Back to Blog

I predict that this blog is going to go through a sudden burst of activity. At least for this burst, the posts on this blog will shift from random thoughts to a focused stream. It will remain consistent with the overriding theme of my doing this for me and me alone. But now, this blog will also serve as an online "cloud" repository of historical documents and writings that are important to me personally.

Looking through the box, bald spot and all!

What triggered this? Going through an old box of stuff from my youth. In this box, I found a variety of things that drowned me in nostalgia. Several of the items relate to my great-grand-parents (e.g., biographies from magazines) and I felt that some of this deserved to be accessible online for anyone to access - though it will probably be primarily of interest to our vast family. As far as I know, none of this material is available online anywhere else.

I also read an article in the paper today about research showing that Google is changing the way our brains work (Science, 2011). We tend to allocate our information processing capacity towards things that are important and relevant to us. As Google makes a vast trove of information easily accessible so that we don't have to actually remember all this stuff any more, our brains are diverting their cognitive capacities towards other things - like where stuff is stored (as opposed to WHAT that stuff is).It's true. All the materials I found in this box brought back a flood of memories and I wondered why this information wasn't more easily accessible. I would like to offload some of my memories to the online world so it can be easily accessed by myself and my friends and family in the hope it will keep these bonds through time rather than just when I stumble upon an old box of knick knacks.

Already, Facebook has enabled me to connect with several of the people dusted off from within the box I opened yesterday. What a world! Coincidentally, I watched the movie "Social Network" this weekend. I really believe now that social networking sites like Facebook (or whatever other incarnation happens to dominate in the next decade) are stunning achievements in their ability to connect people not just across space, but across time. Sure, enough has been written about the problems with sites like Facebook, but on days like this, I just marvel at its ability to connect people over the years. I found one person from my past and found he was connected to just one or two other people. Each of those people had connections with just one or two other people from my youth. Within a few hours, I had connected with people from my school, college, and acting group based in different continents.

Then, there is my own stuff. I used to love to write and I found notebooks and typed pages of stuff I wrote in the early eighties. Now, that by itself is not so interesting. What stunned me is that some of those brief essays are astonishingly well written even with my jaded professor's eyes of today. Truly, I am quite stunned at what I wrote when I was 18 years old. Surprisingly, some of the content still seems contemporary and appropriate even today. For example, I found this short essay I wrote called "Nostalgia" which is written from the perspective of an old man looking back at his past and his youth. Now, what could an 18-year-old possibly know about old age and nostalgia? At the "ripe old age" of 44, I am reading this and still can't find much fault with the perspective. And, it seems so well written. I remember writing it, but can't emotionally connect with the person I was when I wrote this. It just seems to be better written than anything I could come up with today. What happened to me?

So, that should prepare you for what is to come on this blog over the next few days/weeks. A documentation of my past, essentially. You'll hear and see from my grand parents, great grand parents, and even the young me. I'll refer to friends and associates (please drop me a note to have any references/links/images redacted) and hopefully build a searchable online repository of my personal history.

So, let's start, quite appropriately, with an essay I wrote (most likely in 1984 or 1985 at the age of 17 or 18) called "Nostalgia." Wait for it tomorrow ...