Nostalgia is poisonous...
I have been way to indulgent of much of my nostalgic memories in the past.
I look back at things that remind me of the 70s and 80s and I tend to conflate them with fictional values.
While much of the 80s was a time that I greatly values, the 70s were not exactly such.
There is also the tendency to want to go back to those times, which I have written about here as well. There is nother wrong with looking back on a life well remembered, but to do so as a means of escaping the here and now is a bit of a mistake and delusion.
I encounter this among some of the most unlikely people. They yearn for a simpler time, as I do, but to think back that the past was actually simpler is also a mistake. I had problems that needed addressing even at the best of my life. Only looking at those problems with solutions that are available today tends to undermine the significance of those problems. We did not have cell phones (well, maybe I did post 1987/88 - 88, that was when what's his name tried to blow-up my car), PCs that could stretch out to grab information with a few key strokes, nor did the PCs we did have contain enough memory to record all of our lives' events for later recollection or use. We had paper and pen(cil), calculators with simple functions (few of us had even scientific calculators, whose possession was garanteed to mark you as someone who was a geek - and in a manner that was not as flattering nor common as it is today). We had to use a telephone for all of our communications (and if we were lucky, we had - or our friends/co-workers had - answering machines for those times when no-one answered), and mail from the post office was not thought of as slow... The snail had yet to begin delivering it.
It is funny to think about the visions of the future that we once had... I never really expected to have a flying car. I tended to be a little too pragmatic when it came to that (especially with a younger brother who could fly an airplane before he was allowed to drive a car). I never expected rocket-packs (Too much stuff that could blow-up in one place)... I did expect to have pocket or wrist-watch communicators (which you can buy, BTW... The wrist-watch bit... They just only work as cell-phones... Not sure if the company even still makes them. They were being sold for a while in Europe, but I think that the desire for that color screen killed them - and the battery life couldn't have been too god... I should look to see if I can find one online?), which are really available as cell-phones and have a lot more capabilities that I imagined... Of course, I also figured that we would have personal computers that we could carry with us... I just didn't think small enough to see a cell-phone containing a PC as well (except of course, right now; it is a Mac)...
The one thing now, that I think is causing all of this bizarre nostalgia on my part is my disconnect with the right side of my brain. I have not been feeding it too well. I need a LOT more art in my life, but I don't really like having to deal with a lot of the artist types who seem to only be able to communicate through the emotional/subjective portion of their mind. That is probably an unfair projection or judgment on my part, as it comes motly from not going out to see who is doing what with music or art these days, and about the only people I have met who are doing it are people who are dripping my right-brained BS...
I can be incredibly stuck-up when it comes to the ability to communicate or effectively/affectively represent things. I guess that maybe I should come down off the high-horse a little bit, and cut people some slack... Most of this is coming from that English Class (Women's Studies), where I have to listen to some pretty freakishly bizarre views from women. Most of them are very sensible, but there seems to be a great need for a new language built around talking about issues of sexual equality/parity. The women want to emasculate a lot of current expressions in our language, and men want to keep women from interfering with established communication structures and methods... There needs to be some form of compromise that will enable both to not feel as if they have been cut out of the discussion. A lot of it comes from just not knowing where the language comes from, and the fact that a good many of the people who have explored this issue come from countries who speak languages that are inherently sexed (Romance lnaguages have nouns/pronouns that have a gender. This leads to the appearance of a rejection of many female (or male depending) roles from society), when this is translated into English, many femenists have the view that they are speaking of English as well, which does not label its nouns/pronouns as inherently sexual... You can have a table that is a he or a she, where in France, a table is a she (la Table - the 'la' being the feminine identifier, it would be improper to have 'le table', which would be a he). This is even more true when you speak of professions. For instance, you have "le politicien" which is a decidedly male term ('le' identifier as male, and the ending 'cien' being male as well). Only recently has the term 'la politicienne' come into usage (and it had to do so by a complete revolution in the French system. At least according to the accounts of two different Authors - one French, Luce Irigaray and the other Italian Christina Lasagni)...
Anyway... I need to go and put some other views in a different blog (I will probably post some info about that one eventually, it is a more "Professional" blog where I deal solely with issues of technology and its impact upon society & the human condition, which isn't much more than I do here... Except I probably won't be running off at the mouth on it about the various dream/dream states that I encounter... OH! And, I also began a blog on MySpace... I am still not sure what I want to do with it. Probably dedicate it to more artistic/right brained endeavors)
I look back at things that remind me of the 70s and 80s and I tend to conflate them with fictional values.
