names

This weekend I met Jon the Baptist. Ok, maybe I should back up.

I am really horrid at remembering people's names -- that is, the name-face association. I learn them eventually, of course, but it takes me longer than it should. It's just as well I didn't go into any sort of dealing-with-the-public career (including, sadly, congregational rabbi). This is an essential skill in those fields.

I've had the "trick" explained to me: find some feature that's unusual enough to remember, and then find some association that, through the wonders of word play, helps connect the name to that feature. The most graphic illustration of this came when someone was telling me how she remembers Peggy's name; her hair and the shape of her face reminded the person who was telling me this of Miss Piggy, and Piggy sounds like Peggy. Mind, this isn't the sort of thing I would tell Peggy. But it worked; I will never forget Peggy's name unless she drastically changes her appearance.

But I can't come up with this stuff. I wish I were more creative, or that more people had truly distinguishing features. Instead, I have to settle for asking people to tell me their names several times until plain old memorization does its thing. And if I meet someone out of context, it's even harder. (I once ran into a rabbi I know at the grocery store. Yeah, rabbis shop too, of course, but he was out of uniform and out of the usual context, and it took me a moment to recognize him. It was the kippah that did it.)

In the last couple weeks I've met three people that I'm trying really hard to remember. (Also some new coworkers, but there are more tools available to help there.) Two of them are named Scott, and maybe that will help. They're both professors, too. But in neither case have I made an association with any physical characteristic. Maybe that's my problem -- I remember that Jack is the physics professor from Berkeley I met at the all-you-can-eat sushi bar, but none of that helps me remember what Jack looks like. I can remember all sorts of sometimes-useless details, but not the face to go with them.

Which brings us to Jon the Baptist -- because his name is Jonathan and he grew up in a Baptist congregation, though he's currently looking elsewhere. And, um, he's tall, and somehow I always pictured John the Baptist as tall, though I have no idea why and it might be that all biblical guys are tall (except Jonah, who I always pictured as kind of a runt). And this is the best I can do, and it's pathetic.

The sad thing is that I know I had this problem at an early age -- this isn't senility -- yet even though it was obvious I had this deficiency, I somehow never learned how to fix it from my teachers or parents. I can remember all sorts of useless stuff, like phone numbers of places I no longer live and details of talmudic arguments that will never touch my life directly, but I can't remember the stuff that's important in my day-to-day life. Drives me nuts.

I just hope Jon forgives me when I accidentally call him Scott. Or whatever.

weekend stuff

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

( minor puzzles )

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.