In which I convince myself I've lost my mind.

Is it too early for me to be having "senior moments"?

I'm only in my mid-40's (it pains me greatly to say) and am in reasonably good health and hold a job and care for a home and family and seem pretty much on top of things MOST of the time, but I get the feeling that being in good physical health (relatively) and on top of daily life (mostly) doesn't translate all that well to actually being able to keep a firm grasp on reality, or to remember things accurately.

Take, for example, the complete blank I drew when I read the following phrase from a journal I kept in college: "my date with Charles went OK, I think. I'm not sure what I feel about him."

Charles?

Who was Charles?

I don't remember a Charles.

I remember Mark, and Chris, and Sam, and Butch, and John, and Carlton, and Marc, but not Charles.

Charles would have been around the time of Chris (I was not an exclusive dater), but heaven help me if I can remember who he was, how I met him, or if we went out more than once. Was he blond? Dark-haired? Tall? Nothing at all comes to mind.

That got me thinking about the other guys I dated while a single girl in my 20's. The was also John and Darell and Charlie and Bert and Steve and Scott. There was the guy that looked like Ric Ocasek, and the one that worked for a radio station with whom I had a very fesity hate relationship, there was the guy in Charlottesville that was an ass to the waitress and kind of scary who I kissed goodnight just to get him to let me out of the car, and there were probably others that I simply CANNOT REMEMBER.

Who were they? Do I dare keep reading my journals to find out more about what I've forgotten?

And it's not just PEOPLE that don't register with me. I also forget entire events!

A friend from high school once said something along the lines of "remember that time we went camping and you spilled the whole thing of OJ on yourself and stripped down to your underwear and jumped in the lake to wash off, not know that there were GUYS in the campsite next to ours?" To which I replied with a blank stare and a scrambling brain, trying vigorously to figure out how it was that I could have erased something like that from my memory so completely that it's as though not only did I not remember it happening to me, I was sad to not have ever been there at all, because it sounded like fun.

A couple of weeks ago I said I forget a CAT (Statler) we had in our dorm. I also forgot the rabbit (Cadbury). That bothers me, but they're only fuzzy little animals, not PEOPLE. I was convinced I would not forget people. But I have. At one time, I was REALLY convinced that my reality at that time would always be my reality, and that I would forget nothing of what I've done or where I've been. But I have.

I've forgotten a lot.

But riddle me this, Batman - how much are we SUPPOSED to remember?

Riddle me also - is it any coincidence that not long after I mentioned Charles in my journal, I wrote about getting high for the first time? I think not, dudes, I think not.