So on Friday a coworker gave me a gross of CD jewel cases; my first question, of course, was "did these 'fall off a truck'"? Apparently not, but yeah, I've got a lifetime supply now. If this kinda only needed the one, but hey.

The word gross (in the numerical sense) always reminds me of the Politician: he seemed to use it all the time. Likewise, the word goofy will always remind me of his wife, who had an inexplicable grudge against it.

Leaving aside names, nicknames, and descriptive adjectives, there are some other words for which I have non-obvious associations with people — multiple and Jenna, empathy and Jonas, whimsy and Flo... I seem to have a lexical association for most of the important people I've known, mostly from words that came up in conversation.

I'd like to think that, ceteris soberus*, I have a good memory for what people have said, for voices, and for where things are (e.g. words in a book, objects in the house, information on the Internet). And I'm talking about the processing and storage levels of memory — there are other types of knowledge, like geek trivia, procedures, rules, and mental maps of certain areas — which I recall well only because of constant repetition. I don't have a "good memory" when it comes to that stuff: I'm just a bit obsessive.

On the other hand, I have a bad memory for names, dates, faces, circumstances — and while I'll recognize text as familiar, I can rarely if ever correctly quote something I've previously read. That's really inconvenient, because it means I can't cook anything without the recipe right in front of me.

Except for television stuff, I don't seem to store visual memories very well at all, and I don't think I have any memories of the real world that consist of several images in sequence.

Other people have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to memory, and I've long thought it strange that there should be any variation in the filing systems. It's hard for me not to act puzzled when someone can't remember a months-old anecdote, or defensive when I can't attach a name to a face.

(As happened yesterday at Ben's, with his friends Drew and John... but the Mariokart Drinking Game solves all problems. It's rare that I can devote a night to both beer snobbery — Ben brought me a delicious Ganter Wodan from Germany — and videogame-based binge drinking.)

*Almost certainly a nonsensical phrase