I can be counted on to forget anything that may be relevant to my job and in high school I was never able to remember anything that related to my subjects.
I once turned up to an HSC exam holding only a pen and said “Community and Family Studies? I do that? Shit. Well... What’s it on?”
Ask me to recall the name of the Premier of Victoria and at best you’ll get a confused face and perhaps a mumbled “Errr... Bob Carr?”
But then, there are song lyrics and random trivia facts. You want to know all of the words to an Abba song? I’m your girl. You’re confused about the second verse in the Puretones 1998 hit, Addicted to Bass? No need for Wikipedia, just give me a call.
It’s practically a fucking superpower.
This seems strange to anyone who has known my relatives for any length of time. My Grandma is kind of infamous within the family for getting song lyrics wrong. You know the line in I Will Survive, where Gloria Gaynor belts out “Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?” For a solid section of time my Grandma thought it was “Weren’t you the one who tried to rape me with your eyes?”
Now, I’ve never been one to stand in the way of a good eye fuck, but I could never work out if that was what she meant or if she thought they would somehow detach their eyeballs from their optic nerve and try to penetrate someone with them.
There was a song released in 1980 that said “Oh Vienna...” and for a while my lovely Grandma thought it was “Old Piano.” Now, lest you think my Grandma is old and deaf and senile, when Ultravox released Vienna, she was only 36.
You can see why it’s so astounding that not only do I get the lyrics right, but I can somehow store them in my brain, sometimes laying dormant for a decade, and then pull them out and start singing them like it’s still the year 2000 and Faith Hill is coaching her boyfriend on basic respiratory technique.
And believe me; you want me on your trivia team. It won me a hat on my honeymoon. What is an Alligator Pear? Which country produces Panama Hats? How many calories do you consume while licking a stamp? Put down your iPhone, people, I’m here to save the day.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t sleep on a mountain of encyclopaedias, like mythical dragons sleep on huge treasure piles. I don’t get up at 3am to log onto the net and click through 47 pages of OMG Facts either. Well, not often...
There’s just something in my brain that retains all sorts of useless information about the bathing habits of Gypsies.
I don’t know why that is, but perhaps it will save me from some embarrassing social faux pas when next I meet a Romany woman standing downstream from a horse.
I once turned up to an HSC exam holding only a pen and said “Community and Family Studies? I do that? Shit. Well... What’s it on?”
Ask me to recall the name of the Premier of Victoria and at best you’ll get a confused face and perhaps a mumbled “Errr... Bob Carr?”
But then, there are song lyrics and random trivia facts. You want to know all of the words to an Abba song? I’m your girl. You’re confused about the second verse in the Puretones 1998 hit, Addicted to Bass? No need for Wikipedia, just give me a call.
It’s practically a fucking superpower.
This seems strange to anyone who has known my relatives for any length of time. My Grandma is kind of infamous within the family for getting song lyrics wrong. You know the line in I Will Survive, where Gloria Gaynor belts out “Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?” For a solid section of time my Grandma thought it was “Weren’t you the one who tried to rape me with your eyes?”
Now, I’ve never been one to stand in the way of a good eye fuck, but I could never work out if that was what she meant or if she thought they would somehow detach their eyeballs from their optic nerve and try to penetrate someone with them.
There was a song released in 1980 that said “Oh Vienna...” and for a while my lovely Grandma thought it was “Old Piano.” Now, lest you think my Grandma is old and deaf and senile, when Ultravox released Vienna, she was only 36.
You can see why it’s so astounding that not only do I get the lyrics right, but I can somehow store them in my brain, sometimes laying dormant for a decade, and then pull them out and start singing them like it’s still the year 2000 and Faith Hill is coaching her boyfriend on basic respiratory technique.
And believe me; you want me on your trivia team. It won me a hat on my honeymoon. What is an Alligator Pear? Which country produces Panama Hats? How many calories do you consume while licking a stamp? Put down your iPhone, people, I’m here to save the day.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t sleep on a mountain of encyclopaedias, like mythical dragons sleep on huge treasure piles. I don’t get up at 3am to log onto the net and click through 47 pages of OMG Facts either. Well, not often...
There’s just something in my brain that retains all sorts of useless information about the bathing habits of Gypsies.
I don’t know why that is, but perhaps it will save me from some embarrassing social faux pas when next I meet a Romany woman standing downstream from a horse.
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