Hi all

[metal134]

HI, I just joined a few days ago. A little about myself. I am 25 and in my final semester at the Univeristy of Akron. I major in Mass Media: News with the hope of going into sports journalism. So obviously, I love sports, namely the big four of basbeall, football, basketball and hockey. And I'm a hometeam guy so it the Indians, Browns, Cavs and Blue Jackets! among my other loves is music; namely classic rock and heavy metal. I love bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, etc.
Seems to many to be a confusing cross section of interests; heavy metal and literature ; there is this perception of heavy metal fans and musicians as these brain dead intellectually devoid morons but in actuality, heavy metal is one of the most intelligent genres there has ever been. Sure you have bands like Motorhead, Motley Crue, KISS, etc that certainly feed that stereotype of metals as brain dead, but those are the only ones the mainstream public hears about; there so much of heavy metal is inspired by history, literature and many other such topics and I think my love for each feeds each other for me. That is, there is a lot of literature that I was exposed to through heavy metal and a lot of heavy metal that I gave a chance because it was based on a certain piece of literature.

[Cien]

Oh my! I live in Akron! Wow -- I didn't KNOW we had people with BRAINS around here! At least not in general. (Okay, so can you tell I don't like it much here?) Did you have classes today? Isn't the weather killer? It sucked that they didn't cancel classes while all the high schools did even though college students obviously walk outside way more.

So what literature do you like? And I understand how people can be weird about interests that don't seem to go together. I love fashion, and people seem to think I should be an airhead because of this.

[metal134]

I only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday because I do my internship on Monday and Wednesday. Of course, if there were no classes, I wouldn't be required to go to my internship but that didn't matter to me because I was going to go anyway.

As far as literature I like, I more into classical literature; Hugo, Dickens, etc. I don't read much contemporary literature, but my favorite modern author is Stephen King, though I'm not as big on him as I used to be. I also very much like sports literature; especially baseball. I love to read about the history of the sports; baseball lends itself to romanticism so well.

[Cien]

I'm more into classics too, though I read a lot of non-fiction just depending on what my interests are at any given moment. I'm really into Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Coetzee, James Joyce... and so many more that I honestly couldn't list them all.

And forgive my rudeness about Akron. I didn't mean it as harshly as I typed it -- I'm just kind of frustrated with a lack of intellectual outlets around here right now.