“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” ~Doug Larson
This is not what I was going to tell you about this morning. It was going to be depressing and I was going to rename this site “Complain Pasa Nada” since it’s the morning after I got into a car accident. In a rental car. And was hit by another rental car (“A BMW and a Mini Cooper convertible walk into a bar…”). That was until I checked my email just now and saw the PhotoJoJo twice monthly time capsule waiting for me. If you’ve never seen it before it’s an awesome feature that plucks four photos from your Flickr stream of yore (well the year before) and sends them to twice a month. Lack of attention means that I never know when the email is to arrive, so color me surprised when in my inbox was this photo:
Actually it was less of a ‘Whoo! Surprise!’ and more like ‘Woe! Heartbreak! Longing! Missing!’ I get these pangs of sadness when discussing Europe. Europe is always my happy place and I wasn’t raised to feel determined to pack a passport at least once a year and go ‘cross the Atlantic and yet once a year I get a little sad and troll around Orbitz and my ING account to see if maybe I could make my dreams come true.
Though it’s how my brain works when looking or thinking of any place I miss. A smell, a sign and everything inside of me goes reeling back to some picturesque time that I’d forgotten about thus erasing from my memory any Bad that may have occurred at said place. This is why, the other night when I was walking down F Street in Gallery Place and passed by a night club I used to frequent between the ages of 17 and 20, I got a little nostalgic. I remembered February nights, standing out in the cold without a jacket, craving Smirnoff Ice and ready to dance my ass off for hours on end.
Strangely enough, I’d conveniently forgotten about the strange men 10 years my senior, grabbing my ass and sweating all over me and the 18 year old girls puking in the bathroom and the time I lost a friend of mine in a club because she decided to go off with some rich diplomat’s child and ended up puking out the cab window all the way to Upper NW.
Instead I was full of fond memories and late nights when passing this club and then my alma mater later. Memories of well vodka and being drunk and using the metro handrails as a strip poll and running around the dorm at 4 AM and hangover breakfast with friends in while recounting the details of the night before. All good things and never the bad.
It’s crazy how the mind works.
7 Comments
I’ve only been to Europe once, but I SO want to go back. I love it there.
It’s funny how the only memories of bar life or club life are good ones! I only have good memories of it as well, but there were the losing-friends-to-some-random-guy moments and the puking-your-guts-out-in-the-washroom moments. Good memories, and I never want to go back!
And what happened to my fucking zip car title is all I am saying?
My ING account called and said it wants the 90′s back.
People trigger a lot of my memories like that lately. Like I don’t necessarily need to be back in Cali with my two best friends, I just want to live in the same city as my two best friends again. No matter even if it is some town like Albany or something.
Surely your string of bad luck as at it’s end. MUST BE. Glad you’re writing the day after your accident, and not unable to write!
Smells are my strongest memory trigger.
I soooo know what you mean.
And amen to the pangs of sadness re: Europe. We were in Paris and Italy this past May, so this particular picture makes me all kinds of nostalgic.
I feel like Europe is my happy place, too, even though it’s been four years since I was there last.