If a War of the Worlds scenario were ever to take place (chances are probably pretty slim), rather than sending the common cold to defeat our invaders, I might just challenge them to understand the text messages in my cellphone.
As a rule, my memory is terrifyingly good.
Stay with me on this one. It’ll come together (I think).
I can relay conversations from months ago nearly word-for-word. Rattle random facts shared in passing. I can realize that new information I learn relates to an unresolved question from years back.
Looking for a text I received from someone a few months ago, I noticed an odd pattern — disembodied thoughts. Or more accurately, “out of context thoughts”.
For example earlier this year, over breakfast, a friend relayed a story that happened somewhere we had both been, but not together. He couldn’t immediately recall the name of the place.
We played that game where people throw cues at each other to try to remember something. “I think it’s west”. “Is it a province or a municipality?” “Warm or cold?” “Flat or mountainous.” Etc.
The conversation moved on to other topics. Work. Family. Life. The watch I was wearing. The breakfast food. You know, the random flow of conversation. Occasionally, the conversation would go something like:
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about making a move to a different job too.” to which the response would normally be something like “Really, are you talking to any one yet or actively looking?”
Instead it was more like:
Person 1: “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about making a move to a different job too.”
Person 2: “Tianjin?”
Person 1: “No, I think it was more west.”
Person 2: “Chongqing?”
Pause.
Person 1: “No. Maybe not as big.”
Pause.
Person 2: “Chengdu? Are you thinking career change or just job change doing the same thing?”
Person 1: “Wasn’t Chengdu. I don’t know. I’d like to change careers, but I just don’t know to what.”
You get the picture. It isn’t memory loss. It isn’t a decline in intelligence. The information is there. Ultimately, it’s accessible. I think it’s more deciding certain things can be tossed into an archive for later use, but take a little longer to access than if kept closer to front of mind.
This isn’t a new phenomenon and I’m certain I’m not explaining something foreign to anyone hearty enough to have read this far in a long Facebook post. It’s just that there are more of these in the past year than previously. Now they are memorialized in text form like never before.
For example. This particular breakfast ended. I can even tell you most of what we talked about, in some cases even the exact phrasing used to discuss things. I remember walking a little bit of the way together after breakfast before each going our separate way, with a detour to see if an interesting-looking building was a cathedral, commercial building or something else (turns out it was a synagogue).
We said our goodbyes and promised to chat again with less of a gap in between conversations. That was maybe 10:30 in the morning. Hours later, sometime in the afternoon, I sent this:
“Qingdao? (shandong province?) — anyway … really glad to see you. Thanks for reaching out”
The message immediately prior to that in my phone was someone asking about whether it was cold outside, and from a completely different day.
If you aren’t familiar with War of the Worlds, I’ll save you some time: Martians invade earth. Despite all of the best weapons of war humankind has to offer, the martians cannot be defeated. Ultimately, they succomb to an infection with which humans can grapple, but martians cannot. If you choose the movie version, you can add a lot of extremely annoying Dakota Fanning screaming for a few hours to the rest of the plot.
Anyway.
If a War of the Worlds scenario were ever to take place (chances are probably pretty slim), rather than sending the common cold to defeat our invaders, I might just challenge them to understand the text messages in my cellphone.
It might not completely short circuit their systems, but at least it’ll give me time to escape.
