You know that you've gotten old when you suddenly realize that Meatloaf song you always loved was actually performed by The Who. There isn't room here to recount all of the reasons my boyfriend is lucky to have me, but nestled comfortably among the top 5 is the abysmal incompetence of my functional short term memory.
I can recite every term and definition from the vocabulary section of my 4th grade CTBS test, I can quote the movie "Heathers" verbatim, and (for god knows what reason) I can tell you that blanding's painted turtle embryos undergo a natural developmental process similar to the metastasis of cancerous cells which renders them immune to the effects of senescence and effectively immortal--but I can't for the life of me remember what I ate for lunch, if I ate lunch at all, or what pigheaded thing my boyfriend might have said before distracting me with something sparkly.
It makes me wonder: was it all of the bully-related head trauma in the 80s? The copious quantities of LSD in the 90s? The alcohol that saturated both of those decades and the better part of the next? Or do most people my age experience a reduced capacity for memory?
Using "When does memory start to decline" as my Google search parameter, I found this interesting article (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/010814063231.htm) which purports that my memory has been continuously in decline for 10 years or more.
Of course, in the search for that article I encountered unrelated studies which claimed that sleep is essential for memory performance (I haven't gotten any since starting school in 09), which could just as well account for my cognitive malfunction as anything else.
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