nos⋅tal⋅gia

    [no-stal-juh, -jee-uh, nuh-]  Show IPA

–noun

1.	a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time: a nostalgia for his college days.

Tonight Tugrul slept over. Towards the end of the night T was laying in bed talking with Sinem on MSN and I was looking through my grade 12 yearbook. Billy Joel's Pianno Man LP playing. As I usually do when I reminisce I became overwhelmed with nostalgia. I started by reading T some of the things written in my yearbook and then once we went to sleep I layed in bed thinking about different eras of my life and how they affected me. 

Nostalgia is something that is just as creative as it is destructive in my life. I'm not quite sure yet how to describe how it is destructive, but it is. It's like I get lost in a day dream where the chemicals in my body shift and make me feel like someone gazing off into the stars or across the room at a person they are in love with but no one is aware of their feelings. If I am around people when this happens, I start to vocalize it and usually quite quickley they start to say things like "dude, thats history...quit living in the past." etc...

This disease called nostalgia starts off positive by granting me great joy reminiscing about good times in the past. Then if I dwell too long I start to place myself back into a specific era/memory in my life. It feels almost like when someone is taken back in time to view the past with a magical spirit and they can see everything and everyone and what happened but they can't interact with any of it.

If I continue to think about past memories in this state I start to feel like memories are things that represent things/feelings/moments that I can never get back. And for some reason...that really bugs me. I compare it to something I realized a few days ago. I can't do everything. I'm not qualified or I may never be able to be qualified for certain jobs, careers and/or experiences. Even if I have never desired to persue a certain idea, job, experience etc...once I realize that I can't, I feel like I am missing out on something that life has to offer. Something that I am supposed to experience or do...something that I should understand. And I think that bugs me.

I value life for the experiences that it has to offer. I value experience since it offers understanding. Understanding and Experience are very important to me. I think if I had a choice to live for thousands of years I would take it. I would do and learn everything that I could...experience everything! However I think that the disease of nostalgia would be extremely intense, maybe even unbareable.

If my super power was an innate desire to experience things to understand them, to understand others...then I think my fatal flaw, my kryptonite would be nostalgia. Sometimes I worry about how I will deal with memories when I am an old man. At that point I hope that I have learned to become content with where I was, who I was, who I knew, and where I'd been. I hope.

Nostalgia creates what feels like an alternate reality. Usually to overcome it I have to be in  a currently familar environment, maybe watching the news or doing something or talking to someone that I currently hang out with. It's weird because I know that my life has, is, and most likely will be great! I think that I am content with who I am and what I've experienced up until this point in my life. So I'm not quite sure why I occasionally suffer from this disease of nostalgia...or what it means. I dont think my life was "better" in the past...but why do I still concern myself with it so much.

I think at the end of the day this is something that I will have to wrestle with myself. No one else ever wants to dwell in the past with someone like me for the same period of time...it just gets frustrating (I can imagine).

Finally, I think that it is important for me to make an effort at remembering my past, recording it, whether in a journal, scrapbook, or via photos. This is something that I have a desire to do and will one day do well. I would love to make a collection of memories...photos, videos, documents etc...and create a few dvds and a few scrap books for each era of my life.