So I was just watching TV and an ad came on for the US Army. The typical, "BE STRONGER. FASTER, and ELITE!" Having served 8 years in the army and over 2 years in combat tours in Iraq, I'm proud of my service. When I see these commercials I'm always like FUCK YEAH MY TIME IN THE ARMY WAS BAD ASS, FUCK I MISS IT!! Remembering rolling around towns manning my 50 cal and the camaraderie. Then after that initial adrenaline rush wears off, all the memories of getting yelled at, treated like shit, and shot at in 136* heat with 70lbs of gear for $2000/month comes flooding back. FOCUS: What do you get nostalgic about, just to remember how shitty it was in actuality? Miss your care free days of high school only to remember getting stuffed in trash cans and shoved into lockers?
If I ran the universe, and as far as I know I don't, I wouldn't have the afterlife be choirs of angels worshiping me and shit like that. Well, I might have that. But I would also have it set up such that the afterlife had the ability to relive any day of your life as many times as you wanted, without changing it. That way, people that made the most out of their life would have a lot of good shit to relive, and people who didn't...wouldn't. I can enumerate the days I'd relive. There are a few things I'll get nostalgic about, but mostly it's stuff that I barely got to experience. I would have loved to have been about 18 years old in, say, 1981, because shit was awesome in the 80s. You go into the basement of a Sears and there's a badass Atari 2600 collection down there you can't even imagine. Sadly I was born too late, and got adult freedoms in the 1990s, when there was fuckin' nothing going on. Ooh, Geocities and the rise of chain coffee places. Please. The one thing I do get nostalgic for that sucks now is after-school cartoons like He-Man and Transformers and stuff. Transformers was OK, but most of those shows were just 30-minute long ads for really cheap plastic toys. It's obvious now, but at the time those seemed like high art to an 8-year-old. Oh, well.
I get nostalgic for college. In my head it was all freedom and parties and intelligent conversation. Then I remember the roommates who got addicted to Oxycontin and spent all day laying on mattresses in the living room. Or I realize how much I hated gen eds ( I don't have a mind for math and the Spanish professor was out of her fucking mind.) It's the same way I feel about high school until I remember the fact that gym class was so mind-numbingly boring that I would get panic attacks from trying to figure out what to do for the entire class period. (I'm sure most people didn't have this, but gym at my high school involved being told to keep busy even though I was not friends with anyone I had class with and the only thing to do was fuck around in the weight room and beg the teacher to let me go upstairs to the rock wall.)
My high school reunion is coming up, and it is going to be nothing more than a giant nostalgia fest, which I want no part of. "hey, remember how awesome high school was!?" No, it wasn't. I worked a shitty McJob at a shitty McRestaurant, and I had some responsibility, but virtually no freedoms, which I'm not that nostalgic for. I rather enjoy having responsibility now, because it comes with freedom. That freedom didn't exist in high school, when I had to be home by a certain time, or call and check in, abide by my parents rules, or drive whatever shitty car they let me drive to get to and from work/school. I couldn't just go out and buy a video game or a movie, I had to save for weeks for that, and even then I'd have to ask my parents because they'd get angry if I "spent my money stupidly." I had to work to pay for car insurance, gas, and repairs on a car that I didn't own and didn't have a say in choosing (for 18 long months, I drove a 1984 VW Rabbit, with no air conditioning, no stereo, and no radiator, so it would overheat if I drove it more than fifteen minutes). The thing I get nostalgic for is living in my old college town. We lived in a shitty area, and a shitty apartment, but I loved almost everything else about that city. If we lived in a nice part of town I'd be all about moving back there. Everything was close (at least within a 15-20 minute drive), traffic didn't suck like it does up here, better restaurants, better night life, plus we both had a lot of friends we left there. Also, people just in general weren't the giant asshats they tend to be in this area. Seriously, people around where I live now suck. Then I remember that we had to drive over an hour and stay with either my, or the wife's, parents at major holidays, and that we never, ever got an actual holiday at our own home, and that there was always drama and fights between her parents and, well, everyone over who we stayed with when we visited home, and what an epic pain in the ass it was on the rare occasions our families came to visit because we had to field five or six phone calls when they inevitably got lost, and they always wanted to go to the same shitty chain restaurants instead of the good restaurants that we knew about but they had never been to before, so they didn't want to try anything new. Birthdays or any holidays were always a chore. God forbid we came home for just one day, that was always unacceptable. We had to stay for at least three days, or her parents got angry that we didn't spend enough time with them. Finally, in football season you couldn't leave your home on game days because the city was inundated with fans who went to the game and then went out to eat or just driving around. Seriously, home game days down there were fucking awful. I could very rarely see the Bears (they were blacked out in our market if the Colts were playing at the same time, which they always were), White Sox, or Bulls games. I could see Cubs games, but only because they broadcast nationally a lot more than others. Honestly, though, if I had my choice, we'd move back there, but my wife is dead set on being near our families when we have kids. The other major thing is that all my friends are still there, while all her friends from down there have moved around the country. Ah well, this area doesn't completely suck.* *Yes, yes it does.
