I Don’t Know Either

There’s this thing that pops into my head every so often.  It’s one of those things that is only dimly-recalled, and I’m not actually certain of the source of it, other than that I’m reasonably certain it was in either a comic strip or a comic book.
Basically, someone keeps doing or saying something that a main character finds bothersome, and this continues over the course of an extended period of time, and it leads the main character to proclaim in frustration, “If X does Y one more time, I don’t know what I’ll do!”
Then it happens again and the main character doesn’t do anything, explaining afterwards that, “I said I didn’t know what I’d do.”
I think it’s from an old Peanuts strip in which some kid kept referring to Snoopy as “fuzzy face,” but, again, I only have the dimmest recollection.
In any case, this springs to mind every so often when I find myself in a similar situation, as I typically end up having the same response.
It’s also related to the whole thing where I think, “I can’t take this anymore!”  And then I take some more.

A Strange Thing

Memory is a strange thing.
In addition to being error-prone and subject to revision it’s also likely to just plain fail at various points along the way until it eventually stops working entirely.
And yet, ultimately, our memories are all that we really have.
Okay, this is starting off on a more depressing note than I’d ended.
Let’s try again.
Memory is a strange thing.
More to the point, the way memories form and how it chooses what to keep and what to discard can be at times utterly baffling.
This was brought to the forefront of my mind by a discussion in a comment thread over at Slacktivist in which someone made a reference to people who couldn’t remember the dates of World War II even though he actually lived through them.  (Worse, the man in question was a high school teacher who taught US History.  The appalling nature of this was the point of the comment, which is not something I missed, even though it led my brain to follow a particular train of thought.)
It led me to wonder how about the way memories form, particularly in terms of events that will later prove to be of historical significance.  Certain events and even specific periods of time, can frequently – though not always, of course – be recognized as being “historic” even while they’re happening.
JFK’s assassination, for example, was an event that people immediately recognized as being one for the history books.
That’s a particularly cogent example, as it’s an event that’s often cited, for those alive at the time, as a day on which everyone remembers exactly what he or she was doing when the news broke.   People remember – often so vividly that it “seems like it was only yesterday” – exactly how they felt upon hearing the news, they remember seeing Walter Cronkite lose his professional composure, what the weather was like, who they were with, and so on.
I would wager, however, that there are a fair number of people who, despite the crystal clarity of these memories don’t remember the actual date on which it occurred.
I could be wrong on this, of course, given that the anniversary of that date is generally noted rather prominently in the media when it occurs, but the point I’m eventually going to get to would still stand, I think.  For the purposes of this line of thought you can substitute some other historical event that does not get a similar amount of attention when its anniversary comes around, or one that is perhaps slightly less emotionally charged.
In any case, given that I wouldn’t be born until nearly a decade later, I obviously have no personal recollections of that day.  But I do remember the date.
The same thing goes for, say, the attack on Pearl Harbor, or D-Day, or…well, a whole host of significant dates that I memorized in school or otherwise committed to memory as the result of my brain’s – inconsistent – skill at capturing and retaining such information.
What I’m getting at is that there seems to be a difference in the way our memories hold onto information, and what information they hold on to, based on whether it’s something that we encounter as a simple fact of history or if it’s something we actually experienced.
Let’s consider an example of an event that I lived through personally, one that is often cited, like JFK’s assassination, as one of those “you’ll always remember exactly where you were when it happened” events, the Challenger disaster.
As a matter of fact, I do remember where I was and what I was doing when it happened, and I remember it very clearly.
I was in school, and it was during lunch hour.  I had walked from one classroom – known as the “Little Room” - where some kids were playing a typing game on one of the school’s Commodore 64 computers and into the other classroom –  the “Big Room” – to see what people were doing on that computer.
When the school purchased the second Commodore 64, they didn’t buy a monitor for it.  The existing computer and accompanying monitor were moved to the Little Room, while in the Big Room we hooked up the computer to the school’s tiny black and white TV.  The display of the computer’s signal on the TV was terrible, with a lot of static and “snow,” making it comparable to trying to watch an actual TV channel using only rabbit ears for reception.
Which was, in fact, the only way we ever did watch the TV, as there was no aerial antenna hooked up, and certainly no cable.
In any case, as I walked towards the group huddled around the tiny screen, I couldn’t tell that they were watching “breaking news” on Channel 6, and assumed that they were playing some new game.  As I approached, a girl – Brandie Snell – told me, “The space shuttle blew up.”
Initially I thought that she was explaining the concept of the game that was being played, and then it occurred to me, particularly as I looked at the ashen complexion and stunned expression of our Principal – Mr. Morehouse – as he stared blankly at the screen that they were actually watching live TV, and the horrible truth sunk in.
As I said, I remember all of this very clearly, as well as all sorts of other details that don’t relate to the event itself, such as the names of those present, particular qualities of their personalities, my own personal feelings about them, and so on.  I even remember remembering watching the first space shuttle launch on that very same TV in that very same room years earlier.
What I don’t remember?  The date.
I have since looked it up, of course, and I can say that I did at least remember the year and the month – I also recall that it happened shortly before my grandmother died – but I didn’t remember the specific date.
I don’t know what, if anything, that actually means, or what it says about memory and the differences between the experiential formation of memories and those formed through rote memorization, but I do know this:  memory is a strange thing.

