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.

The River Lethe

It went like this. Try to follow along. I know it's confusing.

I got an e-mail from my friend Michael asking me if I had seen a performance by a guy named Rufus Wainright, who does Judy Garland tributes. Michael had seen the video of Judy's Carnegie Hall performance filmed by Wainright at the Paladium. Michael had rented it from Netflix and liked it so much he ended up buying it (Michael and I are both big Garland fans).

I had been transcribing my interview with Rinde Eckert when the e-mail came. I had reached the point where he was explaining the whole Orpheus and Eurydice myth and how, in Hades, Eurydice was offered the opportunity to bathe in the River Lethe...

...she’s offered the River Lethe, which is a river you bathe yourself in and you forget everything. ...the River Lethe is basically to ensure that you aren’t crippled by nostalgia. Because there’s nothing new, what you can be is constant longing, aching for the past and aching for what was, and so to counter that "hell," basically they offer Lethe, which is a way of wiping the slate clean.

After I read Michael's e-mail, I thought I'd go to YouTube and see if there was something from the concert he recommended so I could get a hint of what Wainright was all about.

I had a bunch of windows open on my computer including two different Firefox windows, so clicked on one of them.

Well, I tend to overload my system with too much multi-tasking for the amount of RAM that I have and I did everything so fast that the system stalled. And it stalled on the Firefox page which had a different interview with Rinde Eckert, also about his Orpheus X, and he was answering a lot of the same questions I had asked.

While waiting for Firefox to actually get going again so I could go to YouTube and check the videos, I started reading the Eckert interview. I also was clicking around on other tabs trying to jump start the computer (when will I ever, ever learn that the way to "jump start" a computer is NOT to ask it to do something else, but to back away and let it do its own thing!) I inadvertently clicked on the Word tab and Word takes forEVer to load and you can't stop the load once started.

Well, eventually I got Word shut down and Firefox started up again and I was already to check out Rufus Wainright on YouTube.... but I absolutely could not remember what it was that I wanted to look up. I couldn't remember if it was about the interview or about something in e-mail, or another of the odd thoughts that flits constantly through my mind while I work.

I sat here staring at the screen and realized that within the space of what was less than five minutes I had completely forgotten what was so important that checking out that very thing needed to interrupt my transcription and overload the system so rapidly that it temporarily stopped working.

I got this image in my head that my short term memory is becoming so wonky that I'm starting to think I've been showering in the waters of the River Lethe--not enough for a full dunk to offer total loss of memory, but enough to make the synapses of the brain sizzle on and off on a whim.

I tried to remember all that I had done in the previous 10 minutes ... had I checked Scrabble to see if Joan had made her move? ...did the e-mail from Char evoke any thoughts of things I needed to look up? ...was there something I heard in the latest Morning Stories that made me want to check Google for further information? ...did I get a brilliant idea for an Utterz? ...was there something I needed to upload to Flickr?

It was just a total blank. No clue anywhere as to what it was that I wanted to check out. So I went back to work, setting the brain waves to churn in the background while I continued transcribing Rinde's interview.

And then, with a loud POP, the waters of the River Lethe parted and I remembered that I wanted to look on YouTube for video of Rufus Wainright (which I did).

Is it any wonder that I rarely get things accomplished, when my brain is firing on so many cylinders at once and age has given the added challenge of trying to remember what cylinder A was all about when you've already skipped ahead to cylinder D?

Bathing in the River Lethe instead of a quick shower does have some interesting good points about it, but I'm not willing to give up all the good memories just to lose the bad.