Today’s Tuesday Twofer, on memory.
What is the one thing you forget to do the most often?
Call people back. I’m terrible at this, and I realize that it’s the first step on the way to being a rude asshole, but I just can’t help it. People call and they leave messages, I listen to the messages, and then I go sit down and start doing something else. Yes, it takes only five minutes of my life to call someone back and give them the information they’re looking for, decline or accept the invitation they’ve tendered; but it takes five fewer minutes not to.
Most of my friends have gotten used to this over the years, as if silence itself is some kind of unspoken language that we’ve worked out between us. It is a language which Sham seems to continually resist, however, and after four blissful years together, she still will not forgive me for a time when we were first going out and I forgot to call her for four days.
I know, I know, shut up, shut up. I wasn’t good with the girlfriend thing; I was learning on the fly.
What’s the one thing you’ll never forget?
Actually it’s a bunch of things, but it’s all based around a single experience, so I figure that counts. I hate to be embarrassed.
I know everyone hates it, but I really, really can’t tolerate it. Embarrassment burns forever in my memory, and I always carry it around thereafterwards. If I’m telling a story about something especially humiliating, I will blush and wince and feel the sick, sinking feeling of it all over again.
I think I can remember every truly embarrassing moment of my life, and I’ll tell you, there are no lessons more thoroughly learned than those ones.
And no, I won’t tell you what any of them are.