I have moved 14 times in 36 years, not including digs as a touring artist or artist-in-residence, or times where I practically lived at an ex’s house.
My first 4 years were spent in a house I barely remenber. I have flashes of: biting a sofa as a toddler and it feeling weird, a family party where everyone was enjoying how much I loved bananas, and watching a rainstorm out of the big window.
Then ages 5-19 i lived in a small village surrounded by farms, rural footpaths with styes and gates - so I have a lot of memories of all sorts of life: from kids playing to being teens with nothing better to do, with sneaking away with partners to fool around in the long grass, to taking walks just to fun…
Over time the village got bigger, this field filled with giant dead logs we used to play on is now houses, some fields we walked across are now fenced in, and my parents retired and moved, so they sold the house and they completely remodeled it: changed the entrance, moved the bathrooms and the kitchen. So yes I feel nostalgic for that, but also change is inevitable so there are experiences lost to time like tears in the rain.
Then after that I’ve lived in big cities, which as I got older and more financially stable, meant i moved further in to the centers with more stuff to do and more trouble to get up to.
And then coming up on 2 years I bought this house where we plan to stay for a good long while.
We just sold a house after living in it for 25 years. It’s where we raised our kids. Before selling i was struggling a bit. The moving out process is exhausting and makes you just want to be done. We inherited a house that needs significant work. The remodeling of that is exciting and the proceeds from our house sale make it possible, so I’m not sad about it at all. My husband likes to drive by to criticize the new owners landscaping.
I remember every single place I’ve lived in (over a dozen) and remember the address of most of them; the ones I don’t I can look up quite easily
I do feel quite sentimental about two specific places (ironically the two “worst” places I’ve lived in), not much with most others; one I almost hate with a passion
Hey it’s you again.
I remember when I used to live Guangzhou. I used Baidu Street View to see it.
Can’t even see like the actual front of the building, its down some alleyway. The baidu car thing that recorded the street view can only go so far.
Its the same place I had a traumatic memory in. lol
I feel very emotional about that place. Its a scar in my memories.
Here’s the author Jason Pargin riffing on the topic of nostalgia , and the key takeaways for him are that:
- Nostalgia is toxic because it is the intense grasping for something that is definitionally forever outside of your reach
- Nostalgia is a false rose-colored filter to view things through.
That said, I have a penchant for sentimentality, and fall victim to nostalgia at every given whim I get, especially when visiting my parents’ house where I grew up.
I love to allow myself to be transported to the viewpoint of my younger self, which I feel I have lost some connection to.
I often find I was stronger and more worthy than I gave myself credit for.
If only I could properly translate that into the current moment, it would remove a lot of self-doubt that holds me back from living with confident authenticity.
It’s weird seeing his name written out. I still stumble with not calling him David Wong.
Holy smokes! I see his online persona so often that I forgot he had a pen name!
I’m on my 23rd adress now (spread over 6 towns/cities). I have memories attached to each of the places, both good and bad I remember most of the addresses. I’ve had a pretty chaotic life but am mostly done with that now. I might move again in a few years but for now I’m settled.
On average I have moved once a year the past 11 years. I remember all of them, but am only nostalgic for my childhood home.
I do remember. I don’t miss it. Always moved to a place that suited me better, often after a year or so of my circumstances changing so I’ve got time to get annoyed with my living conditions where I moved from
we had to sell my childhood house because it was going to be foreclosed otherwise. Barely even a week after my dad’s death. I’ve broken down every time I’ve tried to look at the place again, in person or through street view. I just want my home back.
no they all sucked except the first one and the last one.
I tried counting, and I think I’ve lived in 20+ places. Only 4 during college, so I’ve just always moved frequently.
I remember everywhere other than the place where I was a baby, which I remember in bits and pieces, but didn’t recognize from streetview. There’s only that house and the one after it when I was like ages 2-4 that I would want to go back to out of curiosity. The houses felt so huge, and I’m sure they were tiny. Seeing them in streetview is more like teasing a mystery than bringing up memories.
