I’ve been doing some very non-scientific research that I think will nonetheless make it into the medical journals.
Remember how when you were 10 and then, 30, how life went on forever? How a year lasted a near decade, it took so long to come back around to Christmas again? You don’t hear 12 year-olds saying, “Seems like it just happened yesterday!” Those words are saved for grown folks who can’t believe that little baby is now going off to college.
From what I understand, the reason time flies ever faster each year is because it’s all relative. In the first year of life a year is a literal lifetime. You then live 50 years, and 365 days compacts down into a fleeting moment compared to all the days you’ve walked the earth by then. It’s all about comparisons.
Here’s where my 3 a.m. thought-up research comes in.
When you were five, all the information you had to keep in your little head consisted of what time dinner was, who the people who took care of you were, and what was on TV. Then, you started growing, and because you went to school in the old days, you learned to write in cursive, all about world history, arithmetic and geography, and all that information went into the file cabinet in your head next to the files containing dinner times, caring people and the TV schedule.
Then, you went on to learn how people work — and that took up a whole lot of your brain — about love and disappointment and how grade point averages affect your chances of going to college. Then, they invented 24 hour-news, cable TV and fax machines, and with that, the entire world exploded. Then, computers and internet came along and suddenly the claim that the NY Times carries more information in a single day than a person of the 17th century learned in an entire lifetime seemed like it could be plausible — and probable.
And then you went out into the world and studied some more or got a job or had kids or did something else that nearly crashed the system. There was so much to remember in a day.
So, by the time you get really grown (beyond 55) you’ve got more information in your big head than you ever thought possible, so that remembering the name of . . . you know . . . that girl, with the hair. She came to our party — you know . . . what’s her name . . . oh . . . whatever!
Her name, compared to what Donald Trump did today and the reactions of all who agree or disagree with you on it . . . “Christine? Is that it? No, that’s not . . . wait” . . . Clarissa . . . no. You know — she’s married to that guy. What’s his name? Leonard! She’s married to Leonard. And her name is . . . She wears pink a lot. Crap. What is her name?
Anyway, remembering at this advanced age that Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, that there are 128 ounces in a gallon, that Chaucer died in 1400 (I had an English professor in college who told me to never forget that, and I didn’t!), that Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, to pay your electric bill on time, how to speak French, 77 passwords and to be sure you turn down the heat before you go to bed takes up so much room that the little stuff — or even important stuff — gets stuffed behind the sofa cushions in your brain, because there is just so much stuff in there. But it is not because you’re getting old.
“Helga! That’s it!” That’s nothing like those other names, I know. But that’s her name.
Doesn’t that sound like real science to you? I think it is. I think I’m gonna get a prize for it. What’s the name of that prize they give for breakthrough scientific discoveries? I don’t know. But, I know I’m getting it for this.