Moonwalking with dynamite

In hindsight, blogging during 2020 might have yielded regular content, some of which might have even been worth reading. Anger used to fuel my writing from years (and years and years ago) Since I lost my mind I also lost my anger, along with my memory. It’s very hard to be stay mad when you can’t remember the problem.

I logged on to talk about #lockdown but bam: talking about memory again.

Last night I finished Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein which a) I enjoyed and b) actually finished.

Joshua talks about his foray into the world of memory championships or.. to be more exact.. spending a year training for the American one. He talks to lots of people about memory. About having one; not having one; having a really really good one; how to get much, much better with the one you have. 

One of his first lessons was the use of a “memory palace”. If you’ve ever watched Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, you’re bound to know he uses one to great effect. As I was reading Ed explaining and training Joshua with a “to do list” to remember as he built his memory palace, I followed along and dang if it didn’t work! I hope that sounds positive because.. for me.. it did work. 

Ed urged Josh to remember each object in an exceptional way like the jar of pickled garlic as a massive jar in the car port, something so amusing and detailed and strange that you just can’t forget it; maybe like Einstein moonwalking. After committing the same list to my memory palace, each item with a distinctive, creative, detailed image associated with it I put my book away and fell asleep. Upon waking I found the list was still available to me in the order and where I had place it.

That was half-a-book and two weeks ago, and here I am able to recall the list still. For a woman who had to get the NZ mobile phone provider to give me the same number I had while I lived in Australia because it had taken me THREE YEARS to learn, I am flummoxed at how I can still remember the fourteen weird items on Ed’s to do list. 

The thing is; I can’t seem to forget it.

I don’t know how to clear out my memory palace. The giant jar of pickled garlic is still in the ‘car port with the peat-smoked salmon swimming around in a cottage-cheese garden. I don’t feel like anything else can fit because these gigantic ridiculous items are tripping me up when I walk about my memory palace!

Mention is made in the book that the memory competitors “clean out” their memory palaces, opening up all the ‘windows’ and letting the sunlight shine in, getting ready for a competition. But they didn’t explain how to do that.

A quick Google suggests that clearing out a memory palace is as personal as populating it. Seems that visualising the palace as very empty and lonely helps, as does going to each place in the palace a memory has been placed and destroying it - dynamite seems to most popular weapon of choice.

That’s gonna make a mess of the cottage cheese and salmon!

Get down, lock down

Auckland under Level 3 lockdown again. The unexplained/untraceable community case is quite close to where I live - and has impacted some neighbours. The infected person was in the community for a week before testing positive, so the number of contacts is potentially high which is why we all locked down again.

We don’t have any new cases today which is awesome.

Our Prime Minister, Jacinda Adern has just presented at our daily 1 pm nationwide news conference and has reminded us we haven’t had any deaths due to Covid-19 for some time, but to never forget that this virus does kill. They are sharing details of how this variant of the virus is presenting differently, and for everyone to pay attention to any symptoms.

My oldest son has had a Covid test today as he works in the area (results: negative). Everyone is being extra-careful, and there are lots of testing stations to meet the demand of cautiousness.

Back to normal (whatever that means)

And true to their word - in combination with months-honed contact tracing and genome-sequencing, our little UK variant outbreak is contained and we can move back to Alert Level 2 (and to Level 1 come Monday if all goes to plan).

I read an interesting article about the UK variant on Stuff the other day - if you can get past the long advert on the video, it’s well worth a watch as the difference in spread in NZ of UK Covid with the risk mitigation’s in place (alert level protocols) compared to not having them is quite interesting. While the genome sequencing lets us know it’s the same variant, I guess our “habits” of bubbles, social distancing, masks and washing our hands have something to do with the spread being slower or smaller which buys a bit more time.

In theory, locking down should get easier each time, but for some reason, it doesn’t. I thought it might just be me: our comms at work goes UP as the levels do, so I feel constantly on a tenter hook waiting for the next bunch of copy for an email/web blast to come through. But after talking to others, they felt this week was a bit of a slog too.

Don’t get any of us wrong - we are flipping lucky population to be where we are, how we are, and who we trust to lead us - we have a LOT of things going our way at the moment. But hard is hard, OK? And I’m thankful it’s a) the weekend and b) we’re in Level 2 with Level 1 clearly in sight.