While much of the 80s was a time that I greatly values, the 70s were not exactly such.
There is also the tendency to want to go back to those times, which I have written about here as well. There is nother wrong with looking back on a life well remembered, but to do so as a means of escaping the here and now is a bit of a mistake and delusion.
I encounter this among some of the most unlikely people. They yearn for a simpler time, as I do, but to think back that the past was actually simpler is also a mistake. I had problems that needed addressing even at the best of my life. Only looking at those problems with solutions that are available today tends to undermine the significance of those problems. We did not have cell phones (well, maybe I did post 1987/88 - 88, that was when what's his name tried to blow-up my car), PCs that could stretch out to grab information with a few key strokes, nor did the PCs we did have contain enough memory to record all of our lives' events for later recollection or use. We had paper and pen(cil), calculators with simple functions (few of us had even scientific calculators, whose possession was garanteed to mark you as someone who was a geek - and in a manner that was not as flattering nor common as it is today). We had to use a telephone for all of our communications (and if we were lucky, we had - or our friends/co-workers had - answering machines for those times when no-one answered), and mail from the post office was not thought of as slow... The snail had yet to begin delivering it.
It is funny to think about the visions of the future that we once had... I never really expected to have a flying car. I tended to be a little too pragmatic when it came to that (especially with a younger brother who could fly an airplane before he was allowed to drive a car). I never expected rocket-packs (Too much stuff that could blow-up in one place)... I did expect to have pocket or wrist-watch communicators (which you can buy, BTW... The wrist-watch bit... They just only work as cell-phones... Not sure if the company even still makes them. They were being sold for a while in Europe, but I think that the desire for that color screen killed them - and the battery life couldn't have been too god... I should look to see if I can find one online?), which are really available as cell-phones and have a lot more capabilities that I imagined... Of course, I also figured that we would have personal computers that we could carry with us... I just didn't think small enough to see a cell-phone containing a PC as well (except of course, right now; it is a Mac)...
The one thing now, that I think is causing all of this bizarre nostalgia on my part is my disconnect with the right side of my brain. I have not been feeding it too well. I need a LOT more art in my life, but I don't really like having to deal with a lot of the artist types who seem to only be able to communicate through the emotional/subjective portion of their mind. That is probably an unfair projection or judgment on my part, as it comes motly from not going out to see who is doing what with music or art these days, and about the only people I have met who are doing it are people who are dripping my right-brained BS...
I can be incredibly stuck-up when it comes to the ability to communicate or effectively/affectively represent things. I guess that maybe I should come down off the high-horse a little bit, and cut people some slack... Most of this is coming from that English Class (Women's Studies), where I have to listen to some pretty freakishly bizarre views from women. Most of them are very sensible, but there seems to be a great need for a new language built around talking about issues of sexual equality/parity. The women want to emasculate a lot of current expressions in our language, and men want to keep women from interfering with established communication structures and methods... There needs to be some form of compromise that will enable both to not feel as if they have been cut out of the discussion. A lot of it comes from just not knowing where the language comes from, and the fact that a good many of the people who have explored this issue come from countries who speak languages that are inherently sexed (Romance lnaguages have nouns/pronouns that have a gender. This leads to the appearance of a rejection of many female (or male depending) roles from society), when this is translated into English, many femenists have the view that they are speaking of English as well, which does not label its nouns/pronouns as inherently sexual... You can have a table that is a he or a she, where in France, a table is a she (la Table - the 'la' being the feminine identifier, it would be improper to have 'le table', which would be a he). This is even more true when you speak of professions. For instance, you have "le politicien" which is a decidedly male term ('le' identifier as male, and the ending 'cien' being male as well). Only recently has the term 'la politicienne' come into usage (and it had to do so by a complete revolution in the French system. At least according to the accounts of two different Authors - one French, Luce Irigaray and the other Italian Christina Lasagni)...
Anyway... I need to go and put some other views in a different blog (I will probably post some info about that one eventually, it is a more "Professional" blog where I deal solely with issues of technology and its impact upon society & the human condition, which isn't much more than I do here... Except I probably won't be running off at the mouth on it about the various dream/dream states that I encounter... OH! And, I also began a blog on MySpace... I am still not sure what I want to do with it. Probably dedicate it to more artistic/right brained endeavors)