A New Layout for Blogger and Nostalgia

I leave for what? A month? And this is what I come back to. A completely new layout. I have to say, it's much prettier than the old one.
Things have been happening, as they often do. This being senior year and all, a lot of those things are lasts. Tonight was my last high school orchestra concert, and tomorrow will be my last high school band concert. Neither of these facts have hit me yet; I haven't felt the urge to cry, I haven't gotten too nostalgic. It doesn't really feel like I'm leaving. I am though.
The thing is, sometimes I feel like I realize things earlier than other people seem to, but the true weight of the realization doesn't hit me until long after. I realized at the end of swim season how final this year truly was, but now I just don't feel all that emotional about it. When other people start talking about how sad it is, then I get sad. When I really think about it, I get a little upset. But unless I try and make myself feel these emotions, they just aren't really there.
When we moved it was like this too. I knew all the facts early on; I had resigned myself to moving two or three years before we ended up leaving. My dad kept being transferred, from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, and then to St. Paul - and every time I was told we might move. So that by the time we did move, it was no longer a surprise. I'm not sure I cried when we left, or in the weeks before it. I was upset, to be sure, but it wasn't until we were in Minnesota that I really got into it. After I came home from camp, I cried myself to sleep a couple of times. So right now I'm excited for college, but I'm sure two weeks after everyone's left I'll just have a breakdown.
That was the first thing I wanted to say about nostalgia. The other thing is slightly more complicated, and harder to describe.
As backstory: I am a nostalgic person, in case you haven't figured it out. I own nearly every Disney soundtrack to the movies I grew up with. I regularly rewatch movies from my childhood. Reliving the past is something I do on a semi-regular basis.
Today, as I mentioned, we had our orchestra concert, and afterwards we went out for ice cream. There was a large group of us, so we ended up outside, and in the course of our conversation, I brought up the fact that when I was little, we had a very large (and I mean, really large) bin filled with toys from McDonalds. I had nearly every character from Anastasia, Tarzan, Mulan, Hercules - I would re-enact scenes, and have characters from different movies meet each other.
Anyway though, so I mentioned this bin, and right after I said that we had all the Tarzan toys, one of the people I was with started flipping out. He was almost crying, but happy at the same time - the way you get when you feel nostalgic. That's what was happening. He said he was "remembering his childhood" - as if somehow, he had managed to forget it.
I couldn't understand. The other people I was with started to remember other things too - like the Beanie Babies you could get for a while - and he was getting more and more freaked out and agitated, but again, happy too. After awhile I left, because it was getting out of hand (we were outside, it was pretty late, and it didn't seem appropriate to be screaming). But I can't get over what he said at first - "I'm remembering my childhood." How could you ever forget that much of it? Maybe it's just because I'm constantly reminding myself, but the things from my childhood are never far from my mind. When I start to get excited about old toys or shows or movies with people, it's because I'm excited by the fact that someone else remembers them too - not because I ever forgot. I always thought that was normal, but maybe I've been wrong. Maybe sometimes people do lose track of what the past was like.
The weird bit for me was that this guy is someone who's very in touch with his inner 5-year-old. So for him to become so upset and seem so completely awestruck by these memories was unsettling. In the end, I feel like it mostly just ends up being a product of the energy of so many people combined with the emotion of our last concert, but I can't help but wonder if that's how everyone else lives - forgetting about the past and being surprised when it does appear. It would explain a lot about politics.