August 08th, 2018

Note:  Now that the text and photos are BOTH working (yay!) I am going to attempt to recreate the missing blogposts from Monday and Tuesday (Monday's today and Tuesday's tomorrow).  

I wish there was a button I could push that would flush out of my memory banks all the nonsense and useless information that my brain insists upon keeping so as to make room for new stuff.  My friend Aaron has this theory that I like. It's a great visual.  He suggests that the memory portion of the brain is like a shelf.  You can pile all sorts of stuff on the shelf but if you put too much on one end, the stuff on the other end starts falling off.  That makes perfect sense to me.

Think about it.  Do you really still need to know the phone number that you had in 2nd grade?  I still remember mine:  Hopkins 65724.  I keep wanting to call that number and see who picks up the phone.  If it's me, I will totally freak!  I also, bizarrely remember the phone number from one particular address we had in St Louis:  Underhill 83843.  I will probably remember those two phone number until the day I die.  However, for reasons that baffle me, my brain refuses to memorize our house number here.  We have lived here for two full years now. When someone asks for our home phone number, I still have to look it up.  It's in my cell phone listed under "Me".  I think if I could somehow delete the Hopkins and Underhill numbers from my memory banks, I might have a better chance.

And then there is the silly superstitious nonsense that is stuck in my head. "Breaking a mirror brings 7 years bad luck". Wow! 7 Years!  That seems punitive.  "A hat on the bed is a sign of bad luck" . That's just bizarre. I absolutely do not see that connection.  Walking under a ladder is bad luck"  and "A black cat crossing your path brings bad luck".  Did you notice that most of these sayings involve bad luck?  Where's the good luck omens.  Although come to think of it, the word omen sounds bad. Too close to ominous.   Knowing any of that does not improve my life one bit. I can ditch all of it with no remorse.

My Nana had a saying for every occasion.  Some of them made perfect sense to me like, "If you lay all of the good intentions, end to end, it still doesn't get the job done."  Ok Nana, I get it.  Time to get off my lazy butt and get my work done!  But there are other sayings that mean nothing at all like, "If you drop a knife on the floor, a stranger will come to your door".  It rhymes which is kind of fun but what the heck?  Butterfingers as predictive devices?  I don't so.  Here's another one, "Opening an umbrella in the house brings bad luck".  Only if I get crazy with that open umbrella and knock something off a shelf and that has more to do with the bad behavior than the umbrella. Poor maligned misunderstood umbrellas.  I don't need to keep any of that information.

Then there are the universal adages:  "A stitch in time saves nine."  Absolutely  not true if I'm the one doing the stitching.  We can deep six that saying.  "A penny saved is a penny earned". Thank you captain obvious.  I think I don't really need that one either. I mean it's true, but yeah, but so what. If I pick a penny up off the sidewalk and put it in my pocket I'm now up one entire cent. Yes. And...?  Not exactly a revelation.

How about the stuff we learned at school that is totally not true.  Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity.  No. No he absolutely did not.  Mr. Franklin did a whole lot of cool stuff. Not a single one of them was discovering electricity.  Or how about "in 14 hundred and 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America"?  Columbus and his cohorts may indeed have been sailing on the big blue ocean in the year 1492 but he absolutely did not discover America!  And then there is William Tell shooting the apple off his sons' head.  William Tell didn't even exist!  He was just a character in a legendary story!  Geez!  If I could ditch all that kind of nonsense, think of the extra space I'd have to remember things like to take my grocery list with me to the grocery store!  I think that would be a fair trade.

Sadly there is no delete button, no brain flush device that will  pick out the unimportant stuff and get rid of it yet still keep the important things I want to hold on to forever.  Maybe I could gather up all these ridiculous, unimportant and useless bits of information and send them to the cloud?  Or maybe any information I'm not using I could donate to someone who  needs it, like 7th grade math class.  Still haven't used any of that Algebra, it should be like new!

Or keep doing what I've been doing so far and use all that useless blahdeblah to win a ton of Trivia games.  :)