Why I Have No Memory

I've been going to community college since 1985. Let me tell you, that's a long, long time to be a sophomore. Sometimes I'll go two or three semesters without taking a class, mostly I'll take one or two classes a semester. There was one semester (we call it The Bad Time) when I took chemistry, anatomy, and Spanish. I woke up one morning covered with flashcards and realized that I was trying to learn three new languages at the same time. My stomach hurts just remembering.

Anyway, all this schooling is the reason I have no memory. I don't have the cute type of no memory, you know the kind where you're standing in a room and can't remember why you entered it? No, I have the being in the middle of a sentence and stopping because I can't remember what I was talking about, type of no memory. I have actually asked one of the kids, "what do you call the machine we put dishes in to to make them clean?". Yeah, that type of no memory.

My theory is that all these years of learning new information, under the pressure to be able to coherently reproduce it in a testing situation, has trained my brain to store memories in a very faulty way. Most people have sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. We can ignore the sensory memory, cause it's just stupid. So, for this post, most people have short-term and long-term memory. But not I, I have short-term, super-stressed-regurgitate-for-a-test-term, and factoids-needed-to-play-jeopardy-term memory.

This means that I know that all your mitochondria is inherited from your Mom, but for the life of me I can't remember her name.