intrigued by ampersand

I don't know if you're like me at all (you probably aren't), but I really love unique ampersands. Adobe Garamond Pro Italic has one of the best ampersands of all time. It's so stylish, so classic, so beautiful. You may not get it, but that's okay. I'm not really in this business to please anybody or anything except my own need to create. Lately I've been finding myself doodling ampersand variations on all of my class notes. I've also started trying to use them more often in my daily hand-writing rather than using the backwards "3" with the lines coming out of the top and bottom or the generic "+." It's just so much more fun to make all kinds of swoops and curls and have it mean "and." Also, along with my sudden interest in the form of the ampersand came an interest in its history. For me this is a big deal. I hate history. Despise it. I can't stand it. Actually having an urge to know something from the past and researching it on my own time is a really big deal to me. I went to Adobe's site and looked it up. Apparently, the actual form of the ampersand as we know it dates back to like 79 A.D. as some Pompeiian graffiti. The ampersand character is derived from the ligature of et, which is the Latin word for "and". The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase and per se and, which literally means "(the character) & is itself (the word) and." So, now you know; in case you go to a school like mine where they really don't teach you all that much in your typography class because it's a freshmen level class and is only one quarter long.