And another one bites the dust

I have a list in my head, that probably I ought to keep on paper.

It's headed "Displacement Activities", but not for the obvious reasons: I don't actually need a list to remind myself of those things I do to avoid doing those things that I need to be doing.

"Displacement Activities" is just the first item on the list, for it is the list of those words and phrases that I can never remember. I used to gesture madly and clutch my head and cry, "You know, those things you do, to avoid..." and shewhomust would murmur "Displacement activities?" and I would gasp with relief and repeat the words and carry on from there. Talking about myself, presumably.

Now I have it on the list. In the nature of things, of course the list is growing. I would cite you other examples, but offhand of course I can't remember them. This is why I ought to have hard copy.

Today? I get to add another word to the list. Three times in a week is once too many to fail to remember the name of a dish that I cook now and then, that I have indeed cooked for thirty people. When you find yourself having to google "Carcassonne stew" (because of course you cannot remember Castelnaudary either, but that's excusable) in order to recover the word "cassoulet", then it's time to add it to the list.

(I am not, however, going to add the name of the young man from last night, with whom I was apparently living in connubial if edgy bliss and also utter bluff, because I could not at all remember what he was called. I do have actual people's actual names on the list, because this happens to me all the time and half my social encounters are pure bluff; but this dreamboat? Was a dream, and may confidently be expected not to recur.)

Further on my forgetting

I wrote a post for Book View Cafe a fortnight back, about how walking has become an inherent part of my working day. What I may not have mentioned - I forget, but I think I forgot - is how I have been through the whole parade of note-taking mechanics, from cheap pads to expensive filofaxes to devices for taking dictation, and none of them works for me. I really am not a note-taking animal. I think about work, I try ideas and phrases and dialogue out in my head, and I try to remember it all.

And, yup, we know how well that works; but I've learned to live with it. Or without it, rather, all the stuff that I think of while I'm out and forget before I get home. I have learned, as my dentist says, to accept the space. (He says this about the tooth that we are both fairly certain that he's going to extract on Tuesday: shall we fit a prosthetic, or shall we accept the space?)

Today I'm trying to write another BVC blog post, about structure. So I was walking to the supermarket and thinking about that, and I built myself the perfect sentence. And repeated it to myself a dozen times, trying to embed it in memory, knowing all the while how rarely that actually works - and then I thought, "Wait a minute! I have a mobile phone in my pocket, and an answering-machine at home: I can give myself dictation!"

So I did that, I phoned myself up, and when I answered I tried to recite this perfect sentence, just as it sat in my head there.

Reader, I forgot it. Halfway through, I totally stalled out on a word, and couldn't get past that refusal.

The message as recorded contains long silences, the sounds of distant traffic, the closer sounds of my swearing at myself as I tried in vain to recover.

Is this another fine notion gone entirely west? I'm not sure. I did in fact remember the lost word on my walk home, and have rebuilt my sentence*. So I might try this again, in cases of future emergency**: but I don't suppose it'll become an essential part of my process.


*Since you ask: Every story has its shape, the logic that holds it all together, the truths of character and worldbuilding and consequence; these are the familiar structures of our own lives.

**And yes, I am totally keeping this one recorded message, as an awful life-lesson to myself.

Decluttering, encore

I'm sorting out the kitchen cabinet, sort of: shifting stuff between shelves, cleaning a little as open space emerges, tossing out the occasional item. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much mustard...?

I'm keeping all the mustards, mind. Mustard doesn't go off, it's a natural preservative.

In general, I'm fairly slack anyway about use-by dates and best-before. Especially on tins and otherwise sealed packages. On the other hand: well, it's not that "1996" unnerves me, particularly, but if I haven't found a reason to eat the contents in the last fourteen years, I think it's fair to say that it can go. (This, I know, is the argument some people use on their books; the argument, indeed, some people think that I should use on mine. What they don't understand is, I don't argue with my books. There's no point. They move in, find a space for themselves, and that's that. Kinda like cats, really...)

Two packets of Imperial green rice, neither one opened. Both dated back to 2005. Hmm. I remember these: I was interested briefly in exotic rices, green and red and black. Not interested enough, apparently. Not sure why I bought two, either: special offer, most likely. I'm a sucker for a bargain. What do we think - keep, chuck or compost...?

Mystery, thy name is Dehydration Brake

I have found ... a packet. Of stuff. Dried brown short lengths of vegetable matter. Labelled largely in Chinese.

On the back, an English label, yay!

It say:

Dehydrated Brake

["Brake" is apparently a genus of fern, the word maybe related to "bracken" and maybe not. One species hyperaccumulates arsenic from the soil. Oh, yummy.]

This product material chooses to use the deep remote mountains wildness brake the northern Conghua of Guangzhou. It was dehydrated by forerunner the dry craft maked refine. Purely natural green food, don't contain any antiseptic, imbibition the water is good, delicious and nourishment is abundant, edibility convenience.

Usage Direction: 1. mix cold: Use boiling water Soak 5 minutes, make its restore to original vegetables shape, make dry put into garlic, sesame oil, ginger, salt etc the flavour. Can make into the pure fragrance and good to eat and dish vegetables. 2. stir-fry: Use boiling water Soak fish out after 5 minutes, can be fried at use to fry the other meat.

Hmm. It's two years out of date, and I probably only bought it for the pleasures of the packaging. (Last time I was in the far east, I thought I should probably set up a business, turning public notices, menus etc into actual English. Even in the posh hotels, it really can be shocking.)

Eat it, keep it, compost it Y/N?