Amen. Buying alcohol and spending money without parents looking over my shoulder faaaar outweighs extra time to play video games and learn Linux or whatever the fuck else I was doing in high school. Plus I didn't have a ton of friends. Every so often when I get a whiff of muddy grass or humid summer air, I get transported back to eighth grade, when I joined the Pop Warner team, having fallen in love with football the year before. Keep in mind here that I am not very athletic, but I am very enthusiastic, and I hate quitting. This means that (because PW requires everyone get playing time) I was third-string wide receiver - on a team that ran 90% running plays; I was fourth-string cornerback - again, running team; and I was, at 5'3", 130 lbs (then), the fucking garbage-time NOSE TACKLE. Yeah. I was going up against kids that had literally a foot of height and a hundred pounds on me. What I nostalgically remember: The couple of times I did well (fumble recovery in practice, catching long balls in practice) The camaraderie and team spirit (jumping up and down in the huddle, etc.) Having practice during a tropical storm, which quickly devolved into "Kill the Man with the Ball" in a lake of mud My team going 6-3 for the year. What I conveniently forget: Getting massacred by every tackle - seriously, that shit hurt Coming up with the lamest excuses to miss practice because I dreaded it so much (My jersey's in the wash! Honest!) Playing a shit position and not getting any playing time Never getting the chance to make ANY sort of meaningful impact in a game. Seriously, this one probably hurts the most after the fact. I love sports, I just wish I was better at them.
Broke into the old apartment "Broke into the old apartment" I sometimes miss the apartment that the Mrsanthropic and I shared just before we bought our first house. We had some great times there - played tennis on the communal courts, walked to the nearby downtown for ice cream and dinner, hung out with a buddy of mine who lived in the same complex, set up our first Christmas tree together . . . Oh, and we also got married while living there. Then I remember how we rapidly ran out of storage space, the neighbor upstairs who dropped bowling balls on the floor all night, the obnoxious landlords, and the fall/early winter when the heat was never turned on in our building. This is where we used to live.
Especially now that I'm having an awesome travel experience, I get mistakenly nostalgic for my trip to Paris last year. I went by myself for two weeks to celebrate my college graduation, and I had been dreaming of going to Paris my entire life. I did love the city itself, but it was far from how I had imagined the trip would be and there were maybe 3 days when I wasn't completely miserable. This was mostly due to poor timing. It was only a couple of weeks after a traumatizing experience and PTSD kicked in a few days into the trip. This was on top of the shitty first half of the year I had had before that, so I would've been miserable anywhere, but the fact that I was miserable on my supposed dream trip to my dream city sucked. I was constantly harassed and was assaulted twice, so even just walking around was terrifying. Plus, I just kept having the worst luck. It rained for most of my stay, I really fucked up my knee, and all these little things kept going wrong that were piling up and pushing me more and more over the edge. I was lonely and homesick, and my run-ins with French snobbery made me feel like a loser. So, for the most part, it was generally an awful trip. But, when I think back on it, I first remember the beauty of the city and the awesome culture and the amazing food and the couple of genuinely good adventures I had and stories I can tell. There were some good things, and since it's fucking PARIS that's all my mind likes to remember. I'd like to go back there some day with better timing and do the trip right.
I miss the first two years of college. Shit was trump tight. My little brother is moving to OSU in a month and it is reminding me how fucking sweet it was to finally be on my own for the first time. Taking easy breezy college classes, getting fucked up three four times a week, meeting all sorts of friends. Looking back though I was still painfully terrible with girls and didn't get laid until well into my sophomore year (if you can't get laid in freshman dorms you have some serious issues). I was also taking random classes that didn't end up counting for shit and didn't lead me to discovering my dream major or life path. I am still as rudderless as I was then. I also look back fondly on my school trip through Europe. My best friend was on the trip and we tried to raise as much hell as possible. Lots of cool places visited and sights seen. On the other hand we had the lamest fucking teacher as the trips leader. Claiming to be a hard core christian he forbade us from anything that might have made the trip truly awesome (read drinking and using curse words, seriously). In Paris as the group passed a bar with a wedding party my friend and I got ourselves invited in only to be snatched up by the teacher. He was psycho about curfews and focused on us particularly since my friend managed to hook up with a girl the first night (her roommate on the trip ratted her out). Over all I had fun but much rather would have gone the next year when the teacher let the kids do what the fuck ever they wanted as long as they could find a taxi back before the bus left every day. Our group leader ended up cheating on his wife with another teacher and getting a divorce the next year. Fucking hypocrite. Off topic: Until a few weeks ago I always thought the term "shoved into lockers" meant physically placed inside a locker and having it closed. I didn't know it is more about just being randomly pushed by someone into a closed locker and hearing the tell tale ping. I don't remember having had either done. My middle school and high school time was pretty fun.
they always wanted to go to the same shitty chain restaurants instead of the good restaurants that we knew about but they had never been to before, so they didn't want to try anything new. Birthdays or any holidays were always a chore. God forbid we came home for just one day, that was always unacceptable. We had to stay for at least three days, or her parents got angry that we didn't spend enough time with them. Finally, in football season you couldn't leave your home on game days because the city was inundated with fans who went to the game and then went out to eat or just driving around. Seriously, home game days down there were fucking awful. "What is LSU? for a $1,000 Alex"