Am I repeating repeating myself? Am I I?

I will have you know that I used to be very smart. I had a brain like a steel trap, full of both important and trivial knowledge. Seriously. I won the 2nd grade trivia contest, you know! The prize: a book of trivia. Gosh, Mrs. Lindstrom sure had a great sense of humor.

So, I have been slowly realizing over the past 5 years that my brain seems to be slowly oozing out of my skull, or my neurons are misfiring. The steel trap is not so steely anymore; it's more like rusty tin, or maybe not even metallic -- mashed potatoes or pudding. Yeah, a pudding trap doesn't work very well I've found.

The main result of this bad brain is that I don't remember 90% of what I watch or read anymore. Unless I read a book more than once, it immediately starts seeping out of my head. It makes being a participant in my book club extra challenging if I start forgetting a book moments after I've finished it. The first time I really noticed this was when I read the book Ahab's Wife, which is really long. I was well over halfway through when I realized, "Hey! I've read this before!" And it's not like I had read it 10 years before. No, probably had been 6 months. But I had zero recollection until one sentence jarred my memory.

This goes for films as well. Though I do have a somewhat better memory for films, it's not really that impressive when I average seeing three movies a month. Since having children, I average 2 movies a year in a theater, and the rest I TiVo or watch on DVD when I visit my mom. (We don't rent DVDs anymore. We even failed at Netflix. Yes, we suck.) Anyway, the point of this is that I just wasted 2 hours watching "Signs" which I had TiVo'ed on Saturday night from ABC. I started watching, and things were vaguely familiar, yet I had no recollection of having seen the movie before. Definitely not in the theater. A few scenes in, it's coming back to me: "Hmm, there's something about those water glasses all over the house that comes into play later...." Further on, I'm still watching even though I now know I've seen this movie before. "Hmm, is M. Night a doctor in this movie? Wait, I think that's the Sixth Sense." By the halfway point, I can remember the final scene of the movie, but I continue watching. I might as well finish it, right? I at least got some knitting done, so it wasn't a total waste.

It would be fantastic to be able to actually remember if I've read a book or seen a movie before, though, so when I am faced with a two hour block of free time I can use it to maybe read a book I haven't read yet, or see a movie I haven't watched before. Considering there are millions of books and hundreds of movies out there that I could be tackling for the first time, or that I could be revisiting the classics, I don't think reading Ahab's Wife twice or watching Signs a second time is really necessary.

Sigh, I better go to bed so I can give my feeble brain a break. I think I'll go buy some Omega 3s tomorrow!