July 30, 2005
Yet Another Spectacular Rincon Sunset
Alrighty - 5 weeks of pics are up at Flickr... still need to post a couple of hundred from my wife's camera, though :)
July 27, 2005
Back from PR, some self-discovery
Woohoo! I'm back from PR, and let me tell ya, it was a blast. As trips go, this was more of a working vacation, what with getting the BH furnished, and whatnot. I had fun, though, and will probably detail a bit of it here (after I upload the 3GB or so of pics we took :).
What I wanted to talk about, the point of this post, is something that happened on the way back, at the airport in San Juan - someone stopped me, and asked me if I had studied at RUM, and was my name Carlos... This is not so unusual in PR, it happens to my wife all the time (especially to my wife, who thrives on finding obscure connections to people, as in "Carlos! Remember Pepe? This is Pepe's baby third cousin!"). It doesn't happen to me, because: a) I'm not that outgoing, b) I don't remember stuff.
It's "b" that has me worried.
I didn't remember this person at all, though she treated me as someone who should know here. I drew a complete blank. Not so much as an inkling. It worried me all the way home.
Now, I've always had bad memory, especially for people and places. What got me thinking was whether there is some biological reason for it, or whether I don't remember people because I'm an unsocial shite who just doesn't care to.
A few days earlier, me and my brother-in-law were at a pool bar drinking when a bunch of his friends walked in. I stood up to introduce myself, when they said "don't be silly, we know each other! Remember at (my other brother-in-law's) wedding? You yanked down all those metal beer signs with your bare hands so we could take 'em back to FL".
Well, I vaguely remember beer signs, and bloody hands, and walking into the ocean to clean them off, in a tux, heavily intoxicated. Even though I had drunk enough to rip metal signs nailed to trees, cuts be damned, I still remembered that stuff. But I didn't remember them. At all. Blank.
Worries me. If it's biological, then it isn't new. I've had it all my life.
However, the fact that I remember a few people clearly, but casual contacts hazily, if at all, points to another explanation. Perhaps I'm egocentric. Perhaps I live in the abstract, contacting reality only occasionally. Maybe I just don't give a shit about other people.
The fact that I don't know is telling.
