What "The Muffin" told me & other memories

XGF set me straight earlier today when she commented on my previous post. Turns out The Muffin -- that whacky former neighbor of ours -- did in fact tell me what "The Answer" was.

She said only, "One."

How could I forget that?

Considering my elephantine ways with recalling conversations, it is unusual for me to need reminding about what someone told me. But it does occasionally happen.

Thankfully, there are a few people out in the world who remember some of the stuff I forget. XGF is one. My sister is another.

That brings me to my next topic, which is the matter of what we want people to remember about us. As S2 noted in a conversation last night -- and then, again this afternoon -- I've become a little "obsessed" lately with narrative. (It's not really "lately," per se. It's a long-running obsession.)

But I've been talking to her about it a lot because I've started narrowing the focus for an independent study I'm doing at school this fall. I'm specifically interested in exploring the intersection between the narrative we tell about our lives -- the meaning we give to our experiences, the way we conceptualize what our intent has been (often retrospectively), the things we want people to believe about us -- and the process of facing death, as when one is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

I'm not going to go into my developing theory or approach on this here blog. It's not well-formed yet, and when it finally does get well-formed, I intend to bottle and sell it rather than giving it away for free on the Internet.

But, because I always try to provide my readers with a little taste of the quirk that is my approach to life, I will tell you what I did last weekend, when I was working a LOOOOOOOONG day at the H4TCI.

I wrote S2's life story. Without her permission or even her knowledge. Personally, I think that may be a little ... rude, because it does technically belong to her. And the fact that I wrote it in first person ... well, some people might consider that a violation in some way.

But your UCM is nothing if not faithfully and earnestly disrespectful. So I went ahead and did it anyway.

Now, to be fair, just because I claim to have written her "life story" doesn't mean I wrote it accurately. It is, admittedly, a flawed version of events. It starts out with the flaw of being drawn only on the base of our conversations over the past two years, conversations that were never intended to transmit her life story.

Also, S2 is essentially a private person, so she keeps a lot of personal stuff to herself.

And, finally, I do so much of the talking in our relationship that she appeared to me last night in a dream and said she had found me hiding where I was (hiding from murderous space aliens) because, "I heard you talking. You were talking to yourself. Apparently, you are *always* talking!") So with all my talking, it's possible S2 has not found an open mic within our friendship through which she could actually transmit her life stories. (Truth: S2 has never in waking life complained to me that I talk to much. That's my own issue.)

Anyway, it turns out that I've collected more data than I realized. I wrote a little more than four pages, single spaced, and S2 said I "hit all the big ones." And in talking about it, I realized again how much more I actually knew -- particularly the ways in which she once used her parent's credit card -- that I was not able to tap into while I was doing this exercise.

Exactly what the *point* of my exercise was, however, is not quite clear. Some of it stemmed from a conversation last week in which I told S2 I think she knows a lot more about me than I know about her. (Perhaps if I would stop talking sometimes....) Some it stemmed from this "obsession" I have with life narrative. Some of it was just a matter of testing my memory, particularly when it hadn't been intentionally collecting information.

It was such an interesting thing to do that I considered trying my hand at more people in my life. Just to see what I think I know about them and what they're telling me about themselves. Or, at least, what I have managed to remember.

The only problem with that idea -- truth: there are actually *many* problems with it -- is that I don't have the time to do it. I can barely keep up on my own life story. My frame of reference seems to be shifting in ways I can't quite catch up to right now.

However, at some point, I imagine this might be part of the work I do with people. If that's so -- and if death begins to malinger on your horizon (or if you are just interested in giving form to your story) -- hunt me down, and we'll do some work around it.

In the meantime, I guess I can say to S2: I gotcha covered.*

(*indicates a margin of error +/- 3 percent)