nostalgia | Random Misanthrope

It’s pingback time on Random Misanthrope. Be prepared.

Amazingly, the one year anniversary of RM came and went without anyone noticing. Back then it was called Project Mayhem, which was the name of a previous multi-blog writing project started up by High Priestess Kang, myself, and the marvelous Ming. (Whatever happened to her?) That project was abandoned after about six weeks, so keeping this current blog going for over a year has been quite a feat, and therefore a little nostalgia is called for.

After a month or so we realised that there are several intentities on teh intarwebz called “Project Mayhem,” which meant that we had to change the name to something totally original. Eventually we settled on Random Misanthrope. Before then however, on the 6th of April, 2011, the first ever Project Mayhem/Random Misanthrope post was posted by High Priestess Kang. It was called, appropriately, “…and she’s back!”

There have been a few changes since then. We have lost one founding member and there was a lot of drama associated with that, none of which ended being shared here (thank goodness). We had a lot of great ideas but very few of them were carried through to the present date. For example, in the beginning I took it upon myself to write a Word of the Day post every single day, but only managed to keep it up for about three months. One thing I’ve learned about keeping a blog is to not make any promises to the reader. I “promised” several times to get back to posting regular WOTD updates, but I never actually did.

The Month of April 2011 was the busiest month on RM, with a total of 129 posts. And no wonder. It was our first month and we were all so full of energy and enthusiasm for the project. Exactly one year ago today, on the 19th of April 2011, we posted three updates:

Word of the Day: Hopefully <–by Miss Kitten

…fuck Time Warner Cable <–a great rant by High Priestess Kang

McJobs: The Road to Recovery
<–by Shark

Where does the time go…

Interestingly, today’s word was once upon a time considered a medical condition.

Back in 1668, German Physician Johannes Hofer coined the word and defined it as “severe homesickness.” It is derived from the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). I never really thought about it before but the word nostalgia does look and sound like some kind of disease or disorder. (See: myalgia)

The more modern definition of nostalgia as a sort of wistful longing for the past was first recorded in 1920. Nowadays however, the word can also be defined as not necessarily a desire to return to the past, but simply an appreciation for it.

Naturally, this means that the nostalgic tend to look at their particular favorite time in the past through rose-colored glasses, seeing only the good things and disregarding the bad. For example, many people these days long for the simpler times before cell phones and broadband internet connections, but of course they tend to forget how much harder life was back then.

Somehow I got through high school and most of college having used actual books, magazines, and microfiche/film as research material for reports and papers. I remember typing high school homework assignments on a Smith Corona typewriter. Sure, the internet was around in the mid-90s when I started college, but it was all as new and wild as an Old West frontier town. Many of my professors and teachers did not entirely trust the content on the internet (and rightly so) and therefore they simply would not accept internet-based sources.

The young people of today tend to not appreciate how easy they have it, but it’s not at all their fault. Just as Generation Xers like me cannot remember a time when there was no television, the Generation Y kids cannot remember a time when there was no internet.

They were born into the information age.

Stay tuned…