(no subject)
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time thinking about my own future. I'm the oldest of my siblings and cousins, so I never really had any older peers to tell me what to expect in middle school or high school or college. That changed once I got active on the internet (something for which I'll be forever grateful), but for the majority of my life I was informed by my parents and by whatever media I stumbled across, and that's it.
Consequently I developed some pretty strange ideas of what college was going to be like. I vividly remember sitting in our own green Chrysler van on road trips and trying to piece together the mysteries of campus life. Mostly I was convinced it'd involve lots of coffee and cold pizza and libraries and parties where people acted dumb (and possibly an inordinate amount of Cheez Whiz -- thank you, An Extremely Goofy Movie), but for some reason I wound up gathering a collection of songs and movies that got associated with Theoretical College. Said Goofy Movie was one for obvious reasons, along with various TV episodes that showed characters sneaking into college parties and inevitably getting busted. Somewhere down the line I got the misguided idea that Fight Club was actually about a bunch of fraternity brothers who started a boxing club in their school's basement, so I added that too. A whole bunch of acoustic-rock 90's songs (Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, The Freshmen by The Verve Pipe, Closing Time by Semisonic) got folded into this mix as well, and I'd imagine myself going on some kind of crazy road trip with my College Friends and rocking out to these tunes.
While driving back to campus last weekend, K had my iPod on shuffle and some of those 90's songs came up. (Freshmen, for the record, takes on a whole new level of heartbreak when you not only understand what the song is about but are actually older than the characters in question). As we were singing along I had the oddest sense of that pieced-together theoretical future intersecting perfectly with real life. It's happened to me a couple of times before, always at otherwise unremarkable moments -- walking across campus in the rain, or sitting in the coffee shop and watching people pass. I'm sure the Germans have a word for it. It's a kind of reverse deja vu, or a nostalgia for a past that never existed, and it's very strange indeed.
Consequently I developed some pretty strange ideas of what college was going to be like. I vividly remember sitting in our own green Chrysler van on road trips and trying to piece together the mysteries of campus life. Mostly I was convinced it'd involve lots of coffee and cold pizza and libraries and parties where people acted dumb (and possibly an inordinate amount of Cheez Whiz -- thank you, An Extremely Goofy Movie), but for some reason I wound up gathering a collection of songs and movies that got associated with Theoretical College. Said Goofy Movie was one for obvious reasons, along with various TV episodes that showed characters sneaking into college parties and inevitably getting busted. Somewhere down the line I got the misguided idea that Fight Club was actually about a bunch of fraternity brothers who started a boxing club in their school's basement, so I added that too. A whole bunch of acoustic-rock 90's songs (Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, The Freshmen by The Verve Pipe, Closing Time by Semisonic) got folded into this mix as well, and I'd imagine myself going on some kind of crazy road trip with my College Friends and rocking out to these tunes.
While driving back to campus last weekend, K had my iPod on shuffle and some of those 90's songs came up. (Freshmen, for the record, takes on a whole new level of heartbreak when you not only understand what the song is about but are actually older than the characters in question). As we were singing along I had the oddest sense of that pieced-together theoretical future intersecting perfectly with real life. It's happened to me a couple of times before, always at otherwise unremarkable moments -- walking across campus in the rain, or sitting in the coffee shop and watching people pass. I'm sure the Germans have a word for it. It's a kind of reverse deja vu, or a nostalgia for a past that never existed, and it's very strange indeed.