June 25, 2007
Sometimes I wish I knew the algorithm my brain uses to decide what gets placed into long-term storage and what gets thrown out.
I understand that some of it has to do with repeated exposure: I've seen The Wrath of Khan enough times to know all the important dialog and most of the almost-important dialog. Likewise for the original Star Wars trilogy and 80s music.
I'm thinking more of other stuff though. I've forgotten more than half of all the college-level physics I learned, and almost all the calculus. History classes -- even the ones I liked -- barely exist as fragments that might fill a single lecture if I pasted them all together.
But while I was watching the original Star Wars * last week, I remembered an off-hand comment about how two of the girls that used to come by Sig Tau somehow got the nicknames C3PO and R2D2. Now keep in mind that I only met these two because I liked my senior year so much I decided to show up for a third semester of it.
I barely talked to one of them to begin with; the other I hadn't spoken to in more than seven years (I was at Brady but I vaguely remember e-mailing on CMU's system, which means my CMU account was still active, which puts it sometime before the end of the Spring 2000 semester). But once something gets into my head it'll bug the hell out of me until I track it down (thank Og for Google) so I found her MySpace page.
Turns out she has a Masters degree from CMU's School of Computer Science, thus adding her to the (extremely long) list of people who are much smarter than me.
Silly nicknames I can keep indefinietly. But I have to write myself a note to remember to shut off the air conditioner before I leave for work in the morning.
* The good version, with Han shooting first and not stepping on Jabba's tail (because there's no Jabba). The opening crawl doesn't even have "Episode IV: A New Hope" at the beginning.
