Misty water colored stuff I can't remember

People have always been angry with me when I forget things. They think I’m just being lazy. I’ll admit that to a slight degree, I am a bit lazy. I’m not however, as lazy as one would think I’d have to be to not do the things I forget. You see, my memory has always been a bad one. It’s patchy at best, completely absent at its worst.

A good example of its crappiness is when I’m leaving my house. Usually it’s in the morning, but it can be at any point throughout the day. A lot of people might spend their morning shower and breakfast thinking about what they were planning on doing later. Me, I spend it all constantly reminding myself of what I need to do before I even get out of the house.

It should be routine to everyone. Get up, shower, use soap, put clothes on. Odds are I’ll forget one of those. In my 23 years, I’ve gotten the hang of wearing clothes in public (although there have been times that I exit the house in various states of undress) and showering seems to be one of my standards. I don’t want to say that I frequently forget to use soap but it’s happened too often to say it’s extremely rare. Usually I remember as I’m toweling off and realize that my skin is not quite as fragrant as it should be after using soap. So I climb back in and do a quick lather and rinse. I do not repeat.

As I leave the house, I can tell myself remember to take the lunch I’ve prepared that morning. The same lunch I set next to my keys, wallet and phone. The problem is that even after ten minutes of telling myself over and over to remember my lunch, I can be reaching for it when I remember something else that I’d forgotten earlier in the day. I turn for a split second to do or find whatever it is and will leave the house as soon as I finish. Odds are good that I’ve also left without my lunch.

You see, it’s not because I’m lazy, it’s strictly my memory. It’s not for lack of effort, I’ve spent 45 minutes to an hour reminding myself to take my lunch and in a split second, forget it entirely.

The laziness aspect has been hit upon countless times by people around me that see me as such. Let me be clear about one thing: when it comes to cleaning, if someone suggests something to be cleaned, I’m not going to drop what I’m doing (or in some cases not doing anything; i.e. watching football, writing, etc…) and do it immediately. I’ll say I’m going to do it later, after I’m done with what I’m doing. Ultimately I don’t do it 80% of the time.

I understand why people would be upset with me over it, I really do. I just don’t think it’s fair, is all. When I originally said that I would do it later, I honestly meant to. As a matter of fact, I wanted to do it just to prove to them I would. The problem is that almost as soon as I told them that, I’d forgotten it.

When I was applying to UCLA for the film program, I did so with an email address set up specifically for the process. I checked it frequently for weeks, but then one day completely forgot which email address it was. I tried every one I could think of, but it was to no avail. Eventually I stopped even trying to log in. Months later, late at night as I was falling asleep, the address popped into my head. I jumped out of bed and signed in only to find that I had several emails from the school setting up the timeslot for my interview. One of only thirty interviews that year. Interviews where they would decide which of us would be the fifteen students accepted to the program. That’s fifteen out of over 3,500 applicants. I looked at the date of the scheduled interviews only to see that it had been the day before I figured out the email address. It had been sent over a month prior to that, and I found it nine hours too late. It’s not to say that I would have been guaranteed admission to the program, but at least I would have had a 50/50 shot at it.

Besides being born with a faulty memory I’ve had my share of medical problems. Just a few months ago, I received my 7th concussion. It could have been my 8th, but I’m not sure anymore. Regardless, it’s a lot more than doctors would like to hear, especially in a matter of seven years. Those concussions have rattled my brain around enough that I suspect they may have aided my lack of a solid memory. The physical therapist who I saw after my last one told me that he suggests that people stop receiving concussions after their second because the damage it does to the brain. When he looked through my medical records and saw how many I’d had, he joked that I should start wearing a foam padded helmet everywhere.