Other than that, I only look at places out of curiosity of how they’ve changed. Places don’t really hold a ton of significance once they become functionally unattached to the emotional arc of one’s life.
I made the mistake of feeling sentimental about places and thinking I could go back. I even did it, by myself, moving 2k miles away from family to return. Everywhere and everyone is constantly evolving. If you are not present and evolving with them, the sentiment is a cruel fallacy. The nostalgia is for a place AND time. Failure to see the role of time leads to a rough lesson.
But yeah I remember. The funny thing for me was driving the old roads. Even in places I was too young and never drove around myself, I have a knack for mapping places in my head. Driving those old roads brings back wild memories especially when I was only very young initially. I recall the map, but I feel oversized in a world intended for little people. It is the only time I have experienced that size dichotomy.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice”. Everything flows.
Similarly, impermanence is a fundamental aspect of reality, and fighting it ultimately results in feeling things are unsatisfactory in some way.
I remember some places more than others, and I might have forgotten one or two. I moved around a lot from ages 18 to 32.
Sentimental? Only a bit about the house I grew up in. But, my parents owned it until their deaths, so I was there somewhat regularly. We sold it a few years back when dad died. I’ve lived in my own house for nearly 30 years now, I’m not at all sentimental about it. It’s just a roof over my head for me and my son.
I suppose I’m more sentimental about my childhood, than the house I grew up in, come to think of it.
What do you think Ulysses is about?
Monsters. Crashing your boat. Getting seduced by goddesses. NSFS (Not Safe For School) scenes (pretty sure its NSFS). One Eyed Monsters. Poseidon & Zeus fucking shit up.
Horny men wanna fuck your wife.
Being suspicious of your wife cheating on you with those who wanna steal your kingdom.
Pretending you’re a homeless person in your own kingdom.
Shooting arrows through a tiny hole for some reason and be like “I AM THE KING”
Something something the bed is immovable and the wife want to test if it’s a trick by the gods then you get mad at your wife because you think she’s cheating, but then she reveal its actually a prank.
Made no sense whatso ever.
Hey at least it’s more interesting than the bible.
Ulysses not the Odyssey, the Odyssey is a dull book about boring men fighting clever battles compared to the trip that is Joyce’s Ulysses.
It’s a bit of an odd thing to experience the real-life version of a place that I was first intimately introduced to in a literary and fictional capacity. For Joyce, having grown up in Dublin, it was almost the complete opposite — his fictional works, including the modernist masterpiece “Ulysses,” were reflective of the Ireland he already knew well. Joyce once famously said to a friend that in writing “Ulysses,” he wanted to “give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed.”
His attention to detail throughout the entire text is almost absurd in its specificity, especially given that Joyce had emigrated from Ireland long before writing “Ulysses” and relied on his own memory and extensive correspondence with friends and family in Dublin to confirm the accuracy of his references.
https://www.michigandaily.com/statement/yes-i-said-yes-i-will-yes-to-james-joyces-dublin/
Lmao I thought it’s Ulysses as in the alternate spelling of Odyseous
Remember them: yes.
Feel anything: it is usually a particular event or something that causes me to bring them to mind, so any feelings will be more tied to the event that caused the memory than the place itself - and that could be good, bad or just unusual. I don’t think that I have ever had reason to look at street views of any of them.
Sentimental: not in general. They all had good points and not so good. I enjoyed living in them most of the time, but I enjoy where I am now too.
The closest to sentimental would be when I spent a night at one of the old places some years later. I used to live on site for work, but my role changed. No-one lives there now. It is used for meetings and storage etc, but someone will occasionally sleep-over for one reason or another, as I did on this occasion. That evening I felt like a ghost haunting my own past.
I’m only sentimental about my childhood home, and my parents still live there so I can relive those fond memories whenever I want. The area around it has changed a lot though, and it makes me feel a bit wistful thinking of how it used to be. I guess this is how you realise you’re old.