At Max Capacity

It was my intention to get a lot of stuff (for me) done this morning, so once I got up I resolved to spend less than the usual amount of time sitting around doing nothing.
Accomplishing that, I made my way first to Circuit City.
I have a process running on my computer(s) at all times that can sometimes eat up a lot of memory, and this, naturally, can cause issues when I’m working on processor and memory-intensive tasks like painting and image editing.
The obvious solution is to just kill the process when I’m going to be engaging in these tasks, but then the problem becomes remembering to start it back up afterwards.
In any case, last week I decided that to resolve this issue I would simply bump up the amount of RAM in my system.
My system is capable of supporting a total of 4 GB of RAM, and came with 1 GB installed, in the form of two 512 MB DIMMs. This left two slots open and meant that if I wanted to upgrade to the max I’d need to buy 4 GB and replace the two half GB DIMMs.
I opted to simply double the current amount by purchasing two more 512 MB DIMMs, creating a total of 2 GB of RAM. Why not go all out? Well, as mentioned, I’d have to replace the existing RAM rather than simply adding to it, which would, according to my research, cost me around $600.
Simply adding 1 GB at ~$150 seemed like the maximum bang for the buck point, so with that in mind I headed off to Best Buy.
(It should be noted that after going online to find the exact kind of RAM I needed, I wrote the specs down on a post-it note…which I then affixed to the back of my PDA. It was a hybrid low tech/high tech solution.)
Once I got there, though, I found that they had no 512 MB DIMMs in stock, and I hadn’t realized at the time that you didn’t need to pair the DIMMs, so it didn’t occur to me to just buy a 1 GB DIMM.
Over the weekend I made the discovery about not needing to pair the memory, and also found that employees of my company get a discount from PNY, a memory manufacturer. However, they did not have the kind of RAM I needed in stock.
So today I decided to check out Circuit City. I had grabbed a 1 GB DIMM and was considering buying two, as it would bring me up to 3 GB and still keep the cost well below the $600 that 4 GB would set me back, but they only had one DIMM in stock.
Ultimately I decided to check the other Best Buy that I was near, but they didn’t have any of the RAM I needed.
On the way back to Leesburg I stopped at the other Best Buy to see if they’d replenished their stock. They had 1 GB DIMMs in stock, and, in fact, had them on sale at such a price that buying 4 GB only cost about $50 more than buying 2 GB would have.
So, while it’s too late to make a long story short, the gist of it is that Hugin is now whizzing along with 4 GB of RAM installed.
I’d planned on going grocery shopping before going home, giving me enough time to get everything put away before my chiropractor appointment, but by the time I’d bought the RAM I only had enough time to go home, put the RAM in, make sure that I didn’t inadvertently fry anything in the process, and head over to the chiropractor, so I held off until after my appointment to get the groceries.
So all of that is done, and now here I am having completed all the tasks I set for myself today.
Because I’d forgotten to stick my post-it back onto my PDA, when I was at Best Buy I was operating from memory, ironically enough, as to what kind of memory I needed to buy. I was 99.9% sure I had the right kind, but went up to an employee to ask him to double-check for me. This was only after I was able to find one, as they’re never around when I want one, but are constantly besieging me when I don’t.
I found some kid who had that all-too common sort of teenage boy voice that suggests that either he has a permanent head cold or is mildly retarded (my vote is for the latter), and explained that I wanted him to confirm for me that this was the correct kind of memory.
He said, in his congested/brain damaged voice that he “don’t understand that computer stuff,” and so I went off in search of another, who understood that all I needed him to do was go to a memory maker’s Web site and do a search on my computer’s make and model using the database search that the site (like all memory manufacture sites) has. The site seemed to be broken, though, so he had to go to Dell’s site to find it.
Anyway, that was the bulk of the excitement for my day. I had the disturbing experience of being behind an elderly woman buying lingerie at Wal-Mart, but the less said about that the better.
Ahead of her was a woman who was making her shopping experience more difficult than it really needed to be. As I’ve said many, many times, buying stuff isn’t really that complicated. I should know; I just spent over $500 today with no real difficulty at all.
Yet somehow people manage to make it so, and I just don’t get it. Are they just overthinking it and operating from the theory that it must be more difficult than it appears to be on the surface?
Somehow I have my doubts about that, as there seems to be so little thinking actually involved. One can’t help but wonder how these people handle the actual challenges that life throws at them when they have such difficulty clearing one of the easier hurdles.
Of course, I can’t think of a better note on which to direct your attention to this clip from the Mike Judge film Idiocracy, which tells the story of a future in which natural selection has been thwarted. Enjoy!