Quoting my favourite, Nora Ephron, from one of her essays as a journalist :
“I will tell you something else: they didn’t drink wine back in the early fifties and sixties. Nobody knew about wine. I mean, someone did, obviously, but most people drank hard liquor all the way through dinner. Recently, I saw a movie in which people were eating take-out pizza in 1948 and it drove me nuts. There was no take-out pizza in 1948. There was barely any pizza, and barely any takeout. These are some of the things I know, and they’re entirely useless, and take up way too much space in my brain.”
Such ease in her self-realisation.
If you identify with what Nora Ephron says about knowing and remembering (what’s usually perceived as) the useless, then you’d also agree how no one really knows why certain people are able to remember the mundane like they do! I, for one, fit the bill perfectly and have never figured the ‘how’ either (having given up on the ‘why’, a long time ago!)
At work, I know by-heart random 6-digit identifiers, exact folder locations, long names of documents and database tables, exact figures on a report, to the second decimal sometimes. I am the walking-talking reference book for my colleagues to look up such information from! As much as I try to look sheepish about it, I secretly pride myself at the marvellous memory I’ve been blessed with. Like, the other day, I related a search analysis to another we did almost 8 months ago; I recollected the details and later confirmed I was right, at which point of course, my colleague gave me a side glance with a raised brow that probably dubbed as, “Why, Ramya, why, why on earth would you remember that?!”
The152Girl 