Home, or Nostalgia. (also a minor archivecrawl script update)
I was struck on the drive back to Kent this evening. Not by anything physical, but something intangible: a visceral emotional wave from my childhood, triggered by a combination of physical sensations.
It's difficult for me to put this into words. Or rather, the difficulty comes form separating which to describe first: the bit of my childhood reflected in the memory and why it was called up, or what it was that called the memory up.
I'll start with the trigger.
It's a simple act that millions of people do every day. I would wager you, the average "you" in my audience, reading this right now, did this same thing today. If not today then tomorrow, or possibly yesterday. I decelerated along a highway exit ramp.
In and of itself, not a monumental act.
But I grew up in a house two blocks from an exit/entrance ramp for Interstate 70. Specifically for the West-bound lanes, but that's neither here nor there. (The East-bound exit/entrance ramps were spaced farther apart for surface street considerations.)
I cannot count how many times in my childhood I was riding in the car and, half asleep, eyes closed, head bowed, I knew we were almost home when I felt the car slow down and heard the pitch change in the road noise, along with the slight slope and elevation change of the exit ramp. Even as an adult, driving myself, and encountering those sensations at that exit, coming home after a road trip, I felt comfortable, safe, happy knowing I'd bee home soon.
And I was hit by those sensations again this evening, even though I no longer live near the off ramp, and home is still another ten or twelve minutes away.
After living in that house nearly twenty years, some sensations become so deeply ingrained that they never go away, I suppose.
When I lived in Portland, I looked for an apartment near the highway, telling myself I was looking there because the apartments would likely be less expensive and that I would not mind the road noise. I wonder now if some part of me was trying to recapture those moments of my life before Portland as well.
I also made some tweaks to my archivecrawl script that grabs files from the internet archive. "crawl" is really the wrong word for what the script does, but that's not what I changed. It now evaluates the output of the wget command that grabs the files and prints how how many new, duplicate, and missing files the script found. It also waits a bit between each request to not hit the web server so frequently. It makes the script take longer to run, but it puts less strain on the server.
It's difficult for me to put this into words. Or rather, the difficulty comes form separating which to describe first: the bit of my childhood reflected in the memory and why it was called up, or what it was that called the memory up.
I'll start with the trigger.
It's a simple act that millions of people do every day. I would wager you, the average "you" in my audience, reading this right now, did this same thing today. If not today then tomorrow, or possibly yesterday. I decelerated along a highway exit ramp.
In and of itself, not a monumental act.
But I grew up in a house two blocks from an exit/entrance ramp for Interstate 70. Specifically for the West-bound lanes, but that's neither here nor there. (The East-bound exit/entrance ramps were spaced farther apart for surface street considerations.)
I cannot count how many times in my childhood I was riding in the car and, half asleep, eyes closed, head bowed, I knew we were almost home when I felt the car slow down and heard the pitch change in the road noise, along with the slight slope and elevation change of the exit ramp. Even as an adult, driving myself, and encountering those sensations at that exit, coming home after a road trip, I felt comfortable, safe, happy knowing I'd bee home soon.
And I was hit by those sensations again this evening, even though I no longer live near the off ramp, and home is still another ten or twelve minutes away.
After living in that house nearly twenty years, some sensations become so deeply ingrained that they never go away, I suppose.
When I lived in Portland, I looked for an apartment near the highway, telling myself I was looking there because the apartments would likely be less expensive and that I would not mind the road noise. I wonder now if some part of me was trying to recapture those moments of my life before Portland as well.
I also made some tweaks to my archivecrawl script that grabs files from the internet archive. "crawl" is really the wrong word for what the script does, but that's not what I changed. It now evaluates the output of the wget command that grabs the files and prints how how many new, duplicate, and missing files the script found. It also waits a bit between each request to not hit the web server so frequently. It makes the script take longer to run, but it puts less strain on the server.