You know, I'm starting to get worried about my memory.
I've always been bad with names. I'll typically remember any of a number of other details about a person (their favorite color is purple, they own a Rottweiler, they play softball every weekend) before I'll remember their name. I've tried the tactic of verbally repeating someone's name in their presence several times (if possible without seeming weird) with fairly good results. However, bottom line, I'm bad with names.
Lately, though, it's more than names. Someone tells me something, five minutes later, it's gone, unless I make an effort to remember. For instance, I was at midnighter's last night. His wife had cooked us all dinner, partly in celebration of my new job. We'd eaten, had watched a DVD, and were down in the basement computer room when midnighter called down to say that one of their cats had gotten into my glass of tea and had been drinking from it.
Why the cat was drinking unsweetened tea, I don't know. Why midnighter didn't take the good-host step of removing the glass from the coffee table after he'd discovered the cat drinking from it, I don't know.
But not three minutes later, I was back upstairs, and unthinkingly took a drink of the cat-contaminated tea.
Braunbeck said, "You really need to learn to retain things, Lucy." He's partly frustrated because he'll start talking to me while I'm typing or in the middle of something else, and I won't hear him. At all. I hyper-focus on tasks and block everything else out, so if anyone starts talking to me it takes me a few seconds to realize I'm being addressed.
I don't like being this spacy. I wish I knew what the problem was, if I'm deficient in some vitamin or need more sleep or different sleep or what. I've been a night owl -- the new job lets me continue that -- but maybe I shouldn't be. I don't smoke pot (or anything else) and my alcohol consumption is negligible. I'm not on any drugs, prescription or otherwise. I'd try ginkgo but for the fear of colchicine contamination (a common problem, from what I've read -- it caused my mom's hair to start falling out when she tried the herb a few years ago).
It could be genetic. It could be a side effect of being unemployed close to 11 months. It could be sunspots. It could be everything.
This couldn't be some kind of latent attention deficit disorder, could it?
Maybe I should try coffee, and see if that helps me keep track. My PDA is very useful for preserving the bits that fall through the steel sieve of my mind, but I'd rather be able to fill in the gaps on my own.
2008 Edit: As it turned out, I had undiagnosed hypothyroidism. All hail Synthroid!