i've been thinking about you, so how can you sleep?

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2 may 1997

12:36 a.m.

Dear diary, I've always been bad with names, but I'm utterly hopeless with dates. Anniversaries? Forget it. History classes? No thanks. What happened when? Hey, if it took place more than a month ago, please provide a complete citation. The inability to track the past is a major frustration in my life. Fortunately, my friends' disgust with my missing their birthdays is offset by my frequently forgetting my own. And one of the few upsides of forgetting is that you also soon forget you forgot. Four summers ago I worked for the state. This piece of trivia would hardly be notable, except I didn't remember ever having the job -- let alone have it listed on my resume -- until tonight. I wasn't trying to remember anything. I was avoiding a particularly difficult Hawaiian translation by making a tape. The next thing I know, I'm cursing and struggling to retrieve a Pizzicato Five CD I'd just bumped over the back edge of a drawer. I pulled the whole drawer out and started blindly groping around for it. When I pulled my arm from the land of cobwebs and lost pennies, I found two CDs in my hand. "Pablo Honey" was the other one, the first album by Radiohead. I hadn't listened to it for years, and apparently hadn't missed it either. Plum out of ideas as to what kind of music would make the most jarring transition from a Chopin piece, I popped it in. I skipped ahead one track to "Creep," the only song on the album that went anywhere in Billbored land. And all of a sudden it was 1993. As the singer whined "I want you to notice when I'm not around," I closed my eyes and the vision was crystal clear. I was sitting in my own cubicle at the back of a windowless, air conditioned sub-sub-department office in the basement of an obscure building, listening to a Sony Discman and desperately trying to make work for myself. A whole summer I forgot even existed was now as plain as yesterday. I could remember the exact layout of my cubicle, the emerald green XWindows color scheme I'd made on the sexy DECStation, the wiry, food-collecting mustache of the department's director... I remember between short bursts of COBOL programming, the office was dead for days on end. I remember thumbing through back issues of random computer magazines. I remember writing letters to every person I knew. Twice. I remember relabeling every computer disk I could get my hands on for no good reason. As each track passed, more details surfaced. The cute guys upstairs, the bi-weekly staff volleyball games, the walk to the old lunchwagon by City Hall... Most notably, I remember my area was equipped with a semi-industrial digital scale. By the end of the summer, I'd weighed every item in my cubicle -- right down to the trackball and a half-box of staples. I'd logged it all into a spreadsheet setup that was capable of tracking bills for a city twice the size of Honolulu, sorted it a dozen different ways, printed it out, and came this close to presenting the whole mess to my boss on my last day. This CD is part of the soundtrack of my life. I suppose everyone attaches songs to events, places, people. For me -- whether because my brain is otherwise useless or because my nostalgia runs deep -- there are moments when music does more than jog my memory. It takes me on full-blown tours of the past... or gives whole chunks of my life back.