Strolling through the toy aisle at Target recently, I was struck by the number of things for sale that I had actually owned in my childhood.

I was particularly fond of My Little Ponies and Care Bears. I have, in fact, bought the modern reincarnation of both for friends’ children.

Nostalgia drove me to it.

Nostalgia makes me do a lot of things.

Because of nostalgia, I have spent entire Sundays watching marathons of “I Love the ’80s” on VH1. I bought a pair of Kangaroo sneakers — neon yellow and purple, with a little pocket inside — when I was 24 because they reminded me of shoes I had when I was perhaps 5.

It’s an emotion that’s seem to grip my entire generation.

Hollister and Gadzooks stock their shelves with ironic ’80s T-shirts. The very trendy American Apparel clothing company makes all sorts of ’80s-throwback stuff, including short, short running shorts with piping around the edges and knee-high tube socks. Lines form outside the O Street bar/dance club Bricktop on Sundays for ’80s night.

A lot of people even dress up.

In part, it’s really fun to wear shoes with secret pockets and to dance crazily to Prince and Madonna. But a bigger part of nostalgia madness, I think, is that Generation Y seems to be an especially sentimental one.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that. I’m a sentimental person myself.

For me and many of my peers, there is a logistical problem with that — my generation, at the moment, also seems to lack storage space.

At this point, we’re mostly in our 20s, driving small cars and living in one-bedroom apartments, storing our old track medals and puff-painted sweatshirts in our parents’ basements.

Fortunately, we have the Internet.

There’s a variety of places online in which we can store our memories of our 1980s childhoods, our photographs from high school and college, our fond, fond memories of that great sandwich eaten for lunch sometime last week.

The one that I’ve most recently become addicted to is MySpace.

MySpace is on online hybrid of Hotmail and Blogspot and MSN Instant Messenger and junior high.

You make a profile. You look at other people’s profiles. You invite the people who look cool to be your friends. They can then accept or deny your invitation.

You can post photos of yourself and create a blog and fill out a form detailing your likes and dislikes in music, movies, books, etc.

It is, perhaps, the most self-indulgent concept ever.

And one that’s very popular with sentimental sorts like myself.

Many, many, many of my peers are compelled to blog about almost everything — about relationships and telemarketing jobs and weird neighbors, as well as stuff far more mundane.

A friend of mine writes extensively about the handwritten notes he finds taped to to the entryway of his apartment. I’ve read blogs about buying cigarettes and eating at Chinese buffets.

And, I admit, when I feel compelled to blog, I generally write about my newly acquired compulsive cleaning habit or the fact that I ate a carton of rainbow sherbet for dinner.

I don’t know how, exactly, it came to be that my generation felt compelled to preserve everything, why it seems really, really important to hold onto memories of bad dates and recently ruined sweaters.

We are, after all, also a generation of excess, of credit card debt and clothes designed to go out of style after a single season.

Are we clinging to simpler times, to days when we had just our little plastic ponies and knee-high tube socks? Have we simply been brainwashed by the people who market this stuff?

Or is this need to cling to our childhoods, to document everything something else entirely?

I don’t pretend to know.

But I do know that I like reading about the mundane events of my peers’ lives, perhaps because I feel less ashamed of the steadily increasing number of nights I spend at home watching “Sex and the City” reruns and doing laundry.

It makes growing up and settling down easier, I suppose.

And when we don’t want to feel like grownups, we always have our My Little Ponies and Care Bears to keep us company.

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.