Big Big Question

(this is my first question on the BBQ so forgive me if this is more chatty than it’s supposed to be here)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I went to my 20th high school reunion last year and caught up with people I hadn’t seen in, well, 20 years. Kids graduating today have their entire class available of Facebook and one would assume they will always be available on Facebook or whatever takes its place. Why have a reunion if you’ve always been in touch?

Every TV show, toy, movie, book, song will have a wikipedia page, IMDB entry, or some other website devoted to it and will always be available on-demand. No longer will our favorite episodes or song be a distant memory until one day we stumble across a VHS tape or record at a flea market. If you miss your favorite toy you buy one on eBay.

Those of us who grew up in the Golden Age of Video Games went years without seeing or playing some of the classic games. Now we have MAME; those games will always be available.

Not to get all get-off-my-lawnish but will The Kids Today ever feel the excitement of stumbling across a one-hit-wonder from the 1970s, or seeing that one episode of M*A*S*H that you remembered from when you were a kid? Will they have any need for a reunion? How will they ever have a sense of nostalgia? Does it matter?

If you were given a chance to go back in your life with your current knowledge intact, would you? If so, to what age?

(You can take as a given that your current timeline would heal gracefully, that the people you currently know but might not given changes in the past will instead meet other people who will fill similar roles, etc. You can also assume that history will generally follow a similar track, as far as markets, world events and such go, though it’s not an absolute given, depending on who you are and what you might be able to accomplish.)

Did you have any particular boogeyman as a kid? A specific monster in the closet at one point? Any particularly traumatic nightmares? What sort of things left clawed footprints on your young, imaginative psyche?

So everyone (who’s old enough) remembers the JFK shooting, and the Challenger disaster.

What other news events from your childhood really stuck with you?

Adolescence + funny feelings + music = potent associations between certain songs and the singularly emotionally tumultuous period known as teenagerdom.

What song or songs kick you suddenly back to middle/high school, to that girl or that boy or that dance or that night?

What recurring dreams do you have? Do you ever have lucid dreams?

I’ve found myself in a few discussions about just how permanent web content is, and how permanent it should be, and what folks expectations on that front are. It’s a big question, and I’m curious what sort of take you folks have on it.

What do you expect to stay around? What do you not count on? Why? Is how you things see right now how you’d like to see them? Where do your feelings on this come from, historically?

Etc. Go crazy.

What life lessons, or even small things, have you found yourself learning the hard way? What were the outcomes?

It’s a common ice-breaker question: what’s your earliest memory?

I was thinking about this today, and I realized that I don’t have one. The question stymies me. I mean, I have tons of memories going way back to early childhood, but I can’t even come close to pinpointing one as the earliest. I can’t even narrow them down to the ten earliest.

I have all these memories of nursery school, etc. I remember tons of events that would be impossible for me to put in chronological order. I think my earliest would have been from when I was three or so. But I have so many memories from that time, I can’t say which came first.

Am I being too literal? When most people get asked, “What’s your earliest memory?” do they just interpret that as, “Tell me a story from your early childhood”?

Or do most people actually have a memory that they know (or feel) came before all their other memories?