Phantom Planet's "California." The smell of cigarettes. The Felicity season two DVD. REM's "Nightswimming." The never-ending rain. Donnie Darko.

These are a few of the things that remind me of my semester in London. I always thought that acquiring memories was a lifelong process of scrapbooks, cheesy photographs and diary entries. Even so, I've been home since December, and I haven't brought myself to make a scrapbook or even to put my pictures in a photo album. While I can almost chalk this up to my utter laziness, I know there's a stronger reason holding me back.

It seems that the further away those memories get, the easier it is to forget what it was like to be in London. And why should I continue to remind myself that I'm not there by making a scrapbook? Why should I try to hold onto memories I'll never get back?

As a lot of us prepare to go home for spring break, these issues of memories are important. When you are a freshman, going home is this huge event and a chance to see how much things have really changed. When you are a junior or senior, you realize that things have changed and your memories of home are further from what you remembered.

Plus, how many times have we heard that home is where the heart is? Home sweet home?

OK, so there are a million Chicken Soup for the Soul quotes about "home." And there are probably a million more ways for each of us to define home: location, family, life-long friends or your dog Hercules. Nevertheless, when you really think of home, do you find yourself overcome with a flood of diary-like escapades? A photo album full of your dance recital pictures or summer soccer teams?

Of course not.

Instead, we are filled with stronger moments: songs, smells and reminders of what it felt like to call somewhere home. I'd go so far as to suggest that these feelings exceed the laundry list of friends or memories you gave a shutout to in your high school yearbook.

Every time I go home for a break, I find that I have a harder and harder time remembering what things were like. I see people I graduated with and haven't spoken to in three years. Sometimes we awkwardly exchange cell phone numbers and say, "Hey, we should hang out." Except, we know we won't even add that number to our cell phone.

In situations like that, it seems that high school was a lifetime ago, a lifetime that is slowly fading away into the background.

Looking at my high school yearbook, where -- almost three years ago -- I wrote a small paragraph about my life, proves to be hilarious. I'm not friends with a single person I talked about; the friends I've stayed close with from high school, I started hanging out with at the end of my senior year. I even used this Joni Mitchell quote: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone." At the time, I thought that would express what I was feeling.

In reality, it was just an expression of what I thought I'd be feeling.

While the quote seems appropriate, it's not. As a society, we spend so much time clutching to our memories that we forget how memories can be more than photographs. When we constantly look to the past as those "glory years," we completely taint the future.

Of course, memories are important. They make us who we are and they give us foundations. Memories set us in this life, here and now. But, when we look at a picture taken before our high school prom, saying, "Remember when we did that," we're really saying look at that moment. Let's get it back.

In America, older generations have a tendency to look back longingly on their way of doing things. It's that old "when I was your age, I used to carry all my books to class" cliché. Sayings like that do nothing to move us forward; they merely hold us back by a conservative notion that we've lost all our values and morals as a country. Wouldn't it make more sense to realize reminders of the past are all around us, rather than constantly harping on a time when things were better?

When I hear "California," The O.C.'s theme song, I'm reminded of what it felt like to be in London riding the subway system. When I'm walking down the street in State College and I'm overwhelmed by a smell of cigarettes, I can't help but feel like I'm suddenly transported into this strange place where everyone smokes and there's no care if it's going to kill you.

Obviously, this is all personal.

But, once we realize that our memories can exist outside a desperate longing to recreate the past, we'll find that our personal moments are recreated all over the world, in all sorts of ways.

And once we come to an understanding about our past memories and what they mean, the present world will be a much more beautiful place.