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I have a rather large music collection. Among it, there are songs which will infallibly remind me of a particular time when I was listening to them. For example, Rockin' the Suburbs always reminds me of playing Chrono Trigger on an SNES emulator on the computer, in the living room, with mom asleep on the couch, going through the first time-travel of the game. The lamp in the corner was on but it's not very bright, and it gives everything sort of a yellow cast. The peanut butter was sitting on the trunk that mom used as a coffee table (she has a different one now, still a trunk) the front of the label faced toward the dining room. The doors to the dining room were just a couple inches open. They stuck now and again, being rather old pocket doors, and somebody was lazy.

Not all of the songs with memories are that precise, and not all of them correspond exactly with the time that I was listening to them. Kiss from a Rose reminds me of watching Interview with a Vampire and several episodes of Angelic Layer with Jeff on his laptop in a tent at Tracy's house. If You Could Only See reminds me of a very close friend I had, the first girl I kissed, and the extreme confusion I experienced regarding how I felt about her, how she might have felt about me, and all these sort of awkward teenager things. It's more than a recollection though. I actually feel that way. For this reason, I don't listen to that song very often.

The point of relating this experience is to ask a question. Does anyone else experience any of this? For a while I assumed that everyone had it to a greater or lesser degree, but I come to find out that "lesser" is much more common. Do you have any sensory triggers that automatically remind you of certain situations?

It's been quite a while since I posted. Papers will do that to you. Kristine has started doing Stuff Portrait Friday again, which is pretty exciting. I'm late, as usual, but I can't let that stop me from participating in the first SPF of the new season, so to speak.

This week's assignment is "Your Favorite Picture." Unfortunately, I've already used my favorite photo for at least one other SPF. I was sorting through my photos today, though, so I found one I really liked from my trip to the Dominican Republic in the winter of 2006. This dog seemed pretty much domesticated, and as near as we could tell he was just playing in the waves. Maybe he was honestly surprised by the water, but he seemed too comfortable with the beach for that to be true.