Tag Archives: Reminiscence

Waning Technological Desire

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What seems like a long time ago, I blogged about the unre­lent­ing pace of tech­nol­ogy and Internet-borne social inter­ac­tion, and how much I loved it. But that was a Feb­ru­ary day with the promise of Spring in the near future. Now it is Autumn, and I am not alto­gether sure I feel the same way.

I’ve thought long and hard about my options now that my phone con­tract is up for renewal, and the more I con­sider, the less sure I am — not just of what I want, but of my innate gadget-fetishism as a whole.

My first choice was going to be a Galaxy Tab, but hav­ing seen the prices, I’m not sure if it remains a sen­si­ble idea. For that money I could have an iPad — I’m typ­ing this post from one and it sure is nice to type on, but every­thing else App­ley would get on my nerves soon enough. Should I just go for an upgrade of my cur­rent hard­ware — the lat­est and great­est Android phone, rather than try­ing to split my usage into a sep­a­rate tablet and dumb­phone? Maybe just jack the whole busi­ness in and keep inter­net brows­ing to my laptop?

My pre­vi­ous post, in which I spent too much of everyone’s time rem­i­nisc­ing about my hor­rific late-90s web­site, reminded me of sim­pler days. Win­dows 98, Yahoo dialup, AOL Instant Mes­sen­ger, Netscape Nav­i­ga­tor. A big beige box with 32MB of RAM and 1 hour-a-day usage limit imposed by my parents.

Pretty grim by today’s stan­dards. But yet I used AIM to talk to my friends every night, even though I’d seen them at school that day. And now we have Twit­ter and Face­book and all the rest, and I’ve IMed my own Best Man, some­one I lived with for two years, maybe once a year — and most of my other friends less than that.

I looked at only a few web­sites a day, in part because they took so long to load, but I was pretty happy with that. These were days a long time before RSS and clear­ing hun­dreds of items a day through Google Reader.

For all the grey clicky but­tons and emoti­cons and sneaky IRC ses­sions behind my par­ents’ backs, was it maybe just more fun when that’s what the Inter­net was like? Should I save my money for some­thing other than gad­getry, and hark back to some more inno­cent age? Or have I got my rose-tinted mir­ror shades set to max­i­mum, yearn­ing to revive a fake past that I would get bored of within days, sep­a­rated as I would be from the lightning-fast pulse of technology?

Cherry Blossom and Reminiscence

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Last night I ended up watch­ing the last few episodes of an anime series called Card­cap­tor Sakura, which by my reck­on­ing is at least ten years since I watched it all the way through as a kid.

At the time, I sup­pose the main character’s relent­lessly chirpy atti­tude had quite an effect on me. I watched a lot of sim­i­lar stuff around that time, and some­how the idea that being some­what self-sacrificing and being con­stantly happy at peo­ple would Make Every­thing Okay got stuck in my head.

Actu­ally it seemed to work pretty well when I was that age, but that atti­tude prob­a­bly got stuck for rather too long — case in point, here’s me still spaffing Card­cap­tor Sakura song lyrics on my Live­Jour­nal at age 19. Of course, approach­ing life with the atti­tude of a fic­tional, supernaturally-chirpy 10-year-old girl didn’t really sur­vive first con­tact with Uni­ver­sity life, and cer­tainly not with fatherhood.

But watch­ing the series again still makes me happy, both to see the char­ac­ters fall in love again, and to remind myself how glad I am that I am no longer that naive.

And kind of con­fused that, despite the first time I watched Card­cap­tor Sakura seem­ing so recent, it was nearly half my life­time ago.

Momentary Reminiscence

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Four years ago, what dom­i­nated my mind most was that I was run­ning out of time. The end of my time at Uni­ver­sity loomed large in front of me. I didn’t have a job to go to, my final year project was dead in the water and my rela­tion­ship was painfully long-distance, but those weren’t the most weighty issues. I was trou­bled far more by the fact that three months from then, I’d be leav­ing the city that defined my tran­si­tion from child­hood to adult­hood, los­ing that con­stant con­tact with friends that defines Uni­ver­sity life.

And come June, the inevitable hap­pened, and off we all went.

There’s a lot I don’t miss about that time — the pres­sure of course­work and exams, the phone calls every night until my head felt ready to burst, the hav­ing very lit­tle money — but there’s one thing I really, really do.

I miss the drama.

At the time, I was pretty con­flicted about the giant morass of drama that got dropped on us in what was my third year — I hated it, but it was almost enjoy­able in a weird ironic sort of way. And now I miss it.

I miss the burn­ing feel­ing and the anguish of devel­op­ing crushes on com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate peo­ple. I miss all the knowl­edge of other people’s lives that comes from being so reg­u­larly in con­tact with them. I miss try­ing to fix other people’s bad sit­u­a­tions, I miss suc­ceed­ing, and I miss fail­ing. I miss hav­ing break­fast at KFC, though only two peo­ple know why. I miss bar­ing the con­tents of our hearts until deep into the night. I miss the secrets and the gos­sip. I miss friends becom­ing lovers, and I miss friends becom­ing ene­mies. I miss find­ing the right things to say to the right peo­ple, and I miss fail­ing at that too. I miss falling in love for the first time.

None of that is com­ing back, and per­haps I should be glad of that. After all, I just con­fessed to hat­ing it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all (or was it Absinthe?), so it’s prob­a­bly for the best that it’s all safely con­fined to the past. But once every so often, just like now, I’ll rem­i­nisce about those times long ago.