have you ever had a piece of information fall out of your head? you’re walking along and plop, something you swear up and down you used to be completely sure of… is gone. what remains is simply the empty slot in your brain where the information used to live. so you have a memory of information. just not the information itself.
this happened to my best friend once. she couldn’t remember a word. she knew the meaning of the word she was looking for, and then she couldn’t remember it. we spent an entire weekend trying to remember the word, asking everyone we knew if they could remember it. the funny thing is, now i can’t remember it either. see? and i haven’t even done enough drugs for this to be blamed on the inevitable short-term memory-loss.
but yesterday i lost something of my own. something fell out of my ear. something i’ve known for years. it’s the force-quit command for macs.
i’ve been dealing with fidgety, dodgy macs for five years. mostly in college, where i ran the newspaper on that plasticky-bit-on-the-end-of-a-shoestring budget (is there even a word for that plasticky bit? have i forgotten that too?). the temperamental macs that pissed everyone off at the computer lab? those were handed down to us, cinderella-style. our computers here at work, too, are cranky old apples. so i’m quite used to force-quitting a program in order to keep work-flow moving.
and then yesterday, IE freaked out on me like it does on a daily basis, and i forgot how to force-quit. i spent all day willing my fingers to naturally gloss back over those beloved and useful keys to execute to ship-saving prompt. nothing. i’ve psyched myself out. i can’t remember.
database out of memory space. please help.

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