I don't have a particularly good memory for events. I will remember that I went somewhere and did something and enjoyed myself, but afterwards the details blur together awfully quickly until all I really have left is a kind of zeitgeist. I spent four years in high school and can barely remember ten minutes of it. I don't think this makes me unusual, but I'm certainly on the "poor" end of this spectrum.
So photographs are especially meaningful to me. They're not just reminders; they give me back something I've lost.
Now, I just had a small wave of nostalgia and tried to find, on the internet, some pictures of nodermeets I've been to; pictures that other people took, pictures I remember fondly but was too foolish to save for myself. Pictures of frisbee, cricket, and Pimm's in Hyde Park, mooching about in Edinburgh, my longest pub crawl ever, being swung in a circle 80 meters above Copenhagen, even my first ever nodermeet (at which someone actually captured the moment I first arrived, dressed atrociously and wearing a suitably awed expression).
They're all gone. A few Copenhagen pictures remain, including the all-time classic Impossible Copenhagen Nodermeet Panorama. Some of the noders in question are still around, and the pictures probably still exist somewhere so I am perhaps being a tad melodramatic. And yet, they were there. Now they're not there. Realistically, even if I made a nuisance of myself, I'm not going to track all of them down. It's hard not to feel as if I've irretrievably lost a part of myself.
On a positive note, it's an E2 tradition to node nodermeets. So (some) of these wonderful events aren't completely lost to time. An especial shoutout goes to sam512 who was present at most of these and whose comprehensive logs are, in some ways, even better than the pictures.
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I can't believe I took the time to write this instead of my MSc thesis proposal this evening. But E2 is in the air, somehow. Catbox numbers are up. Old faces have shown up again. New writeups is looking fresh. It must, surely, be time for another nodermeet soon?