Googlestalgia

[elfs]

Take a look at this image. That's my high school. What strikes me now, looking at it 20 years on, is that I really wasted all of the opportunities that the school represented. I look at the map and the buildings are tiny, but not the tennis courts, lacrosse field, sculling pond, baseball diamond, track-and-field, and even the golf course. The largest buildings on the map are the swimming pool and the year-round ice-hockey rink.

The map is quite amazing. I can see the pizza joint and the convenience store where we used to by red rope licorice. I can point to every dorm and recite the year I lived there. If you look at the quadrangle in the lower left-hand corner, there's a red building to the north. On the second floor of that dormitory I wrote the first Journal Entry. That building down and to the left? The chapel from Genesis 2:19. The white building across the quadrangle? Nickolai's dorm from Elizabeth. That small square further down and to the left? The setting for the kiss scene from Moon, Sun, Dragons. That black patch near the middle? The pond from Aimee 2. That building on the east side of the quadrangle? The library in Janae, which may never be finished. Underneath that facility is a mass of tangled steam tunnels, which are featured in the fourth (or it fifth now?) Aimee novel, which needs to be re-written.

It's amazing how useful the place has been, considering how much I loathed my time there and still loathe most of the people I met there. I think for more than most people, my memories of high school are simply not worth recovering. The place was beautiful. The people were not.

Comments

small world

[mo-hair.livejournal.com]

wow. so you went to the hill school. around here (south jersey) it's considered one of THE places to send your kid. that of course knocks it off our list of where to send our own. funny, your feeling for the place mirrors how i feel about my college: the place was gorgeous, the people generally less than stellar. however, my high school i have very fond memories of. and, as the years have passed, it is one place i have learned to appreciate more and more.

I wonder...

[mothball-07.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you've just coined a new term... Googling Googlestalgia brings up this entry alone, so it's not in previous use, it's a good term for a basically new phenomenon (I did exactly the same thing days after Seth announced the maps on WL), and you might just have enough internet pull to do it...

It will be interesting to watch. I find Google's sway over internet culture fascinating...