I Find Competence Elusive

I forgot my name the other day.

Really, I mean I just completely forgot my name. I was at the bank cashing a check, and when I went to sign the back of it and accessed the part of my brain where pertinent information is stored—like my name and my address and exactly how many of my parents are still living—I basically ended up with the neural equivalent of ‘404 Error’. You know how in old western movies they always have a shot of a barren desert, and the only movement comes from a lone tumbleweed blowing across the frame? That’s how it felt.

Fortunately—inasmuch as the word can apply here—I had the presence of mind to pretend I couldn’t remember my account number so I at least didn’t look like a total nutbag in front of the teller. In the end I got it all sorted out but I must blushingly confess that I had to look at my driver’s license to jog my memory. I got everything I needed to do done and I even remembered to take my purse with me when I left (I’m a fiend for leaving my purse behind in places, even though it’s roughly the dimensions of a Boeing), and I went about the rest of my day as normal and didn’t really think of the incident again.

And actually, that’s what I find so troubling about the whole thing—that it didn’t really occur to me to be concerned about it at all. The most worrisome part isn’t that I forgot my name to begin with, but the fact that forgetting my own name didn’t even register as at all unusual or cause for alarm. To be perfectly frank, it really isn’t. This kind of thing happens to me all the time.

I’m not an especially successful adult. I hesitate to call myself an ‘adult’ at all—I come under the category of grown-up only by virtue of a few technicalities, much in the same way a Chihuahua counts as a ‘dog’ despite the fact that it’s taxonomically more consistent with members of the rodent family, or is possibly some kind of furry bug-eyed beetle. Speaking personally, I have only two traits that mark me as an adult: I am over the age of eighteen, and, despite all of my efforts to stop it, am in possession of a set of fully functional reproductive organs. Other than that, I remain astoundingly immature and childish. I have all the sense of responsibility and maturity of a rhesus monkey, and display roughly the same level of awareness of my surroundings as a fish stick.

Add to this the fact that I am both extremely forgetful and absentminded, to such an amazing extent so as to seriously suggest some kind of legitimate mental deficiency on my part. And I don’t mean my mind wanders or I forget where I left my sunglasses—although both of these do happen to me, and frequently—but I will completely forget where I put something just seconds after putting it down. There are very few things I can remember with anything like reliability, and I’m constantly having to stop and really think about things that should be second nature, like exactly what year I was born in and what planet I come from. A weekly ritual for me consists of finding a landline telephone—in and of itself a challenge—and then using it to call my cell phone so I can hear it ring, because I can’t remember where I put it, inevitably resulting in a whole afternoon playing a high-tech game of Marco Polo. I once spent an entire day frantically looking for a favourite bracelet I’d misplaced; I retraced my steps and called every store I went to that day to see if anyone had found it, to no avail. Heartbroken, I went to bed that night accepting that I had probably lost it for good—only to find it in my bra, exactly where I’d put it hours earlier to wash my hands.

I frequently forget entire, lengthy conversations with people who are important to me—like my boss or my boyfriend—putting me in the absurd position of having to be reminded of everything I said and agreed to, as well as having to take someone else’s word for the fact that the conversation even occurred at all. I’m very fortunate that no one in my life is an asshole, because I could very easily be convinced that I had a conversation that never happened and agreed to things I’d never even considered.

Even on a good day, I have at best a tenuous grasp of reality and the world around me. It’s not unheard of for me to miss things that other people would find quite startlingly obvious. It really is extremely difficult to overstate my level of obliviousness. When my dad got a new car several years ago, it was months before I even noticed—despite the fact that it was parked in the garage, I saw it every day, and it was a completely different make and colour than the old one. I’m not talking a subtle change of colour, either, like a dark blue car to a black one. No, the old car was ultramarine blue and a station wagon, and the new one was a silver sedan. This happened six years ago and I am still occasionally surprised to find that the blue car isn’t there anymore.

Just in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about me, this is my ultimate accomplishment of absentmindedness. In my life I have experienced three—three!!—earthquakes. All three times I completely failed to notice that anything unusual had happened. The epicenter of one of these quakes was just two miles from my house and actually split open the road, so these were not insubstantial little rattles. And yet in all three cases I found out much later from outside sources that the ground had actually shaken beneath my feet, arguably a considerable change from the norm, and yet I had no idea it had happened at all. At this point, I’m reasonably sure that someone could land a helicopter in my bedroom and I wouldn’t even notice. For all I know this could have happened already, and there could really be a helicopter in here and I just haven’t figured it out yet.

I know there’s no hope for me to keep my head on my shoulders, so these days I just try to be at least broadly aware of where I am and what I’m doing. Enough to keep me from taking any more of those accidental, unplanned excursions over the state line while absently thinking of bubblegum and napalm. (This might or might not have really happened to me—I said something very similar to this to a friend, who then asked quite seriously if it was true. The fact that I can mention a scenario so overtly absurd and it still sounds like something I would actually do speaks volumes.)

So this is what I have to work with. I am not, in short, a person to whom any amount of mental sharpness comes naturally. Most of this seems to completely preclude being a proper grown-up, and yet at the age of eighteen and despite all of my obvious mental shortcomings, I was handed over complete and total control of every aspect of my life as if this was something I had any capacity to understand or appreciate. It’s like giving over control of a Space Shuttle launch to a six-year-old—it can only end badly and will probably involve large-scale destruction and a fiery explosion.

I do actually remember the very first thing I did on my eighteenth birthday as an Official Adult. I bounded downstairs, confronted my mother, and declared gleefully, “Guess what, Mom! I am my own adult supervision now!” Whereupon she and everyone else who knew me and was aware of my proclivity for absentmindedness and making radiantly unwise decisions made a secret pact to be dead before I was old enough to have control of the country.

And then I went outside to play with matches, because I fucking could.

Actually, I’m not being completely fair to my brain. It is capable of holding onto information and doing so for a very long time, but unfortunately it seems to have come to exactly the wrong conclusions about what is worth holding onto. Despite being completely unable to remember my date of birth or what kind of car I drive, I can still tell you the mascot of every school I ever went to (the Aspen Owl, the Daly Bulldog, the Neelsville Knight, and the WMHS Wolverine); I know the shortest term ever spent in office by a US president (William Henry Harrison, who celebrated his inauguration by contracting pneumonia and dying in thirty days); I remember the name of the girl at school who used to try to pick me up every time she saw me (Rachel), and the woman who babysat me when I was three and my parents both worked (Lou-Anne). If I walk into a room I stand only about a fifty percent chance of remembering what I went in there for, and I can’t remember if my middle name has an ‘e’ at the end of it or not, but I can remember advertising jingles for products that have not been on the market in more than fifteen years.

Thinking about it, though, I don’t know that I’m completely alone in this. I think a lot of people forget really important things but remember totally useless shit. I bet if you survey a thousand average Americans, less than a third of them could tell you who was president when they were born or name any more than one or two Supreme Court justices, but every last one of them would be able to hum the Jeopardy tune and recite the lyrics to the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ theme song.

Go ahead. Do it. I’d do it myself but I can’t remember where I left my cell phone.