Things I Remember, But Don't Need to Know

Have you ever wondered how big of a percentage of your memory contains completely useless information?  I know so much stuff that's a complete waste of brain matter that I thought maybe if I purged some of it here, I could free up some prime real estate.

Things I remember for no good reason:

• Kim Kardashian was married for 72 days before filing for divorce.  Whoopity-doo!  All forms of media are pushing this fact on me and now it's stuck in the place where all the other celebrities short-lived unions are stored.  J-Lo and Cris Judd.  Kid Rock and Pam Anderson.  Lisa Marie Presley and Nic Cage.  Renee Zelleweger and Kenny Chesney (still trying to wrap my head around that one!)  Britney Spears and that guy from her high school.  Drew Barrymore and that bar owner.  Drew Barrymore and Tom Green.  Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett.  Actually, I'd like to keep the Roberts-Lovett marriage in there if I can.  It was one of the most unexpected, quirkiest, barefooted (and soon forgotten) short-lived unions between two celebrities that I actually like.  But, the rest of you all, be gone!
• All of the words to Jabberwocky.  I memorized this with great fervor in the seventh grade and have never forgotten it.
• All the words to "Pink Elephants On Parade" from Disney's Dumbo.  You know, the song the hallucinated elephants sang to Dumbo right before he woke up, hung over, in a tree full of jive-talking crows?
• My high school gym locker combination.  Don't believe me?  4-24-2.  Right, left twice and right again.
• The fact that all of my elementary school teachers wore polyester elastic-wasted pants (that made their butts look big) and shoes with wooden soles that clip-clopped down the halls, so you could hear them coming from a mile away.
• That my childhood neighbor from across the street once had a dead squirrel stuck in his tree.  Its head was inside a hollow about 15 feet up and it died somehow with its butt and tail hanging out.  We couldn't look away and peeked in on it for several days in a row.  One afternoon we were surprised to find it suddenly tailless!  The mystery still remains unsolved.
• That same neighbor's daughter was showing me a family photo album in which her dad had cut their dog's head out of the picture frame when taking it.  She chuckled and said, "Oh, Dad cut off the dog's head."  And, for the longest time I thought that her dad had cut off their dog's head!
• Every Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, Mike Meyers, Phil Hartman, Julia Sweeney, Melanie Hutsell and Jay Mohr SNL sketch ever made.  Most of them, verbatim.  This goes for all the corny Sandler song lyrics and the farewell they all sang, in character, to Phil Hartman on his last night on the show.  (Favorite line: Michael McKean, "I don't have a character yet, but I was on Laverne and Shirley... ♫")
• My class room number for my first day of fourth grade.  The elementary school I'd attended grades K-3 had closed down and I was very nervous to be starting at a new school.  Class room 6 is burned in my memory because I did not want to get lost that first day.
• That my gym teacher was missing half a finger.
• E=MC squared.  Don't know what to do with this information, but I remember it!
• HONIFClBr.  My tenth grade chemistry teacher promised us we'd always remember the diatomic elements if we turned them into a nonsense word that was pronounced "Honey-Feklurbur".  Did it work?  Seeing that it's twenty-two years after the fact, I guess so!  What is a diatomic element?  Ummm...  It looks like your work here is only half done, Mr. Shalla.
• Janet Jackson has her cha-cha pierced.  I didn't want to know that either, but she had to go and mention it in an article I read in the 90's.  After her Super Bowl appearance, I guess we all know she's pierced elsewhere as well.
• Lots of mean things that were once said to me, but don't bear repeating.
• That the corners of the hallways that were painted orangey-red in high school had the girls' bathrooms.  If you headed to the wrong corners of the school, you would find a boys' bathrooms instead and you would be late for class.
• Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for a movie called My Left Foot.  I had heard of the movie about a man with cerebral palsy that learned to paint with his left foot.  But, every time a presenter that night would name the movie title, I still thought it sounded like a phrase you use when you're trying not to swear.
• A friend in second grade made me sing her phone number over and over again, so I wouldn't forget it.  I still remember it along with the melody that she created for it.  I have no use for this information anymore seeing that I have no idea who would pick up if I dialed the number thirty years after the fact.
• The chorus to the first song I ever wrote, when I was about 8 or 9ish.  "Jack and Jill went up the hill, Humpty Dumpty fell off of the wall, Old King Cole was a merry old soul, but my love ain't no fairy tale at all."  I didn't know much about love at the time.  Just that singing about it could land you on the radio.

Well, I don't know if I've manage to purge anything tonight, but I've certainly made myself good and tired.  Now, my main concern in going to bed and dreaming about headless dogs and tailless squirrels.  Night all!