We’re 14 going on 25
It’s always the best when you get together with old friends and rehash all the good old days. My friend/teammate Jen from high school came up to the Bay Area from San Diego for a wedding and last night we got together, had some dessert and just caught up. I say that she’s a friend from high school, but we definitely knew each other in middle school, and maybe even before then.
There’s something about being around people that you can just sit and do nothing with and still have the best time ever. I guess that’s what makes them great friends. We got to talking about how we’ve all gotten older and moved away from each other, and how once you start working, it really takes effort to catch up with people and hang out. Last night I re-realized something that I also thought about on my recent trip to Nashville and North Carolina. I always fail to reconcile how many memories I have of events that are stored in OTHER people’s minds. I think I came across this face in my Social Neuroscience course at Pomona College, where a journal article that I was reading was discussing why people get depressed when they get divorced. It’s not necessarily the fact that they miss the other person, but if you spend a part of your life with someone, there are pieces of memories that you rely on the other person to remember for you because they were there with you. Not having access to those memories is what is actually “depressing”. This is kind of similar to seeing something that reminds you of an inside joke with another person. Imagine if that person wasn’t around for you to share that with anymore, and you kept seeing things that reminded you of conversations that you had or things that you had done, but you couldn’t share it with that person.
The more I catch up with people that were a significant part of my life, or even some of those who I didn’t know very well, but were in the same social environment, the happier I become.
In Nashville and North Carolina I got to relive moments from high school basketball and college life that weren’t necessarily heavily ingrained in my long-term memory, but when Vickie or Emily brought up certain stories or events, things started to flood back into my mind that I never would have been able to recall on my own. Last night Jen and I relived memories of old elementary, junior high, and high school teachers, old technology that we used to play with such as AIM profiles, AIM buddy icons, Winamp, Winamp skins. We also allowed ourselves to feel old by acknowledging the fact that Facebook wasn’t around, and how some high school teachers back when we had them were probably our age now, when they were teaching us.
I’m really happy that I got the chance to catch up with Jen last night even though I definitely stayed out way past my bedtime. I definitely paid the price for it a little bit as I struggled to get myself out of bed to make it to my 7:45am class, but conversations of that type, no matter at what hour, are priceless.
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