- looked through the entirety of Tiffany's and my wall-to-wall dating back to 2007
- looked through SAO albums of a couple of alums from Freshman year
- looked through my Skype chat history with Emily and did a search for the words "ridiculous" and "drunk" (there were a lot of results)
- scanned a bunch of old high school photos
Am I alone in this? I feel like I am truly predisposed to feelings of nostalgia, like I was somehow born handicapped by my inability to ever live in the moment. Even my hobbies of choice either hearken to the past (art history, anything vintage) or distance myself from the present. Photography is counterintuitive in that way. In theory the click of a shutter freezes a moment in time, and what could be more immediate than that? But my mindset before I take every single photo is that I'm capturing this moment so that I can look back on it in the future. Every second it takes to frame a picture through a lens is a second I'm not seeing the world in its raw form. Same goes for blogging. Web 2.0 buzzwords and instantaneous communication aside, every word I write is to preserve some state of mind I know I'll want to remember, and any blogger knows that after writing for a while, a funny event starts to almost immediately transform itself into a swirl of words to be included as a witty anecdote in your next entry.
Milan Kundera said it best in L'Ignorance (props to Tiffany for introducing me to this novel that has spoken to me more than nearly anything else I've ever read): "Le retour, en grec, se dit nostos. Algos signifie souffrance. La nostalgie est donc la souffrance causée par le désir inassouvi de retourner."
In English: "The return, in Greek, is called nostos. Algos means suffering. Nostalgia, then, is suffering caused by the unquenched desire to return."
When I'm asked if I'm excited to graduate, the words sound ludicrous. At least this week, when everything draws to a close, looking forward is an impossibility. One year ago, I had just gotten back to Bordeaux from a 10-day trip to London, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. One year from now, I'll be a corporate drone typing Excel formulas and proofreading powerpoints.
I've got an unquenched desire to return, and given the options, I'd rather look back.
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On an unrelated note, I miss this blog. I decided to quit it after returning to this side of the Atlantic, because it was intended to be a travel blog and that wasn't my life anymore. Still, unaccustomed earth has interpretations beyond the literal, so I think I'd like to start up again. Just seems so self-indulgent to blog about something as mundane as college life when tens of thousands around me are living the same thing. Eurotrip this summer with Kelly may be the perfect excuse for me to revisit this baby though, and to be honest I'm looking forward to it almost as much as the trip itself.
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