On the Ninth

Facebook has developed a new application called “Photo Memories,” which picks random photo albums you are tagged in, and places those albums on the side of your homepage or on a little picture frame on your “facebook desk” as I like to think of it. Once again, some technology, some programming, and human brain have created a gesture that caters to the human emotion of nostalgia.

I find myself often clicking that link, looking at perhaps forgotten moments, and the memories come rushing back. That gush of emotion that occurs from running into those pictures unexpectedly on my facebook desk very closely follows the emotions that well up upon finding some old pictures buried in a box under your bed while doing a yearly cleanup. This use of technology to virtually mimic an emotion formerly derived from a physical hands-on finding, though scary on some level, facilitates a smiling nostalgia in my heart from time to time.

I never know how to deal with nostalgia. It’s like being on the edge of a cliff, with your arms wide open, eyes closed, drifting closer and closer towards the intangible, while trying to hold on to solid ground. It requires some degree of precision and some optimization mechanisms.

I laid down in the backseat of the car last night, thinking back to the days when I was very very little. We’d go on long road trips with the family. I’d find my comfortable spot, lay down in the backseat at an angle where I could only see the blue, no ground, and no horizon. I’d study the clouds, theorizing in my child brain how if I tried enough, if I searched enough to unlock the mysteries of the world, I would see God or gods or heaven in these clouds.

Little did I know then that I’d finally settle with a heaven in my epsilon neighborhood, and moreover accept it with a placid calm rather than a frustrated anguish.

The tease of nostalgia is only palatable when a certain degree of maturity precedes it.

Ping! And I’ve been google IMed back on to the solid carpet of my room in Coral Springs, Florida.

Those were my nine minutes on cloud nine. ;-)