DENIED. DENIED. DENIED.

Things We Can Earn, Things We Can Learn—and the Things Life Simply Refuses to Give Us

There are things I want in life.

I'd like a house on the water. I'd like a cabin in the mountains. I'd like enough land to grow food, room for my collections, a place for my crafts and, apparently, enough storage for a Christmas village that has developed its own municipal government.

But I'm not jealous of people who already have those things.

If you have a beautiful beachfront house, good for you. I don't want you to lose it. I don't resent you for having it. I may admire it. I may want one of my own someday. Or maybe I never get one.

I'm surprisingly okay with that.

The things that really irritate me are much smaller.

And much bigger.

1.    I want three more inches of leg.

Not three inches taller because somebody might put them in my torso and then I'd really be pissed. I have specifications.

Three inches. Legs. Please.

Denied.

2.    I'd like to be one of those people who can eat according to appetite without gaining weight.

I'm not particularly interested in sweets, with the notable exception of dark chocolate. I'm not sitting around eating bowls of pasta, piles of rice and loaves of bread. Yet apparently my body has decided that calories are precious little treasures that should be preserved for future generations.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the world is a woman eating like a raccoon loose in a convenience store who has been the same size for thirty years.

I don't want her to gain weight.

I just want whatever the hell she has.

Denied.

3.    But the one I really want?         Memory.

Not remembering where I put my keys. In fact, spatial memory is one of the things I'm apparently quite good at.

Years ago, I worked half-days doing bookkeeping for an architectural company. If you looked at my desk, you wouldn't have known anyone worked there. The desktop was clear. Everything was lined up. I had three pens that I used; the rest were kept in a box at the back of the desk.

I could walk in and immediately know someone had been sitting at my desk.

The full-time employee would ask me how I knew.

Something had moved.

Maybe only slightly. But I knew.

Years later, bosses would call me when I was on vacation—or, in one case, about six months after I had left the job—because they couldn't find something.

I could close my eyes, picture the desk or drawer & tell them where I remembered seeing it.

There was, of course, one critical condition:

Nobody could have moved it.

Move something two inches and apparently you create a disturbance in the Force.

I once had a large kitchen and alphabetized my spices. That probably tells you everything you need to know.

But that isn't the kind of memory I envy.

I've known people who seem to absorb information and simply keep it.

I worked with someone in payroll who remembered the names of employees going all the way back to when she started working there.

My daughter can read a book and months later I can ask her something about it and she knows the answer. Show her a dance and within a few repetitions she can have the entire thing.

Kurt can remember what I was wearing on particular occasions.

I had a girlfriend who told me she could close her eyes during a test, visualize the textbook page and find the answer on it.

That's what I want.

·         I want to read a contract and be able to recall it verbatim.

·         I want to read a court decision and, six months later, remember the case name, the principle and where I read it.

·         I want to read a statute and be able to retrieve the section when I need it.

·         I want to read something James Madison wrote and later remember not merely the idea, but where he wrote it and what he actually said.

·         I want to read about growing vegetables and remember their planting seasons, soil requirements, sunlight needs, watering schedules, companion plants and the circadian rhythms that influence their growth. I want to know which plants thrive together, which compete, and why—without having to look it all up again every spring.

·         I want to read a real estate contract and remember every clause, contingency, deadline and disclosure requirement. I want to recall the applicable statutes, zoning regulations, building codes and property restrictions without having to search through a mountain of reference materials every time a question comes up.

I don't want to think:        I KNOW I read this somewhere.

I want my brain to say:    Here it is.

Denied.

4.    And while we're handing out superpowers, I'd also like the ability to learn languages extraordinarily quickly.

Some people seem to have an ear for language. Put them among native speakers and they begin picking up sounds, rhythm, vocabulary and patterns remarkably quickly.

That's the superpower I mean.

Drop me somewhere for a few weeks and let me start communicating with the people around me in their own language.

Imagine what that would open.

Books I couldn't otherwise read.

People I couldn't otherwise understand.

History available in its original language instead of through somebody else's translation.

Cultures experienced from the inside instead of through a linguistic window.

I'd take that one too.

Denied.

And then there is the biggest one.

5.    Time.

Because what good would all these abilities be without enough time to use them?

There are more books than I could ever read.

More places than I could ever visit.

More things I want to learn than I could possibly learn.

More rabbit holes than Digipal and I could crawl through if we worked around the clock for the rest of my life.

There are things I want to build, things I want to write, crafts I want to make, history I want to investigate, people I want to help and ideas I haven't even encountered yet.

So yes, if vampires were real, I'd seriously consider the offer.

Not because I'm terrified of dying.

I'd just be standing there saying:

WAIT. I'M NOT FUCKING FINISHED.

Give me another 400 years. I have things to do.

Denied.

The Things I Can Do Something About

Perhaps that's why inefficiency irritates me as much as it does.

If something can be improved, I want to improve it.

If I have fifty envelopes to prepare, I'm not going to print one, stuff it, label it, seal it, prepare the certified-mail paperwork and then begin envelope number two.

·         I print all of them.

·         Then I stuff all of them.

·         Then I label all of them.

·         Then I prepare all the certified pieces.

·         Then I seal all of them.

Every necessary task still gets done. I simply eliminate unnecessary transitions.

