Sometimes I feel really clueless. And then sometimes, I just feel old.
Tonight, apparently, are the Golden Globe awards, and I was completely unaware that they were being televised until I signed on to Twitter and saw a kazillion snarky tweets about dresses and hairdo's and sore losers making faces at the monitor.
It isn't that I care so much about the Golden Globe awards, but it just seems as if I should have known they were on.
So, I'm clueless.
But before all that, one of my friends asked me a question - the name of the computer store on the corner, the one that I walk by every morning when I walk the dogs, the one I actually told this friend about when she asked if I knew of a computer store in the neighborhood.
Do you think I could remember the name of the store?
No.
There was nothing but a huge black spot in my brain where the name of that store used to be.
And that made me feel really old.
As a matter of fact, the very same thing happened to me just a few days ago. Someone asked to the name of something very familiar, and I could not, for the life of me, recall it. Now, not only can I not recall the specific name, I can no longer recall who asked me or what they were asking about.
See, I'm not normally the kind of person who has trouble remembering things. As a matter of fact, when anyone in my family wants to know the name of Aunt Mary's youngest granddaughter's husband and when they got married, they usually ask me. I'm known as the archiver of useless and trivial information.
So when I lose the name of an ordinary store, a name that I look at each and every day as I walk by, and then look at it again later when I drive by on my way to work, then I feel not only old, but frightened.
I simply cannot start having dark black holes where my memory is supposed to be.
I know I'm getting old (er). In another two months, I will be --wait, I'm mustering the courage to write this---55 years old.
Gulp.
The unfortunate thing about this whole "aging process" is that it's completely irrevocable and totally out of my control. Sure, I can exercise regularly, do crossword puzzles, and eat leafy greens until the cows come home, but there is no guarantee that any of that will do me one bit of good. I could still end up an addlepated mess who can't remember where's she supposed to be at any given moment. And don't let people tell you that getting older is nothing to worry about, or that life begins when you're 50, or that 60 is the new 40, or any of that other bromidic nonsense the media keeps hurling at us poor baby boomers in their pathetic attempt to make us feel optimistic enough to buy whatever product they're selling.
Getting older is just for the birds, and there's no two ways about it.
Maybe that's why we start forgetting things as we age. That way we don't remember all the good things about being younger, so we can remain clueless about what we're now missing.