Memory circuits

Journalistic corrections are usually dressed down, not up, but it’s not often that somebody botches a time reference by an entire decade. But that’s just what I did, when, in last week’s column, I referred to an earlier piece I ran here in “1988 or so.” I meant to say “1998” or so. So, I was off by a decade.

That’s an innocuous enough typo, but here’s the scary thing: Past years, for me, are starting to blend in and run together. Is this middle age?

It’s not that my brain is going soft. My long-term memory has a sticky quirk for academic detail. I can remember, from old textbooks, long equations, detailed graphs, and entire paragraphs, most of which I can actually visualize like a snapshot. I’ll note that this detail only sticks with me if I cared about it to begin with, even outside of academic stuff. So I can tell you the spark plug gap for the old cars I’ve had. I can recall engine limits and engineering details on helicopter models that I haven’t flown, or even seen, in a decade. I seem to think in terms of numbers and quantitative relationships.

Well, why not?

After all, math is truth.

But words are just words, so why not be selectively deaf?

So I can’t even tell you the name of the back-slapping blowhard I’ve met at a business luncheon just two minutes after the fact. Nor can I recall even one word of what somebody sitting next to me on an airliner says during his three-hour-long monologue that offers the highlights of his painfully boring career in (fill in the blank).

And here I confront the reciprocal case of my memory circuits: If I don’t care about something, or somebody, the data don’t even enter my short-term memory, let alone my cerebral hard drive. It’s not that I forget that stuff. It’s that it never registers in the first place.

As a result, beyond the social imperatives necessary to be a gentleman (if barely), I’ll admit that I can’t shift from being perfunctorily polite to being successfully phony. Humanity is so tediously homogenous that you can lump it into about four categories, which renders further effort wasteful. (Author Robert Ringer lumped people into three types, so I’m being generous here; philosopher Eric Hoffer distilled things down even further.)

Fortunately, I do have professional acquaintances who thrive on cataloging social behaviors and alliances, and are thus walking encyclopedias of Saipan’s various intrigues. They know every political figure in Saipan, their family lineages, which relative was awarded which job, all of their histories, their alliances, and so on. They can give me the dirt on a guy for a half an hour, then dial him up on the phone and chat him up, pretending to be best buddies.

Insights from this realm can be very useful, when, for example, I have to write reports about the CNMI, and I have to explain things that are otherwise utterly inexplicable from a purely economic standpoint. But I don’t find this information intrinsically interesting, as useful as it may be for specific applications.

Meanwhile, one of the best things about the tropics in general, and Saipan in particular, is that there are a lot of genuinely interesting people. There are still some adventurers, independent-minded professionals, and such. I never have any trouble remembering these folks, though, in the CNMI’s case, their ranks are dwindling as they go to more vibrant venues where “private sector” isn’t spoken in such hated tones.

It has been said that happiness is good health and a bad memory. I’ll accept about three-quarters of that, and say that happiness is good health and a memory that wasn’t defiled with garbage. After all, the only thing worse than wasting gas at five bucks a gallon is squandering your attention, which is priceless.

Now if I can only remember the fact that 1988 isn’t 1998, I’ll be in good shape.
[I] Ed is a pilot, economist, and writer. He holds a degree in economics from UCLA and is a former U.S. naval officer. His column runs every Friday. Visit Ed at TropicalEd.com and SaipanBlog.com.[/I]