Complex Numbers

Random Access Memory

Entry #2 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. Today we're going to talk about... uh... what were we going to talk about? Oh yeah. Memory.

Memory fails us these days

My memory was questionable even in the Before Times. Like, 20 years ago or more, I used to have a mind like a steel safe when it came to jokes. I could hear a joke once and reliably repeat it.

Music was a good one, too. Lyrics, writers, performers, year of production, hell, even producers -- a whole slew of trivial metadata for each of a bunch of different songs.

What changed? Not age. I know I bang on about being old, but I'm not that old, not yet anyway. No, it was the internet. With an entire world's worth of information at my fingertips, I knew I could forget a lot of things and still consult the Great Oracle for anything I'd forgotten, and besides, even Wikipedia is way more accurate than my memory.

But it made me realize that for me at least, the key to remembering things is emotion.

Give me a bunch of dry facts and figures, and I'll forget them almost instantly. Oh, sure, if I drill them enough I can remember them, like even now I can remember the basic strategy for blackjack even though I haven't gone gambling in something like two years. But if something is a joke, it triggers my emotional "humor" response, so I can remember it. With music, well, I long ago offloaded my other emotions onto music anyway, so it makes sense that I'd remember anything associated with that art, humorous or not.

But if I can make a joke out of something that's not inherently funny, well, boom, there it is, stored in my long-term memory. It's how I could remember things like organic chemistry formulae; I'd make puns about it in my head and dredge them up during a test. I've since forgotten most of what I learned, but it worked at the time.

I wonder, now, why I don't use that more often -- turning everything into a joke. Probably because, all my life, people have sneered at me, "Everything's a joke to you, isn't it?" Well, yeah, it is; that's how I remember it. I have long had this image of me going to trial (for, obviously, something I didn't do) and making an offhand joke about it. I imagine the judge going, "What do you think you are, some sort of comedian?"

"Uh... actually, yes?"

It's like when I did my movie review yesterday. Okay, so, when it came out, I saw the first A Quiet Place. Thing is, I don't remember much about it, because while I recall it was a well-shot and beautifully put-together movie, I couldn't recall a detail of it if you'd put a gun to my head. I think it's because I didn't have a real emotional reaction to it. I remember appreciating it at the time, but... something about having to be quiet because the monsters were blind but had excellent hearing? That's about it.

Hence my joke review yesterday. Give it a year, though, and I'll probably have forgotten the whole movie. That's not a commentary on the film; it was pretty good. It's just that the only emotion it induced in me was the occasional shock of a jump scare. But what I will remember (probably) is how clever I thought I was at turning "silence" into the review.

I don't have many actual phobias in life. I mean, the things that most people are afraid of, like snakes or spiders, well, they have the capacity to startle me, but I'm not frightened of them exactly (the venomous kinds get my respect). Heights invigorate me, and while I'm not a big fan of crowds, I can deal with them. Wide-open spaces, tiny closed dark spaces? Meh, whatever. Needles? Big deal. There's a deep-seated fear in me of anything touching my eyeballs, though, and that's probably why the Universe is fucking chortling right now about me probably having to get cataract surgery, but that's about it for phobias... except for losing my memory.

I'm not sure that particular fear is entirely irrational; after all, I spent 20 years dealing with my parents' profound memory loss. Sequentially. As in, right after my mom died with dementia, my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Now, I'm well aware I don't have their genes, but that doesn't mean I won't lose everything that makes me me.

At least with cataract surgery, I can be pretty sure that if I can face that particular fear, once it's done, it's done, and my vision will be (partially) restored. There's still no treatment for dementia. Honestly, I'd rather die a quick, earlier, painful death by heart attack than waste away for a decade in some hole somewhere, not knowing who or where I am.

All of which is to say that I don't really sweat the small memory glitches. They're annoying, but not worrisome, not yet anyway. As they say, forgetting where you put your keys is normal. Forgetting what keys are is a problem.

Meanwhile, I try to get enough sleep, avoid stress (and drama of all sorts), and mostly I just have to repeat language lessons more than the average person in order to get the material to stick in my gray matter. For everything else, I'll just keep making jokes for as long as I can.