So, when I'm standing at the post office watching someone pick up a stamper, stamp one envelope, put the stamper down, move to the next envelope and then pick the stamper back up again, there is a voice inside my head screaming:

DON'T PUT IT DOWN. YOU'RE NOT DONE WITH IT.

I can't help it.

My brain sees the unnecessary motion.

That same instinct followed me through work.

At one company, I took over responsibilities that had previously constituted a full-time position and performed them working twenty hours a week, with time remaining for additional projects.

That wasn't because I skipped the work.

I looked for ways to eliminate unnecessary work.

There's an important difference between a shortcut that compromises the result and a shortcut that removes waste.

·        Why do six steps if three produce the same result?

·        Why touch something five times when it only needs to be touched twice?

·       Why search for cayenne every time you cook when you can alphabetize the damn spices and know exactly where cayenne lives?

Everything should have a place.

And every step in a process should have a purpose.

But Some Things Don't Care How Efficient You Are

That's where the frustration comes in.

I'm accustomed to looking at a problem and asking:

What can I do about it?

Sometimes there is an answer.

I may not have extraordinary factual recall, but I can take notes. I can organize files. I can create indexes. I can keep records.

I may not acquire languages effortlessly, but I can study.

I may not have unlimited time, but I can avoid wasting the time I do have.

Those are problems that permit some degree of negotiation.

But some things don't.

·         You cannot organize your way into longer legs.

·         You cannot work hard enough to acquire somebody else's natural memory.

·         You cannot create another century of life by developing a more efficient filing system.

There are things we can earn.

There are things we can learn.

There are things we can change.

There are things we can compensate for.

And then there are things we simply have to live without.

That last category pisses me off.

What I Wouldn't Trade

There are, however, things that don't belong in the genetic lottery.

·         Ethics.

·         Morals.

·         Judgment.

·         Work ethic.

Those involve choices.

Perfect memory wouldn't automatically make someone wise.

Intelligence doesn't make someone ethical.

Knowledge doesn't guarantee common sense.

There is another ability I wouldn't want to give up either: reasoning.

For a long time, I probably would have lumped reasoning and common sense together. They overlap, but they aren't quite the same thing.

Memory asks:   What information do I have?

Reasoning: What does that information mean—and what follows from it?

Common sense asks:        Given what I know, what actually makes sense to do?

I may struggle to retrieve the name of a case I read six months ago, but give me the facts and my brain immediately starts looking for relationships between them. What doesn't fit? What contradicts something else? If this is true, what else should also be true? What happens next? Is there another way to accomplish the same thing?

I do it with work. I do it with houses. I do it with people. I do it with problems.

Give me fifty envelopes and I see a process that can be reorganized.

Give me a house on a busy road and I'm already thinking about how a buyer gets in and out, school traffic, driveway configuration, neighboring properties, future development and what I should investigate before someone asks me about it.

It's pattern recognition, systems thinking and problem-solving all working together.

And perhaps that's why imperfect factual recall frustrates me so much.

I can reason with information beautifully. I just wish the damn information would report for duty when summoned.

Apparently the universe decided I could have the processing department but not the filing clerk.

Denied.

Someone could memorize an entire law library and still exercise terrible judgment.

Someone could be brilliant and use that brilliance dishonestly.

Someone could follow every instruction perfectly without ever stopping to ask whether the instruction makes any sense.

Maybe that's why we live in a world where someone apparently decided a pizza box needed instructions telling people to remove the pizza before eating it.

·         Knowledge tells you what has been learned.

·         Memory lets you retrieve it.

·         Intelligence helps you understand it.

·         Efficiency finds a better way to accomplish something.

·         Common sense asks whether what you're doing makes any damn sense.

·         Ethics asks whether you should do it at all.

Those aren't interchangeable.

And if I were given a choice between being the person I am with imperfect memory and being someone with extraordinary memory but without ethics, morals, work ethic or common sense?

I'll keep what I have.

Reluctantly.

I would, however, still like to file an appeal regarding the other items.

My Petition to the Universe

Three additional inches of leg?

Denied.

Eat what I want without gaining weight?

Denied.

Read something once and retrieve it years later?

Denied.

Drop me into another country and let me absorb the language in a few weeks?

Denied.

Several additional centuries so I can actually get through my to-do list?

Denied.

Fine.

·         I'll work with what I've got.

·         I'll write things down.

·         I'll organize the files.

·         I'll alphabetize the spices.

·         I'll batch the envelopes.

·         I'll keep learning.

·         I'll keep reading.

·         I'll keep asking questions.

I'll keep trying to squeeze as much as possible out of however much time I have.

And when something genuinely cannot be changed, I'll eventually accept it.

Probably.

But if the universe is taking requests, I would like the record to reflect that I continue to object.

And if a vampire happens to be reviewing applications—

we should talk.

·         Knowledge — what I've learned.

·         Memory — can I retrieve it?

·         Intelligence — can I understand it?

·         Reasoning — what does it mean, how does it connect, and what follows?

·         Efficiency — is there a better way to do it?

·         Common sense — does this actually make sense in the real world?

·         Ethics — should I do it?

And then there is Rita:

“Excellent. I'll keep all of those. But I'd still like the upgraded memory package, three inches of leg, a cooperative metabolism, instant languages and another 400 years.”

Universe:

DENIED. DENIED. DENIED.

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