To a great extent, I feel like people think I’m just making up excuses for being lazy. It frustrates me more than almost anything else in this world that they don’t understand what it’s like to be plagued with this level of forgetfulness. I’m almost positive that people think less of me with each forgetful moment. Perhaps it’s just my draw in life. Maybe I’m supposed to be forgetting these things for a reason. I will say this however, had I gone to UCLA, I might have had a hell of a leg up in the industry but I wouldn’t have met the people I’ve met at UCSD. It’s a trade off that I hope pans out. Otherwise I’ll just be the forgetful old man who could have been.

Opposites Repel

Apples and oranges are the two most frequently compared opposites in literary ways, it seems. With love and hate; peace and war; and black and white thrown in the mix, opposites are useful for not only hyperbole, but many other forms of mockery. They are however, also quite appropriate it seems, in the terms of love. “Opposites attract” sang Janet Jackson while referring (I assume at any rate) to herself and her brother. Time has proven that particular theory wrong with Michael becoming more like her every second of every anesthesia filled day. But the overall principle of opposites attracting is ever present in the fairy tale love.

With the increasing (not overwhelmingly so, but still) amount of relationships starting online at places like Eharmony.com and Match.com, the theory has taken it’s broadsides. Still it has prevailed, but what is interesting is that if opposites do attract, they must for some reason. The reason I suspect, is that two opposites provide a sense of foreignness or exoticism experienced by both parties reveling in a new type of life. It could also be that one has not lived a life that the other has and they want to live it vicariously. Either way, the newness of it eventually wears off. Regardless of how one feels about it in the beginning, it will ultimately become everyday to them. This could be the source of why some relationships fail after a certain period of time. When one has experienced the life they had not previously led, they could begin to tire of it.

Without enough feeling of closeness, comfortableness or genuine emotional attachment regardless of the flaws and demands of the other party, the relationship is bound to fail. The couple may want to stay together and stick it out to see if it will pass, but it seems that is never the case. Weathering the storm can work but only if at least one of those aforementioned factors is present. Otherwise, the couple may stay together but bickering, oftentimes over petty and insignificant (at least to one party) things.

This theory is only relevant to the idea of opposites attracting. I’m not saying that every relationship built on opposites is going to degrade like above, just that normally that’s the reason they do. Relationships can be doomed from the beginning, but usually they start out with promise.

Some other relationships come from commonality. Two people share interests. They could be art; science; math; poetry; clouds; fucking, whatever. The point is that they have several things in common that spurs their attraction. Usually it starts out slowly. The couple may not be attracted to each other at first, sometimes they don’t even notice the other until weeks, months or years after they’ve met. One of them may not even notice the other has taken a liking to them until even later.

What is interesting to me though is that those kinds of relationships seem to be more grounded, more powerful. While it may not be the exotic one that the opposite couple shares, it has its own type of fascination. Two people that share common ideals, interests and tastes; that gel together and engage the other in a way more telling than the opposites do, seem to stand more of a chance.

I think, and I could be totally wrong as well as making an ass out of myself, that it is because the opposites couple is engaged by the other’s unfamiliarity and revels in the new life they are experiencing, they do not know the actual person they are with. They simply know that they are interested but must discover if they truly like the person beyond that surface level. Why the couple that is alike may work better is because they already have grown to know the person by the time they start to take a liking to them. They have already uncovered, provided the other is not hiding their true self, what kind of person they are being attracted to. This lack of shock, this lack of surprise as to what they are, may be the reason for their success. The thrill the opposites couple experiences will end at some point and they must then decide whether or not they care for this person enough to maintain a relationship.


If you think about it, it’s natural for opposites to not function together. Black cannot be white, and white cannot be black without both dissolving the other. Peace cannot itself be war just as much as war cannot exist in peace. Apples seeds are not crossbred with oranges for reasons too scientific for me to comprehend. The exceptions in the binary, mutually exclusive club are love and hate. They exist in relationships. Frequently too often for one, or both of the parties to always exude a level of frustration that causes constant friction. As present in a relationship as they may be, they only work make the relationship an unstable and frustrating one.