My sieve-like mind

[muckefuck]

Thursday night, I decided to get a drop on the weekend (or catch up on the previous one) by doing a load or two of laundry. I got home, dumped my duds into a bag, and opened the drawer where my shiny new laundry card--which I just put $20 on--is always waiting until I need it. Except it wasn't. My first thought was that I had left it in the shorts I typically wear when I take the washing down. Nope. My wallet? No. Sitting on the table? Wrong again! After ten or so increasingly desperate minutes of pulling apart every conceivable hidey hole, I thought Maybe you put it in the other bag, the one that had the detergent? Fortunately, I knew exactly where this was: Next to the magazine basket.

Except it wasn't. Was I really lame enough to have left it downstairs in the laundry room? You betcha! The extraordinary thing was that, after ten days, not only was it still there, but the bottle of detergent was untouched. My faith in my fellow condo-dwellers momentarily restored, I turned my mind back to the problem of how the hell I was going to secure myself clean undies without shelling out a fiver for another electronic card.

As luck would have it, I had a few fantastic salt caramels (courtesy of e.) that I was meaning to take to my upstairs neighbour. In the process, I bummed her card, promising profusely to have it back within the hour and to repay her the value I cashed in. When I finally began deploying clothes into one of the front-loaders, a thought struck me: Wouldn't it be ironic if I ended up washing my missing card? Not two minutes later, I found something hard and oblong in a shirt pocket. Bingo!

Less than a week before, I unlost the lovely new winter gloves monshu bought me for New Year's. Like the card, I knew they weren't really gone; they were somewhere in the friendly confines of my apartment, I just didn't know where. How was I supposed to remember that a couple months previously I'd decided to wear my new suede jacket out to the local pub on a frosty night and had slipped my best gloves into the pockets to complete the ensemble?

If it were only the occasional lost item scare, I wouldn't mind so much, but it's much more systemic than that. Every time I'm walking home after having spent three or four hours wasting time on monshu's computer, things I meant to take care of in the process drift back into my head. Amazing how they get scattered to the mouldy recesses of my mind the minute I load LiveJournal and don't return until ambient distraction has dropped to a minimum.

At least that's less embarrassing than the loss of my once-keen ability to associate names and faces. Sunday afternoon, the GWO and I did dim sum with the Asians & Friends for the first time since...last November? As far as my mind is concerned, the gap was geologic. I recognised at least half the men at our table but there was only a single one I could name. I was even crushed out on this man's boyfriend before and I hadn't the slightest idea any more what he was called (a sure sign that I am well and truly over him).

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Oh god. My inability to find anything in our house has now grown so bad that I fear my wife may leave me over it. Anything I haven't seen in the past 12 hours is just gone, I never really expect to see it again. As for names and faces, it's a repeating, and horribly embarrassing, problem. Complete strangers come up to me at parties, in the supermarket, and say "Hi Rick, how are the kids? Did you ever fix your barbecue?" Worst of all is when I make the first move, introduce myself, ask who they are, and have to read on their faces what a gaffe I've committed.

Remember, the memory's the second thing to go...

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I have a terrible time with names, which is why I rarely address anyone by name unless I know them well. I've flubbed too many in the past, and at least good friends are more understanding when I call them by the wrong name.