Memories
To go back to an old love or an old hurt, and discover that your mind played tricks on you at the time. Always interesting. This is my favorite story on this theme, which I linked to on my old blog.
A friend went to the ten year reunion of the class below me, and told me that the love of my college life now resembled Yoda. But I guess that's a different sort of problem. I'm pretty sure he didn't look like that at the time.
A friend went to the ten year reunion of the class below me, and told me that the love of my college life now resembled Yoda. But I guess that's a different sort of problem. I'm pretty sure he didn't look like that at the time.
posted by fortuna at 12:02 PM
22 Comments:
*ahem* Perhaps he resembled hot Yoda?
"In fact, he wound up peeing in the sink and showering me with refracted urine, which was, ultimately, more than even my still-teenaged heart could excuse."
One would hope this would be an effective cure for devotion. I've been thinking a lot about paths not taken lately. Not very clearly, unfortunately. Something about wondering whether the path was ever really open.
I think I want the paths both to have been open and not open. I guess it would make sense to try to disparage the old interests in your mind, but that's not really satisfying. I probably make them more vivid, clever, thinking the same thoughts I think, only much more clearly. But this isn't really fair to current relationship.
Anne - that story about Eli just blew me away. Thank you so much for linking to it.
I had a vague feeling of the essay i wrote about Keith M - the boy who was such a hero to me in high school and grade school - but her story ... wow.
So well written.
Ditto that.
I mistook text's comment to say, I think I want the pants both to have been open and not open.
As to the substance, I sympathize. Apart from its use in fire safety, a standpipe is a device for turning opportunity into regret. They're working on a model that doesn't require opportunity.
I say. My weakness for the rhetorical flourish has led me to overstate matters un peu.
the pants will remain both open and not open until somebody lets me out of this box.
One would hope this would be an effective cure for devotion.
I cannot find the "love means not having to say 'don't crap in the shower'" article, or the relevant Unfogged post, but it's out there. Standpipe?
I sort of have a warm feeling toward paths not taken at the moment, but that hasn't always been the case. Sometimes I've been known not to admit that they weren't taken. Industriously recycling old crushes and the like.
To feel warm about them without trying them on again--just for the afternoon--that would be a good life skill to have. For me, I keep getting dropped off at "and I wonder what she's up to these days." Or, "and that's why things have gone so horribly wrong ever since."
Hooray! Christmas songs!
Really the curious thing about the story is how much more control she had than she thought she did:
When I encountered this passage in my old notebook I was astounded. How could I have forgotten that I had rejected Eli, and that he still comforted me? The entire character of my adolescence, to which I referred daily in the intervening years as lost, helpless, boy-wracked, and inconsolable, was a myth. Eli had valued me and I had prevailed.
You tell yourself a whole story that has very little to do with what actually happened.
An argument in favor of keeping journals. And trying to report accurately what happens to you, even if you don't understand it at the time.
I think I want the pants both to have been open and not open
Sounds like Barthes on the art of the striptease.
And I was actually wondering if you'd seen that on my old blog, Sheila.
Yeah - I don't think I'd seen it before!
This is reminding me a bit of Prep - Have you read it yet? Sorry if we've already discussed - I forget - but there's a moment at the end of the book when she has a moment of realization like that ... like she realizes how OFF her perception has been the entire time.
Yeah, I have read it. That's right. It's a similar mood.
Someone just sent me an email last week about how she thought of me while reading Prep, must reply.
That Eli story is amazing.
Makes you wonder what the reality of these things is, no?
Yeah.
Stories like this always make me start thinking about how I would tackle writing about the same subject as it applies to my own life.
As I said on Sheila's blog - really glad you linked to this.
It seems like something I could have written.
Not as well, perhaps, but the genre.
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