River: of bananas and telephones

[mdlbear]

When I was about four years old I choked on a banana. I still can't eat them. I like them cooked, but the taste and texture of a raw banana is simply intolerable.

My freshman year in college I made a real effort to get dates; cold-calling several girls every week. I got shot down consistently, of course, and the calls got harder and harder. Finally, forty years or so later, I am sometimes able to make a non-emergency phone call to somebody I know well, if I have reason to think I won't be intruding. The only other time I was able to do that was the year my father was dying of cancer. That didn't get a whole lot easier, either.

It's not only negative experiences that leave a permanent mark, of course. I still remember every detail of the night I lost my virginity. So do most people, I imagine. If there had been music playing, it would probably be my favorite song.

The association doesn't have to be negative, either, even if the experience is painful. I still love genmaicha, the Japanese green tea with toasted rice, in large part because it was what E served the night she dumped me. It's the level of emotion that casts the association into stone.

It doesn't happen at a rational level, of course, and it can happen very quickly. I didn't decide never to have bananas again; I didn't have to. The association just happened, before I had time to think about it. The habits you form in a moment can take a lifetime to break. It can take decades before you even track them down to their source, let alone start to work on them. Often it's not worthwhile.

I'm still working on telephones, though I'll probably never be particularly comfortable with them. I don't think I'll ever like bananas.

Comments

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

To steal a line from Mercedes Lackey's "By the Sword"...

"...but that's a cold trail, and not worth following."

[kayshapero]

I guess "Bananaphone" is just plain out... :) (Hey, you're the one who got it stuck in my head again just now).

Seriously, I've noticed that myself about emotion - I remember some of the weirdest things because of that. Hey - I wonder if that explains how, when you mislay something, find it, then put it away somewhere safe it's where you found it that you remember because of the relief, not where you put it shortly thereafter.

So perhaps no matter what I forget in later years I'll keep the night I met niall_shapero, Vicky's arrival and the like. The IMPORTANT stuff.

[mdlbear]

Yes, probably -- to all three.

I'll often have vivid memories of things like where I was standing when I got a crucial line of a poem or song. Emotion is what marks something as important enough to remember.

[kayshapero]

And why "where were you when" is a fairly easy game to play.

[callibr8]

For me it's carrots (a bad encounter when I was 10).

From what I've read, the olfactory sense is the most lizard-brain of the five, so it's no wonder that certain scents (or smells) can catapult one's brain back to a specific time and situation.

[mdlbear]

*nod* they certainly can, though I think that what does it for me with bananas is the texture -- I can handle cooked bananas with no problems. But touch goes pretty far down the evolutionary tree, too.

Phones may be different yet again; that one seems to have developed over a longer time. On the other hand, I just realized that touch may be a factor there, too; that may explain why I seem to have less trouble with cell phones than I do with regular (landline) handsets. Interesting...

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

The ambivalences of a vivid power of memory are familiar. Carrying such fragments of a past reality has seriously subversive potential, by the way -- kind of like being a time traveler. For example, I doubt that you're at all taken in by those who would have us believe that the status quo "has always been this way" -- they may manage to fool most of the people most of the time, but not someone who's *been there* in a very different era and *remembers what it was like.*

[mdlbear]

Indeed. Being the resident oldster is one of my primary job functions, in a research lab where our current batch of new hires are young enough to be my kids.