Yeah. Your brain rebuilds it every time. People have been tricked into "remembering" stuff that never happened when researchers showed them photos with themselves photoshopped in.

It's hysterical some of the things my sister reminds me of that I've completely blanked. At least one of them I did to make my life simpler, but it was something that had a huge impact on her.

Other stuff, like the gripey letter I wrote to Fox about their Melrose Place gay non-kiss, I managed to completely forget about for years, but apparently has been sitting near the top of her memory for forever.

And then, there is university. The stoners remember more than I do. I have no idea why that is.

Ah. Here's the show where I learned that [link]

I remember a fair amount of fairly odd stuff. Like the rust stains on the underside of my high chair-it often stood in as my spaceship. What the underside of the long gone plastic side table feels like on your feet. What it is like to sleep in the laundry basket with the cats. That clear blue rubber keychain I lost in the seatbelt thingie of the Avis rental car when we went to San Francisco. I was probably 5 or 6 then (though oddly I don't remember much of the trip itself. Oyster crackers in tomato soup, spiderman cartoons and the mermaid lamps in my aunt's bathroom. Pretty much it.) I remember when my brother's umbilical stump fell off (even my mother doesn't remember that!) I'm sure there are instances it is faulty, but... I can't even call it a highlight reel. I can tell you where my holly hobby sleeping bag's zipper always stuck.

OK, back to work.

Ooh. I just remembered something from when I was two or three and have not thought about since I was a kid....

I had this toy that made a mooing sound when you flipped it over. It was one of my favorite toys. My mom or dad told me it had a cow's voice-box in it, and I took that literally. I found the idea disturbing (but not enough to make me not like the toy).

I read somewhere that every time you remember something, the memories can change. Memory is weird, and not as trustworthy as most people think.

You tell everybody about Sammy! Everybody who'll listen! "Remember Sammy Jankis?" "Remember Sammy Jankis?" Great story. Gets better every time you tell it.

Toilet training ending is the earliest memory I can place on a timeline that has no assistance from other people's stories or photographs.

Inception-related bwah.

I remember my dad and his friend taking my toy where you put the different shaped blocks into a ball and timing themselves putting all the blocks into it.

My father is a child.

When I was about five, I imagined memory to be like a record. To remember something was like a needle of a record player moving through the groove of the record, except when you remember something, the needle partially rewrites the memory. So if you remember something wrong, that error will get reproduced and strengthened over time.

That radiolab is my main source of info on memory, Daisy. Partially because the mutability of memory freaks me out too much for me to want to really look into it further. Brains are weird.