bittersweet bliss or unhealthy practice?

to explain the latter:

pretending the past is better than the present (and you can't go back there), instead of preparing for the future (where you'll definitely be)

I used to love how nostalgia felt.

luckily, still dont have it. my teenager years sucked a bit. this moment is so much better.

Not crap, as long as you respect your past, and don't dwell on it or try to re-create it.

Admittedly, occasionally I feel wistful for a time before George W. Bush, 9/11, $70/barrel oil, reality television, nu-metal, Lindsay Nicole Hilton, MySpace, when the Simpsons didn't suck, and when bands like Fugazi, Jawbox, the Dismemberment Plan and Brainiac were still active concerns....but I'm not saying things used to be better, necessarily.

I think the "past", in everyone's life, is always better, even if I think about my college days I feel nostalgia but I know those days were terrible...

Nostalgia is shit. The mind usually has a tendency to whipped cream coat experiences to accentuate the positives as opposed to the negatives. Very few experiences were honestly as good in reality as they are in retrospect. There's a lot of emotions and actions that go into pretty much doing anything, some are bound to be forgotten or at least glossed over.

I wrote something in a notebook when I was 14 about nostalgia that I found when packing:

"There are three things that can force me to truly wax nostalgic:
1) A good shit when I'm constipated.
2) A good egg when I'm starving.
3) A good life when I'm dying."

I'm almost embarassed to have typed that.

I used to be totally nostalgic.

My mom still lives in the house I grew up in. One x-mas she had the family over there for dinner. I lived there for 18 years, and would come to visit all the time for another decade and I would be totally fine and actually excited to be home. Generally, I would be running all over, finding all the places I used to hide, and rifling through all of the old crap that was left. But after dinner that night, I was up in my old room and all of a sudden I just felt really nervous and creeped out and weird. That one moment fucked with me and I don't think I can ever set foot in that house again. That was like 4-1/2 years ago.

Now I remember shit and I'm like "eh...", totally neutral.

Steve V. wrote:I'm almost embarassed to have typed that.

Why almost?

You waned nostalgic there.

Oh, how I yearn for the days when I didn't think nostalgia was crap!