Maybe This is Where The Term "Feather Brained" Comes From

A couple of weeks ago I was making one of my exciting forays to the grocery store and decided to buy one of those mammoth Valu-Paks of chicken breasts, the ones that come on a styrofoam tray that's so huge you can use it for a boogie board after you're done. They were on sale, and I was so excited I spent the rest of my supermarket outing daydreaming of all the creative ways I'd be using that bounty of chicken over the next few years - chicken stew, chicken enchiladas, chicken tikka. By the time I was done with that chicken my kids would be on their way to college and Rigel and I could get back to eating fast food everynight like normal people do.

The next day I hopped in my van to run some errands and noticed an odd smell, which isn't unusual considering the girls have a small farm of forgotten and discarded Frappuccinos and Jamba Juices growing in the backseat. But this one was worse, sort of...chickeny. I'm sure you can guess where this is going.

Somehow my coveted Valu-Pak had managed to get left behind in the back of the van when I unloaded the car the day before. And with everything else going on I hadn't noticed that it wasn't there when I was putting away the groceries. And no, I didn't even consider for one minute trying to fry up that putrid mass and serve it to my family for dinner that night. Okay, maybe only for a minute.

I wish I could say this is an isolated incident, but things like this seem to be happening more frequently. The other day I was at Barnes&Noble with the kids, and was so concerned with finding their manga books and sucking down the last of my cappuccino that I wandered off and left my purse, wide open, on a chair for around fifteen minutes. Then there's the forgetting of my PIN number (in my defense it was a bank issued number, but still one that I'd had for awhile) and numerous incidents where I have to make Rigel drive back to the house because I can't remember if I turned the stove/cappuccino machine/curling iron off. If this keeps up I'm going to be one of those mothers you hear about on the news that leaves her kids in the gas station restroom and doesn't realize it until she goes to sign them up for swim lessons three months later.

A friend of mine once theorized that we only have so many slots in our brains for information, and the more things we have going on in our lives (e.g., kids, and then there's kids) the faster those slots fill up. Once they're all filled, the only way to take in any more data is for some other piece of information to be deleted. So, while figuring out how to work the Wii and memorizing the sales dates at Bloomingdales may be important, it could cause other more vital information to be pushed out, like the fact that you have twenty pounds of poultry rotting in the back of your van.

I've decided that the only way to get back on track is to try and delete some of the less important information that's taking up valuable space in my obviously crowded frontal lobe. Sort of like clearing my hard drive off all my unnecessary files, like invoices from ten years ago and those 20mb jpegs of Jake Gyllenhaal half naked. So, I'm going to try really hard to forget Paris Hilton ever existed and attempt to wipe the words to Disco Inferno (Burn, baby burn!) out of my head. Maybe then I'll remember where I put that twenty-dollar bill that I swore I stuffed in my makeup bag.

I'll let you know how my little experiment is going. In the meantime, if I have you over for dinner, don't eat the chicken.

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tags: i can't remember how to tag a post

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