt which opened the gate for a non-post.

The acquisition of this shirt involved the use of Latin, which I'm sure would have made my high school Latin teacher proud - or at least put him in an "I-told-you-so" sort of attitude, as the last semester of his class I gained a "why-did-I-take-six-years-of-this-damn-useless-language" attitude.

It was the MIT Lit department giving out the shirts, but the deal was that you had to recite a poem to get one. The only poem I knew by heart happened to be Reflections on Ice Breaking, which goes:

Candy is dandy,

but liquor is quicker.

In my humble opinion, it's not really my fault that the only poem I know is two lines long, but the professor at the table wasn't buying it and insisted on a second poem if I actually wanted a t-shirt. I considered myself done; I don't memorize poetry for fun. 

But I do memorize poetry for International Baccalaureate Latin exams! So I brought out from the depths of my mind Catullus' odi et amo, which is pretty much the second-shortest poem ever to count as poetry:

I hate, and I love: why do I do this, you ask?

I do not know, but yet I do and I am tortured.

The lovely professor proceeded to ask if I knew the Latin, and all I could come up with was "odi et amo," but she let it go. And of course, I picked up a shirt with a quote I had never seen before. There was also a shirt with Latin on it, but I thought that might be overkill. TS Eliot it was.