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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about memories, particularly, how we create and recall memories. I don’t care about the actual science behind forming and recalling memories, but more about the different capacity for memories and why certain people have better memories. I think I have a bad memory. You often read about the memory freaks who can remember exactly what he or she had for dinner on January 21, 1987. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night. Joking, it was pasta.

Seriously though, what leads to lasting memories? I’ve been out of high school for 10 years now and I can only remember bits and pieces. A few examples, when seven friends and I jumped a fence for a shortcut and one guy twisted his ankle when he landed, my basketball coach’s crazy driving to tournaments and a hilarious incident when a tanked girl told us that her boyfriend broke her tailbone during sex with his huge cock (hahah, I still laugh thinking about that weird night). I remember very little of actual school though. I do remember reading Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, and Notes from Underground for my English Independent Study and during my presentation I showed a clip from a Crime and Punishment TV movie. I can’t recall the clip or what I got on the project, but it would be funny to dig up the paper and see how badly I comprehended the novels.

Looking at the examples I mentioned above, it looks like two types of experiences formed most of my memories, unique / one of a kind experiences and frequent occurrences. Unique experiences or occurrences, even trivial ones, like the girl and her tailbone will probably stay with me forever. As well, everyone my age remembers where they were when the planes hit the twin towers (I was sleeping) or many Canadian’s my dad’s age remember where they were when Paul Henderson scored the game winning goal during game eight of the 1972 Summit Series. So, clearly big world events tend to stick with us.  But even small repetitive events can lead to easily recalled memories.  For instance, driving to basketball tournaments; every time you got into the van you knew it was going to be memorable, but one specific incident doesn’t stand out.

Do others only remember fragments of their earlier life? Is this typical? Or maybe I didn’t lead the most exciting high school life to generate crazy memorable moments.  To quote Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd for no reason, “All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life – remind me to kill myself.”

Random question, what is the point of doing certain things if you won’t remember them later? Recently, Ted Danson was on the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and he mentioned that he did not win the Emmy he was nominated for (he lost to Michael J. Fox). He then said something along the lines of ‘it doesn’t really matter who won because nobody remembers anyway.’ He was joking, but really, what’s the point of the Emmys if no one remembers who won? Or why pay $200 to watch a Leaf’s game live, when you’ll forget the majority of the game within hours? To celebrate the now? To live for the day? To enjoy a couple hours of entertainment? Of course, you would probably end up dead trying to live your life with every moment being a memory forming unique experience or just really bored if you didn’t watch the Emmys. Ahh, do people actually watch the Emmys?

No point as usually to my rambling posts, but maybe Nietzsche had it right when he wrote: “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them.”  Fucking A!