I'll Never Forget What's-Her-Name

I had a dental appointment today, just my regular cleaning. I almost always arrive at Cindy's office exactly on the dot, but I was about 5 minutes early and I saw the hygienist getting her station ready for me. Now this hygienist has been cleaning my teeth for about 10 years now, if not longer. I sat there watching her, trying desperately to remember her name (Christina). Fortunately she wears a name tag, so it only took a couple of seconds before I knew her name again, briefly. But this sort of thing is happening to me more and more.

I would be panicking about this, as I have written in this journal before, but I'm not in a panic because I suddenly find that it seems that everybody who is around my age is worried about the same thing. We can't remember anybody's name any more. This is not like putting your car keys in the freezer or the Haagen Dazs bars in the laundry room or forgetting what the TV remote does when you press buttons. It's just the sudden inability to remember names.

Remember that "blogging the Tonys" entry I did a couple of days ago? I could not have done that entry without Google. I couldn't remember the name of stars that I've known for decades. I actually had to look up "Darth Vader" to remember James Earl Jones' name (now when I went to type this, the name was right there in my brain where it should have been).

With other stars, it was even more convoluted. I remembered that a certain star was in a movie which I could visualize, but I couldn't remember the name of the movie either, but I remembered that the co-star was Harrison Ford and I went to ImDb to look up Harrison Ford and find what movies he had been in. I found the movie I was looking for (The Frisco Kid) and checked the cast. There was the name of the person I wanted to write about (Gene Wilder--and I just had to go look that up on ImDb again).

However did aging people remember names in the pre-Google age?

The other thing that is happening to me more and more is that I can't type any more. Seriously. I have always been proud of my typing but two things are now making it frustrating. First, the pinched nerve in my right arm, which the doctor says they can't do anything about, has settled in for the duration. But it means that any letters which is hit with the little finger on the right hand is kind of hit and miss if I get it. I have to go back and correct a lot of words with "p" in them because my finger just doesn't hit that letter (you'd be surprised how many words have p in them!). It also affects my hitting the apostrophe.

But the second problem is a brain one, not a physical one. I look at what I've written and while I've thought one thing, my fingers have typed something completely different, or rearranged the letters in a word. I don't know (there's an example...I meant to type know and I typed wkno) if this kind of brain fart has a title, but it's annoying. It's not even confined to typing. I was writing "Tanya" today and wrote "Tangia" ... another sample is that where I meant to write "wrote" in the above line, I wrote "wrong." Sometimes it boggles my mind what my brain tells my fingers to type. I can't publish anything without reading it carefully, and if I forget, I'm mortified, sometimes, at what actually goes up and has to be corrected.

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So Anthony Weiner is leaving and the Congresscritters currently serving who have sex scandals behind them or who are under investigation for illegal activities (or both) are still there, with nobody, Republican or Democrat, calling for their resignation, while his constituents, the people he's actually working for have said overwhelmingly that they wanted him to stay. Thus is the world of politics. All the talking heads today are talking about how the Weiner story just grew and grew until he had no choice.

Uh. Talking Heads? WHO, please, made the story grow and grow? If you'd all have SHUT UP, it never would have reached this fevered pitch. Chris Matthews today has devoted one hour to Weiner's resignation--and to rehash everything we've heard over and over again.

You know, I was really, really invested in the election process last time. Now I see things starting up again, the scandals revealed, the innuendos brought up, the polls taking major importance MORE THAN ONE YEAR before the election and I just don't think I have another campaign in me. I'm disappointed in a lot of Obama's actions (though not all), I am unimpressed with all of the Republican candidates right now, and the idea that anybody could still be impressed with some of the people whose names have been tossed about chills my blood.

At this point I'm resigned to having no say in anything and to accepting whatever idiot wins the election ... and believe me, anybody who actually wants the job and thinks he or she can effect any change whatsoever has got to be delusional, and automatically disqualifies him or her for the job in my mind.

I'm old, I'm losing my mind, and I'm politically jaded.