Jody, Jodie, Jodeee
by Matt Worley

While getting some material ready for our web site this week, I realized I spelled Jodie Foster's name wrong. This is easily fixed for the web site, but it will be misspelled in the upcoming issue of Lies Magazine. That bad boy is already at the printer (somewhere in North Dakota) being poked and prodded by press operators. Oh well, I've screwed up in the past.

I'd love to say that I'd seen the mistake, thought it looked funny and really meant to fact check and eventually change it, but this isn't true. I blithely wrote a joke with Jodie Foster somewhere in the webbing and didn't even think one way or another when my fingers typed "Jody Foster." All I can hope, of course, is that people don't notice because it's near the back of the magazine and that's just too far for anyone to read. But it leads me to another question (as most things do), which is: am I becoming absent-minded or have I always been this way?

My father is a professor, which always leads to absent-minded-ism. The thing about professors (and my father is no exception) is that they have a lot of information in their heads. Researching for hours during the day, writing down notes, and trying to remember when dinner is. All information is not created equal and neither is the system our brains use to store this information. There's just some stuff the brain puts on the back burner and forgets to connect with a synapse. This problem of mine, however, isn't from being absent-minded. I tried to think if there was anyone else who had trouble remembering people's names in my family (my father, who has already been mentioned during this Father's Day edition of my column, is actually very good at remembering people's names). The only one that might be close was my Grandpa Worley. He had the luxury of everybody else knowing who he was, so he didn't necessarily have to remember everyone's name. Obviously, that is not my problem.

I have taken to writing down notes in the last couple of years. They aren't the detailed notes of graduate students writing their doctorates, or even the scrambled fetterings of an undergrad trying to write a fifteen page paper in two days without the foresight of actual reading. They are things like, "The Magazine That Wants To Hock Pudding Pops When It Is Fifty-Five," or "Change Aaron singing Guns N' Roses' 'Coma' to Aaron playing the song on a cheap 80s Casio for movie." In other words, some of the stuff I write down isn't worth too much. But for every long, incoherent sentence about a diaper changing story on Headline News, there is a little bit of gold, and I'm happy I was able to write it down.

But why would I spell Jodie Foster's name wrong? I think this is actually just a deeper problem for the way I arrange information in my brain. I put names behind everything else. First are faces. If there is anything I will remember about a person, it is their face. And then something funny they did. Or something stupid. Any conversations we might have had come next (abridged version, usually). And after that comes miscellaneous material gathered from conversations about that person with other people. Sliding along behind all of that comes their name. Every time I meet a lot of people at once, I always want to say, "Please bear with me, I won't know your names for about three weeks. And only then if I talk to you a few times." At the very end of the memory cycle is the correct spelling of the person's name. For years I spelled a friend's name wrong. She realized this after a night of heavy drinking when I signed her credit card receipt incorrectly. It still went through.

So I'll just apologize to Jodie right now. After all, she's been through a lot of stuff in her life. Some guy tried to kill President Reagan just to impress her. I should really know how to spell her name. And Robert De Niro. I shouldn't have screwed up his name either (I thought it was spelled like the Spanish word for money.). Oh yeah, and that whole "effect/affect" deal I screw up repeatedly. They give English degrees to anybody these days.

Matt Worley used to have the same memory problem with vocabulary word definitions. By his senior year in high school the only way he would get credit for his vocabulary tests was by making the teacher laugh with the fake definitions he wrote. Of course, he still had to spell the word correctly.

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