It has always fas­ci­nated me how seem­ingly triv­ial things can trig­ger one’s mem­ory on a dime and trans­port you to another time or place in an instant– hid­den snap­shots of one’s life pep­pered through­out our daily com­ings and goings.

This morn­ing, pay­ing bills at my desk and watch­ing the rain pour down, iTunes sur­prised me with a mem­ory jolt– a musi­cal time machine back to col­lege:

This song always pro­pels me back in time to a rainy night in Pitts­burgh– bib­li­cal rain, soak­ing you to the bone and wait­ing on Car­son Street for the 54C back to Oak­land. The expe­ri­ence or night holds no sig­nif­i­cance to my present life, no new char­ac­ters came into my life that night, no pro­found obser­va­tions were made on that day, the rain did not cat­alyze any­thing other than hail­ing a taxi and yet it remains as a warm and vivid mem­ory: Crum­pled up in an old leather jacket, wait­ing beneath a street light flip­ping through sketch­books with the other reg­u­lar from my cof­feeshop (who was also wait­ing for the over­due bus), wet licorice streets, head­lights exag­ger­ated by raindrops…

It seems strange to me that such an insignif­i­cant moment in my life remains so firmly imprinted upon my mem­ory and yet it does.

What ran­dom moments are firmly implanted in your mem­ory, dear readers?

It’s just one of those days; we all have them– you wake up and the world feels grey and unwel­com­ing. You scuff around and feel sorry for your­self and maybe mope a lit­tle. Well today, I’m hav­ing one of those days.

BUT instead of mop­ing about like a fool when I feel like this, I rally my inner troops and forge ahead. This gen­er­ally involves a longer visit to the closet– pulling out espe­cially fun shoes and a col­or­ful jacket, a big­ger than usual cup of cof­fee, a longer lunch break and a tight­en­ing of the cir­cle of dear­est friends. When the world feels unwel­com­ing, I find it best to sim­ply become the ulti­mate host­ess– wel­come the unwel­com­ing and just out­shine the grey.

One of my longest stand­ing friends from child­hood, loved the Bea­t­les when we were kids; count­less week­end hours swam by to the sound­track of the fab four and today my mind has drifted back to those days:

Watch­ing this clip from the movie Help!, the semi-sad lyrics of the song mixed with the sub­tle silli­ness of Paul and George perks me up and makes me smile.

How about you, dear read­ers? How do you perk your­self up when you’re feel­ing down?

When I was a kid, one of the best things about the week­end was the extra hours one could spend run­ning around out­side but more impor­tantly it was the CARTOONS! Sat­ur­day morn­ings with Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes pro­vided a solid foun­da­tion for my humor later in life; I don’t think I shall ever tire of drop­ping anvils on my foes or order­ing office sup­plies from the ACME catalog.

Sun­days, on the other hand, were an utter dis­ap­point­ment in terms of enter­tain­ment. The best one could hope for was a left­over kung fu movie from the day before, assum­ing of course, there was no reli­gious com­mit­ment to attend. There was also Jonny Quest, and a few other odds and ends pulled together mostly from the six­ties. At first I really didn’t like Jonny Quest and his lameo friend, Hadji; and what was the deal with Dr. Quest and Race? But after what seems like years of wak­ing up to Jonny, now I sort of miss him. Sun­days just aren’t the same with­out cheezy car­toons from the past; n’est pas?

What week­end goofi­ness do you miss from your child­hood, dear readers?

The last few days of rain and autum­nal gloom have lulled my mem­o­ries back to Göte­borg. I haven’t paid it much mind over the last few years– I fin­ished my MFA and didn’t really look back afterward.

But here I am, back in Bal­ti­more after a move back from Swe­den, and two three 1500mi+ moves. I’m meet­ing and recon­nect­ing with tons of peo­ple, so all of the ground I’ve cov­ered in the last ten years is get­ting shuf­fled around in the fore­ground of my mind more than usual. But today, today felt like another day in Göte­borg.

Here is how I remem­ber parts of it:

Images: Me (scanned from my old printed pho­tos, no less!)