immemorial

I've been noticing for a couple of years now that I am a lot more forgetful than I used to be. Mind you, I can still recall verbatim every turn of phrase James may have used in a discussion from six years ago when I was convinced he was actually telling me I was unattractive, or what my 10th grade English teacher said about my writing (that it would always be "fluffy"; two Master's Degrees from Yale later, I almost am ready to beg to fucking differ), or what the soap in my German grandmother's bathroom smelled like in 1984. No, I am talking about shit that happened five minutes ago.

Like Friday I got on the bus to go to work and there was a guy in a giant piñata costume (including elaborate horse head) sitting calmly and hilariously among the normally-dressed commuters. I ended up standing right in front of him and was able to spend the next ten minutes admiring the craftsmanship and ingenuity of his work, and then he got off at Van Ness. He was clearly on his way to winning every costume contest in town, provided no one took a bat to him first.

In other words, I was perfectly aware it was Halloween. Three or four minutes later I looked up from my magazine, saw some new passengers standing near the front of the bus, and thought, "I can't believe no one is offering their seats to those nice nuns." And then, "I don't think I recall ever seeing a nun on the bus before." It was only when one of them turned fully around and I noticed they were zombie nuns that I was jerked back to my senses. Oh, riggghht. Halloween. Plus, I don't think real nuns wear Puma sneakers. So many clues.

At work I'll do things such as concentrate all morning on a set of tasks and then report to my group lead something like "OK, I've re-fracked the dirbills and the freenats, and also built for the ungrapped norbars, and I entered the stuff for the padmerizer and made sure it's working properly, so unless you can think of something else, category 1 is ready for a corpus test. Should I go ahead and file the bugzilla?" And then a look of confusion will cloud her face and she'll say, "We ran a corpus test for 1 last night. [pause] Wait, do you mean category 6?" And yes, I will have meant category 6, the very same category I had been focused on with a mad-professor-like intensity for the previous four hours. But a two-cubicle stroll is enough to knock that information right out of my short-term memory's tenuous grip.

And then there's more mundane stuff, like how I often find myself in a room wondering why I am there. I was just in the living room, and now I am in the office. Why? Oh, look at that shiny thing...I need to fix that. And then a few minutes later I will be back in the living room fixing the shiny thing, and remember that I still haven't fetched the book I wanted from the office. Or whatever.

I blank out on people's names on a regular basis, both personal acquaintances and celebrities. The one upside is that I get to experience my own brain doing that cool linguistic thing where, say, I will know that the name I am searching for has five letters, or starts with a G and is two syllables, but then can't get beyond that. Or I'll be trying to remember the name of an actress, and I can imagine the character she played on The Shield, and remember that she is married to David Mamet, but the best I can come up with is "Is it Something Partridge? No, that's not it." Five hours later (and/or after checking IMDb), I'll figure out that the name I was searching for was Rebecca Pidgeon. My brain teases me with the semantic web surrounding my target--nuptial status, some kind of bird involved somehow, employment details--but won't hand over the goddamn name.

Um, what was I talking about? Oh, look, shiny mittens I made this weekend!