If you tell me things that I don't need to know, most likely I won't remember them. There's a lot of things I don't remember
because I don't pay attention to them because they don't interest me because they don't affect me one way or the other. There
are certain people with whom I have had enough experience to know that nothing they ever have to say to me will ever be of
the slightest interest. People who talk too much or present themselves as authorities on subjects that they know nothing about.
Like when someone claims to be close personal friends with a celebrity and then talks about that celebrity all the time.
That's annoying, even if they actually know the celebrity and even if everything that they say about him or her is true
Or when someone talks about their personal lives all the time, or something that they're good at like cooking or auto repair.
Or when they act like they know everything about a certain subject, like the legal system or a medical procedure or even
how Hollywood figures out who gets an Oscar. This is always annoying, especially when you actually know more about the subject
than they do.
Or when someone is overly interested in your personal life, like your kids or who you're dating, and then wants to give
you all kinds of advice and tell you how your kids are feeling or how you should act around women or why your date might have
said so-and-so.
All of these people are annoying and everyone reading this knows exactly what I'm talking about because you either know
someone who does these things, or you compulsively do these things yourself and you're constantly banging your head against
walls muttering "Stupid, stupid stupid...."
Anyway, all I'm saying is that people like this talk to me all the time and I have little to no interest in what
they're saying, and that I retain even less of it, unless it's something that I find amusing because it's so amazingly stupid.
I'm thinking about all of this today because I'm wondering what it would be like to have total recall, or what some
people call a photographic memory. I don't really believe that anyone has a photographic memory, at least in the way folks
talk about retaining everything like pictures in their mind. Like if I just looked at a page in a book, I could just close
my eyes and read it later on. No one can do that.
If it was real I think it would just drive you insane because you would just remember every stupid and pointless
thing that anyone ever said to you, every ugly person who ever wandered into your line of sight, every nightmare, every argument.
I think there's a reason we forget things and block them out. Because we don't care about them.
