Memories are made of this... 08.05.08
It is, without a doubt, the
biggest get out clause we use and we use it time and
time again, the old ... “now will you remind me to...”
Recently when I was in a computer store I saw a sign
that said ‘Memory now cheaper than ever.’
Umm, I thought, that is interesting. Well, okay I don’t
actually remember if that’s what I thought, and well
that is kinda what I’m trying to get at.
You see even though most of us acknowledge what a
fantastic thing it is to have use of our memory, to be
honest we don’t make the best of it.
And so, we forget things. Maybe we think we remember
most of the important stuff, but we still forget things.
Like for instance putting something in the oven and
forgetting to turn it on...or indeed putting |
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something in the oven and
forgetting to turn it off. Or forgetting to pay a bill
or forgetting you were supposed to meet somebody or
phone somebody at a certain time.
The great thing though is that it is never our fault,
unlike say a computer.
You see if a computer’s memory plays up then the
computer, or the memory in the computer is faulty and
needs repaired, but humans are much more clever than
computers, so we just blame somebody else.
It is, without a doubt, the biggest get out clause we
use and we use it time and time again, the old ... “now
will you remind me to...”
It’s all you have to do really to make sure that if you
do forget something, you can right away turn to the
person you said that line to, give them the most
indignant look ever and say... “you were supposed to
remind me!”
What I can never understand about that is why anyone
thinks the other person has a better memory than them in
the first place.
I often get asked to remind people of things and I
invariably forget, but since I have trouble remembering
my own stuff I’m not certain that I try too hard to have
stuff that other people ask me cluttering up my head as
well.
I put this down to an incident many years ago when a
player from an opposing team thought the spot just above
my right eye would be a good place to put his knee.
As the saying goes I woke up with a crowd around me, and
to be honest I can’t exactly say if I’d been hit by a
knee or a shin or maybe even a piece of debris from a
falling meteor – all I can remember is going along to
the game and sometime later waking up, flat on my back,
with a sea of faces staring down at me before being
rushed off to hospital.
Eighteen or twenty-one stitches later (it is one of the
two of those numbers I’m pretty sure but I can’t
remember exactly) people remarked at my wonderful cut
and my blackened face but all I was worried about was
the two or three minutes that have been lost to me
forever because I was knocked out. |
Since then however I’ve
been able to use that bad knock on the head to explain
my fairly scatty memory (it might account for other
things like the content in this column too), but to be
honest it’s just another get out clause I can use for
being too lazy to make sure I use my memory properly.
And I’m not proud of that. In fact, I’m determined that
from now on I’m going to really work hard at remembering
stuff and using the memory that has been given to me.
Now all I need is for everyone who reads this to remind
me of that... |
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A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
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