selective memory
i always feel like i have the worst memory ever. worst. ever. i can put something down and literally, two seconds later, i will NOT remember where i put it. i will want to memorize a phone number that i see on my computer screen at work to dial on my phone (i need to turn my back… don’t ask. my desk is set up in the middle of the room floating away from the wall, but the phone jack limits my phone’s mobility)… and two seconds later, despite repeating the number over and over… i won’t remember it.
but then it’s weird. i seem to have a pretty good recollection of things that happened in my life. and it’s not just fuzzy details, but pretty detailed details. for example, i remember:
- everyone’s roles for missy mouse… even though i had pretty much the easiest part (all i had to do was be left-mommy and right-mommy), i still could remember a lot of the different puppets and who was holding them
- i actually have a pretty good memory of a lot of chinese school… like the skit in 6th grade where we were “camping” and i had to drop a flashlight. and one of the poems i had to memorize and recite for that stupid contest… my poem was titled “my dad’s big leg” and it included a bit about how i liked to sit and hang onto my dad’s leg while he kicked.
- bill! bill! bill! bill! bill nye the science guy! i remember watching this A LOT 7th grade in mr. milne’s class. i remember the table i sat at (2nd from the back, on the side farthest from the door, near the windows)… that i sat at the same table as margaret, mariam, and mariam’s non-english speaking partner. i remember having my body traced as “gus” for our project on the human body
- gus! (hrm… i seem to recycle names) the snowman i made sophomore year with angela on the cut. and then, i remember the snowman my sister and i made on our deck… we used spatula’s to smooth out the mountain of snow (we didn’t do the roll method because… i don’t know. my parents just never taught us that when we were kids. i didn’t learn it until i saw my next door neighbors doing it) that became the snowman’s rump.
- who remembers the pied piper-ish FILMSTRIPS (that’s right! film strips!) we used to watch in elementary school?? i swear, it’s this guy wearing a red “robin hood-ish” hat singing some song and the end of the song it’s like “in english, my name is john”… and so he’d be the intro to all these fables/nursery stories…. rumpelstiltskin… rapunzel… we got to watch all of them!
- when we were moving out of the old house in VA… i was 3 years old. i have very little recollection of the house, but i had this memory where my sister and i, as the last thing we did when we moved out of the house, we went to this ledge and grabbed our two teddy bears (the fuzzy, fat white one that i make sound like a retard… and the skinny, white one of my sister’s that for whatever reasons, reminds me of my grandma) off the ledge and then we left the house for good. now… since i had no recollection of the house really, i always imagined that i dreamt it. but recently, i told my mom this story and she started laughing. she wasn’t sure that it happened… but she said that our house did have a wall in the basement where there was a built-in ledge and she was surprised that i’d remember that of the old house!
so i seem to have these great memories… and yet, i’m missing all these other memories like:
- the apartment we moved to between the two houses i’ve lived in. yea… so i can remember moving out of the old house and moving into the new house, but there was A YEAR where we lived in an apartment and i have NO MEMORIES at all of this time.
- 2nd grade. yeah… the entire year. i really don’t remember much. apparently, the science class i went to was the class that mariam and shruti were in. yet i really don’t remember them AT ALL. oo, my one memory of that year though was jamin’s my little pony. but that’s it. i have no other memories from 2nd grade. i’m also missing any memory from chinese school’s 2nd grade too. which is odd. very odd… (PARTICULARLY BECAUSE 2nd grade in chinese school was a year before 2nd grade in elementary school, but that’s another issue…)
- 8th grade. see, one could argue that 2nd grade was so long ago and i was so young, that i wouldn’t remember it. but 8th grade… i feel like i should remember 8th grade! but i really can’t remember much of 8th grade… like whenever i try to think of middle school, i have all these memories… of 7th grade!! it’s like i repeated 7th grade twice and then went to 9th…
- taking the SATs… so i tutor now for Kaplan so a lot of times i’ll bring up “back in my day…” (i.e. “back in my day… the SAT was out of 1600!”) but the funny thing is… i can’t remember taking the SAT!!! how many times did i take it? where did i take it? when did i take it? i don’t remember!! i do remember taking the GRE however
it’s like my brain takes off certain years so that it can be alert for others and remember all the details of the other years.
