I bought a Hot Pocket for lunch today. I feel like a teenager again. What transports you back to your younger years? Random weird story: The SO was doing some side work here at the office for my Boss. We share the back parking lot with the business next door. Beyond the parking is where he was working clearing the greenspace back there. One of the guys from next door says to him, "You didn't find a machete back there did you?" *blinkblink* WTF kind of question is that? Not to mention from a complete stranger. He followed it with an explanation being that he'd had one and couldn't find it so he thought he may have "left it back there". That made it even more fucking weird. In short I was told to "never talk to that weird fuck that drives the mini van." Ok then. And no he wasn't using it back there to chop...stuff. My Boss owns the property not the business next door.
Music transports me you to younger years. If I hear a song that I may have forgotten about or not heard in quite some time, I will remember some pleasant time back in my youth when I heard the same song. It really sucks when I hear "I wanna hold your hand" cause then I start thinking about a temper tantrum I threw as an infant.
This song takes me back to when I was about 12 or 13. I was at sleep-away camp for the summer. The place was kind of run-down and was very poorly supervised. I saw my first vagina there on a female counselor who thought it was wise to sit on the shower-house steps in a towel and not cross her legs. We went on a camping trip, and counselors all got shit-faced. One counselor, Steve, got shit-faced and started barking at the camp fire. The other counselor excused it by him "just being really tired." 3 other counselors were having a very audible three-some in the neighboring tent. One of the other campers wandered off to take a piss, and fell into a river and sprained his ankle. The next morning one counselor took my Duncan yo-yo away and called me a pussy for asking for it back.
Been having sex and relationship discussions with the boys. I dunno what I did that they're able to speak and ask questions without blushing and feeling awkward.
I was on the cycle machine at the gym last night and it has options to watch TV, listen to music or watch music videos with your ear buds on. I selected the music videos "classic" category. It was awesome. ZZ Top, Madonna, Pat Benatar, etc. I had to work really hard not to sing out loud in front of the rest of the gym.
Definitely this, of course. I think this is universal. Smells definitely bring me back to earlier times and places. The smell of cooking sauce or meatballs, made a certain way, reminds me of dinners at my grandmothers house. Sometimes I can walk into an office or college cafeteria and the smell reminds me of our cafeteria in grammar school. The smell of fresh cut lumber reminds me of working with my dad on projects around our old house, and helping him with side projects he did for a family friend who flipped houses. My dad was a printer, and he always had ink stained hands, and smelled faintly of printing ink. A few times I visited his shop, and the whole place smelled, to me, like my dad. Certain combinations of paint and oily smells, whether in a shop or a garage, sometimes remind me of that ink smell, and my dad. The smell of a baseball glove brings back a whole flood of memories - Spring, playing catch with my dad, little league, throwing the ball around at recess . . . . . .
Hangovers and pregnancy scares. Husband says "music and smells. Wait. Fucking pregnancy scares? What kind of fucked up younger years did you have?" Hehe. He's so cute.
Menthol makes me think of mentholatum which makes me think of my grandmother. I was the weirdo kid that would open up her jar of mentholatum and sniff it. I was the same with mimeograph paper.
What the hell is mimeograph paper? I heard a No Doubt song on the radio today and was immediately transported back to the past and the house we moved into when Tragic Kingdom came out.
You kids, today. smh Ah, the joy of wet, purple paper and (probably) toxic ink. When I was in college, you had to pay for photocopies, but you could run off party fliers on the mimeograph machine for FREE! Also, all the photocopiers at the school where I got my second degree had copiers with those little counter things you could insert. You plugged them in to the side, and it would count like an odometer. Then you took the counter back to the librarian or department head or where ever you were, and they'd charge you $0.10 per copy of whatever. The device had like 8 pins or something. Of course, I knew the paper clip trick, where you jumper pin 2 to pin 6 or whatever it was, and make all the copies you want. I skipped class a lot, so I was always copying notes from classmates. One time, I got the counter thing, ran 2-3 copies, then switched it out for the paper clip. I ended up making like 100 copies. I walked back up to the desk, and the student working there looked at the counter, looked at my stack of papers, looked back at the counter. She sat there for about 30 seconds, and I just smiled at her and nodded my head. She said, "Thirty cents." Good times.
Ever seen the old-school drafting copier stuff that used to have special paper and ammonia that would duplicate from one big page to the other? Like that, but for small paper. Basically it was the duplicating process used before photocopiers existed. A new test would be run off and you'd get handed pages that reeked of ammonia and made you high. Very, very distinctive smell.
Au contraire, mon frère. The mimeograph did not use the ammonia process. That smell was the ink. The ammonia process for blue line drawings, was a spirit duplicator similar to the ditto machine. I spend WAAAY too many hours making prints during my engineering co-op days. That process had the yellow chemical on the paper already, and the combination of ammonia and fluorescent light would remove all the yellow and turn it blue where the original would block the light. The mimeograph process actually put ink on blank paper, and would run out after a certain number. (The last ones in a run would start to fade, and you'd have to decide if they were worth keeping.) ETA: I don't know wtf is going on here, but this is a mimeograph machine.
Yessss, ditto sheets. I called it mimeograph paper because that is the technical term, but in school it was ditto sheets. The teacher would hand them out and I would try not to be too obvious as I held it to my nose and took a whiff. I guess I wasn't the only one, though:
Thank you so much for reminding me of these. Heaven was when the teacher asked you to go make the copies.
It's a friday night, and I'm group texting pinterest ideas with the admin of my school (they're the ones who think up shit, I just build it). We're officially a bunch of nerds. In related news, sounds like I'm going to home depot tomorrow to build a miniature camper/RV facade and camp fire setup.