Hey, everyone. This is Firrian, once again on the acting captain hot seat. Unfortunately, we seem to have made no headway in the sleep deprivation department, so this should be a rather short post if all goes well. I’m fucking exhausted. That said, one of my headmates, Tindwyl, was talking with a new friend of ours about nostalgia and that got us thinking.

Nostalgia? Never Heard of It. Or Have We?

Initially we couldn’t find anything we were nostalgic about, but then the Shins’ cover of “We Will Become Silhouettes”, originally by the supergroup the Postal Service started playing on our excellent East Coast themed playlist, and that gave me an idea. We are nostalgic about some things, just not the things most people are typically nostalgic about. We don’t miss family Christmases or vacations with our brother or anything like that. We have far too much Tragic Backstory for that sort of thing. Tindwyl has even taken to calling this blog our incident report because of how much we talk about our complicated lore here. My poor headmates.

Give Up

That being said, we do feel nostalgic for the spaces we made in childhood and young adulthood by ourselves for ourselves and our friends. These were sacred times and places nobody was allowed into except by our decree. Listening to that Postal Service album I mentioned is one such example. We are a strange combination of resourceful Luddite and tech wizardry because for the longest time, we were forbidden from accessing the internet on weekdays when school was in session.

So we learned to get around that shit in any way we could because we need music to function. This turned into a fully fledged obsession with hoarding hard copies of media. We’d listen to Pandora Internet Radio on the weekends and on vacations from school obsessively, and then check hard copies of whatever we liked out at the library so we could listen to music on the go using a portable CD player from maybe 2002 at the earliest. No internet needed.

We must have checked Give Up by the Postal Service out twenty times. We were fucking addicted to this record. We’d often hole up in a bathtub that was empty save for a thin blanket in the summers and devour entire novels in the summers while listening to that album over and over while the cold ceramic cooled our very heat sensitive body off. I find it hilarious that we were playing an album called Give Up over and over because I assure you, we had most certainly not given up.

This Place Is A Prison, But Our Nostalgia Sure Isn’t

Another very sacred place that holds a lot of nostalgia for us is our creative process. Allēna, our host in the body’s teens, wrote her first real song when we were only eleven and quickly set her sights on recording music in a studio. Not only that, but she wanted to produce it all herself. So by the next year, she had put together a demo her own damn self that she’d recorded by hand in her house on her laptop using Sony Acid.

By thirteen, she’d secured a record deal and was recording in a studio with a producer she observed extensively. When she wasn’t in Dallas shadowing him and recording with him, she was researching techniques, building her own bedroom studio, and experimenting with her own production style with the things she was learning. She let very few people see her process, as she was a very anxious perfectionist and secretly worried that her work would never actually be good enough.

Her mother didn’t help with that, either, and she didn’t want what she was making criticized to pieces before she even had a chance to finish it. Nonetheless, by the age of sixteen, she’d created enough work she was proud of to release an extended play that she’d made entirely herself, Fletcher Coming Home. However, due to her soul crushing anxiety and perfectionism, she delayed releasing it officially for another two years, instead releasing a handful of singles first to test the waters. Her childhood was a prison, one almost entirely unworthy of nostalgia, but by the gods, she was going to write, sing, and fucking claw her way out of it if it was the last thing she did.

The Luddite Gift

An unintended consequence of giving the born fighter Allēna such a restrictive childhood is that the girl was both relentless and clever and refused to let her lack of Internet access hold her back from making friends and being social. It gave her both unprecedented managerial and administrative skill and taught her how to use her time wisely.

She couldn’t market her music online, obviously, so she shamelessly plugged it to everyone she met, both in school and at church. People were drawn to this brilliant, reclusive enigma and wanted to both know and hear more. In the absence of social networks, she built a real world network of people that she was deeply invested in and who were deeply invested in her.

She showed off constantly by performing live at church any chance she got, which brought her powerful voice to new audiences constantly. She was a charismatic force of nature offstage, as well, and church became a refuge that she looks back on fondly for the real world social aspects of.

Legendary Partying With Greater Efficiency

When this involuntary Luddite finally joined the ranks of social media in her mid teens, everything simply became bigger for her and more efficient – and easier to hide from her parents. Her already massive social circle tripled in size as she got older, and as she threw parties with her brother, she took a risk and merged all of the different smaller groups of people she ran with. She learned something interesting here.

Many of her friends got along swimmingly, even if they had never set eyes on one another before in their lives, and these parties quickly became the stuff of legend. She heard from her friends’ parents on several occasions that an invitation to these parties was highly prized and many of their children had met close friends there that they would never have met otherwise. Allēna discovered that she had a gift for connecting people and helping people of various backgrounds find common ground.

She was a brilliant organizer and people saw that. She could get wallflowers front and center playing Twister with people who were complete strangers five minutes prior. Shy anime nerds found fast friends in gregarious library assistants while sparring with sticks from the pecan tree in our front yard. This is our nostalgia. We created it, and it is ours.

Conclusion

Okay, I seem to have lied about this being a short post, haha. I don’t mind. This is totally worth it. I have no clue what the next post will bring, but I’m excited for it, whatever it is. Stay tuned for more magic (and incident reports)!

Firrian, Acting Captain