I’m watching the quiz show JEOPARDY! earlier this year, and the category for the final was MUSICAL THEATRE: “Before this show hit Broadway in 1964, one of its working titles was ‘The Luckiest People'”. I knew the song to which the clue referred was People. I knew Barbra Streisand was in the subsequent movie. But could I remember the name of the musical/movie? I could not; the answer, of course, was Funny Girl.
I was SO annoyed with myself. I don’t mind being unfamiliar with information, but I HATE it when it’s something I DID know but just can’t retrieve. It happens now and then; Hal Holbrook and Audra McDonald, for example, I could visualize, but the names just left me.
I’ve never been great with names. I see someone I know in passing, I’ll say, “Oh, hi!,” which gives me a few seconds to say, “So how are you doing, X?” where X is, I hope, the name of the person in front of me.
If I want to remember something really important, the worse thing for me to do is to write it on a piece of paper, which I will inevitably misplace. Since I have committed the info to paper, I lose the ability to retrieve it mentally. It’s better if I e-mail it to myself.
I have been taking this statin for high cholesterol for about a year and a half. My prescription ran out at the end of December, but I still have a couple of months of pills left. It may be my resistance to the fact that I need them at all that makes me forget to take them. The good news is that my cholesterol is still in a good range, verified with a blood test on January 31, which I would have forgotten to have done had not my doctor’s nurse called me.
Does this ever happen to you? You’re in a conversation, and you have a really great point to make. But you are being polite and let others speak so that by the time it gets back to you, your seemingly “brilliant” thought has vanished in the haze.
Seriously, there was more to this but I forgot to write it down, which I would probably have lost anyway…