Some of my blogs are Written and Pondered for days at a time, honed and edited with all the rigor of… a few hours plus a reread or two. This one is a good old-fashioned Blog, with all the rough edges and personal thoughts that I associate with that. There’s definitely substance here that should give you shit to think about, I did end up just writing about the nature of memory for like 1k words. I hope it’s something <3 hope you’re well <3 death to america <3 we will never have healthy nostalgia while capitalism exists <3

I finished my lunch today listening to the music that I listened to last summer. I’ve been feeling rather disconnected from the romantic ideal of summer in my head. It’s funny because that ideal is almost whole-cloth fabrication, yet I do have reference points that I wish I could be doing this summer! I haven’t been able to visit bodies of water, drive long distances while listening to music that’s nostalgic for something that never existed (zero parallels between the music and my own headspace during the summer), or buy a bunch of chips and baby carrots so that a bunch of my friends can hang out outside and play ping pong. Some of this is because I don’t have a car, some of it is because moving in is stressful, some of it is because life is expensive when you’re paying your own rent, some of it is because I simply haven’t put my mind to it.

This all feels rather silly when I know that I will get to do many of these things in the coming months. June isn’t even over yet, and I’ve done so much. So much of what I’ve done in June will give me more room to do this so-called summer shit in July and August. The present is not forever the future is what I will make of it and I’m so excited to make it what I want it to be.

Music that’s nostalgic for something that never existed always makes me think about the nature of memory. Nostalgia is never for the “reality” of the past, it is always for some ideal that has been inked, colored, and shaded in the time since. Olivia Rodrigo and the Strokes don’t actually make music that’s remotely close to literally relevant to my life but I will still listen to vampire whenever I want to feel summery because I played it on loop on my commute home for like 3 weeks in July 2023. I’ve barely even listened to the Strokes but one of my best friends loves them (actually it’s at least a few of my best friends) and they absolutely nail the wistful summer vibe that propels me through the 90 degree days.

bad idea, right?

It’s important to not measure my life against lies, whether ones of my own memory or ones of the art made from others’ memories. Telling myself this never quite stops me, but I guess I have to keep repeating it. It’s unwise to reminisce about a summer where I didn’t work for months and sucked ass because my boss refused to give me work to do despite there being plenty that I could have easily done. It’s a bad idea to get really attached to one specific model of summer and happiness (a happiness that barely existed at the time, but it also did and I simply need to remember that what happiness there was was not because of the specifics but because of how I thought about it). I shouldn’t be nostalgic for stressful and shitty jobs that forced me to sweat and get sunburnt and drive a 25 minute commute when I have air conditioning and a 10 minute bike commute and 37.5 hours a week consistently this summer. I can say all this, and yet I still reminisce.

get him back

I want last summer back. I want to be looking out at the Potomac river or the C&O canal or looking at elephants in the National Zoo or driving Jessica back to her house at midnight or surprised by a bunch of my friends waiting for me in my driveway when I get back from work or reconnecting with one of the coolest people I’ve ever known or driving stupidly far to see a movie on the perfect screen. I want the summer before then back where I could pick August up at like 7 and we could go get boba and blast Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion until I remembered that I had to be up at 7 the next day. It feels so silly to call memories lies when these things did happen. Materially, meaningfully, really happened. It’s honestly a godsend that our memories distort our pasts. I would be much more miserable if my memories of last summer were only the work stress or the scheduling friend stress or the cancellations or the days where I didn’t leave the house. These distortions mean that I can completely forget about the really nice day I had at King’s Dominion with lovely friends and my sister and then rediscover it and smile really big because I did that!

That summer happened, and this summer will too! Next summer I’ll look back at the late nights laughing and the easy ass job and my lovely housemates and the fresh environment with the same nostalgia that I look back at last summer with. And the things I miss I can make happen, or simply enjoy missing. Sometimes it is a privilege to mourn because it means that it happened.

I think through my memories as I think through movies and photographs. My memory is a camera, it picks and chooses what is real and preserves that for the audience of my memory retrieval. When I reach back in order to reminisce my memory has some hazy images and some clear ones, all of which are colored more by the reason I am reaching for them than the moment they are a memory of.

In the short time I spent in my hometown earlier this summer I felt a lot of different things about nostalgia. Sabrielle told me that she really lived off of nostalgia which I really want to talk to her more about, because part of me is really repulsed by that but that was also because I was forced to spend a lot of time dwelling on the unfortunate parts of home for those two weeks. Not all my trips home are like that, and I think they’ll be increasingly less like that with my feet planted somewhere else. I’m also not sure which parts of my memory are tied to people and which are tied to place. Much of my nostalgia is tied directly to people, but as I’ve spent my first summer in a different place than my first 20 I’ve become very nostalgic about specific places.

Only in Dreams

One of the most illuminating attributes of my memory and how I understand it is that I have often confused dreams for memories. Whether it is finding a story on the tip of my tongue before realizing it was a dream or having a dream that I had forgotten about unearthed by some reminder in exactly the same way “real” memories are, my dreams operate in the same space as memories. I doubt this is 100% true for everyone, but it’s probably a little true for a lot of people. I think comparing my memories to dreams and vice versa is rich and rewarding because it places both in a space of power but not dominance. Neither can wield some absolute objectivity but neither are relegated to irrelevancy in my narrative of self. I remember some dreams more vividly than key life events, but we are taught that dreams aren’t “real” and that “reality” is all that matters. fuck that tbh

Is This It

It doesn’t really matter if your memories are distortions because everything is! That’s really the only thought I ever have and it just loops around itself and through everything I experience. I’ve spent most of this blog’s history writing against ideas of “objectivity” and I do think that trying to hold on to some “objective” memory would drive most people insane. It is a tough balance simply because you need a consistent narrative of self to survive, and it is hard to hold onto a narrative of self that is delegitimized from every direction, as one not grounded in “real memories” would be. I wish I had some answer or some map for you to navigate your own webs of nostalgia and memory but the point kind of is that there isn’t one.

I need to stop ending these blogs with “sorry the answer is the process” but that would require a rebuild of my entire brain so idk love u xx thanks for reading

P.S. in gathering photos to add to this I kind of realized how silly it is to be disappointed in my summer so far! it’s different for sure but god damn I’ve done some sick shit with some incredible people and that’s kind of all that I need out of this shit <3 so. mission accomplished ig thank u again for reading