Memory’s a fickle bitch (and the Badger Blogging Blitz)

March 23, 2014 at 08:39 | Posted in Badger Blogging Blitz, Life | 1 Comment
Tags: annoyingly introspective rants, blogging, Korea, laziness, memory

One of my greatest fears in Korea is in relation to how transient my experiences are here. Knowing I’ve got a firm expiration date on my time here only heightens the concern. The day to day minutiae of my life will be mostly forgotten. The joint biases of attention and memory will magnify and distort certain aspects, while others recede from memory altogether. What’s worse is that the effect will only be amplified each time I savour one of these precious memories, further distancing it from the original. In any case, even initial perception is in no way a tape recorder of reality, so I suppose memory is just one more obnoxious filter to layer on. The annoying Instagram of your life.

What I want to remember most is the intangible, the overall gestalt, what it actually felt like to live here.  Things that cannot be expressed in words — the total summation of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, physical sensations, social exchanges, mundane routines and exciting experiences alike  — you know, the texture of my life. It’s not something I’ve got the talent for conveying via words. I guess the kind of memory I’m hoping for is the kind that catches you off-guard, spurred by some oddly anachronistic smell or inexplicable confluence of perceptual stimuli — the sort of memory that you can explain no better with words than you could the original experience. But the memory feels more authentic in that vagueness, its inability to be broken down into anything more discrete. Interestingly, when I first came to Korea, I was often struck by the most seemingly random memories from long, long ago; some I was fairly convinced I hadn’t even thought of for twenty straight years. Memory is strongly linked with perception and your mental state, and Korea is nothing if not a unique experience in perception and mental states. Anyways, there’s heaps of science out there with far more interesting and substantive claims to make about experience and memory than me just prattling on.

I guess the point I initially wanted to make is that I’ve done a pretty piss-poor job of chronicling my time here. However, that’s going to change! For at least one week, in any case.  A fellow UW alumna and Korea transplant has initiated a Badger Blogging Blitz. I and a few other UW alumni here in Korea are going to blog every day for a week! We’ll recap our days and answer a couple questions each day. Given my past track record, I’m sure it’ll be a challenge, but I’ll do my best and commit at least some of my daily experience to the page, er screen. Wait, no, page works too.

Wish me luck! And let me know if there are any questions you’d like to ask me or the other bloggers.

Other badger bloggers in Korea:

Bodging for Apples II

Outside the Pyxis

Rebe with a Clause

The Hungry Partier

The Traveling Flamingo