Reminiscing

I was tired yesterday so I wanted to try to get to sleep earlier. Of course, I didn't go to bed any earlier. But can you blame me? I stayed up converting Rockapella youtube videos to mp3s.

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Let me explain. These are not just any Rockapella videos.

Somewhere in the vicinity of 1993, we went to the Mall of America. Of course, I was most enthralled by the biggest board game store I had ever seen. I went home with the Carmen Sandiego board game. It came with a cassette of mostly Rockapella music, including the PBS Game Show theme. But in this new digital age, nothing, not even Rockapella cassettes are gone forever.

I was able to find the songs I liked on youtube, use catchyoutube.com to convert the videos to mp3, and now I've recreated my cassette in iTunes.

Of course, this music isn't providing intrinsic enjoyment. The only reason I got excited about it because of the memories it brought back. How I listened to that cassette on my walkman hundreds of times.

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In fact, this is just the latest of trips down memory lane for me. Although it's a contentious category, the best video game experience of my life is probably Metal Gear Solid (1998, Playstation). I never owned a ps1, and to this date never owned MGS1. But I played for the first time at a Chris's house and fell in love. And then I had to borrow Brian's playstation so I could play the game full through on my own.

In fact, I just completed MGS4 on ps3, which I basically got because of the memories of the first one. Of course, it's surprising to look back and see how terrible the graphics were just ten years ago.


Also, this past weekend I made a version of my mom's Thanksgiving stuffing for the first time on my own. Last year, I watched her make it and wrote down the recipe. So this year I tried to make it, but upgrading some of the ingredients. (Sourdough instead of boring white bread, adding craisins for color and flavor.) And yet it didn't taste like my mom's. It's not that the stuffing that I made was good or bad, it just didn't capture the flavor memories, which was sort of the whole point, in retrospect.

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It's amazing how much of the human experience is spent trying to recapture what we had--or didn't have--in our childhood.