Or do I have a head injury?

[resonant]

You know, the longer I spend in post-menopausal word loss --

"if you don't live in a country with an active -- aw, hell, I've lost the word -- not royalty, not monarchy, not oligarchy, the thing where some people have better blood than other people --"

"Aristocracy?"

"Thank you!"

-- the more familiar it looks to me when Ray Kowalski says "the Northwest Areas" or starts the Miranda statement and then loses his place and trails off.

(Due South content in 2022 is thanks to fox, who KNOWS WHY.)

Comments

[fox]

WAITAMINUTE does that happen in menopause too? I've like only just recovered from pregnancy-and-early-childhood mom-brain.

[resonant]

Yes, it does, and it sucks. But it happens to the spouse, too, so some of it may be just simple age and not menopause at all.

Someone on Table Talk once said she forgot the word "refrigerator" when her baby was small, and said, "You know, the big white box with the cold food in it."

[luzula]

Now I'm picturing a story with the tag "Post-Menopausal Ray Kowalski"...

[fox]

Incidentally my favorite "or do I have a head injury?" take was something by (I'm almost positive) laurajv in which he did in fact have a head injury. Stella made a comment about his having aphasia. I adored that. (I don't remember anything else about the story, I don't think, but what I adored was Laura's treating off-hand remarks as if they were just as true as . . . on-hand remarks. There was a Sentinel one of hers where Blair really did fly Apaches in Desert Storm. ~heart eyes~)

[resonant]

I remember that story, but I couldn't remember who wrote it.

And I just reread Dira's "Relax," where Ray really did (sort of) get abducted by aliens when he was ten.

[resonant]

It crossed my mind!

[mekare]

Ha, I have the same problem since the birth of my first. At first I thought it was due to loss if sleep but that is something we got a lot better at by now. It doesn‘t help that it happens in both languages I speak ugh.

[mekare]

Whoops meant to reply to fox. Sorry.

[mekare]

>>pregnancy-and-early-childhood mom-brain.

*high five* though I haven‘t recovered completely yet...

[china_shop]

Ha, I used to love writing Kowalski because my brain works like that by default -- I just had to turn off the bit that corrects it.

the thing where some people have better blood than other people --

<3 <3 <3

[china_shop]

But it happens to the spouse, too, so some of it may be just simple age and not menopause at all.

Randomly, in Korean there are two words for menopause: one specifically for woman (or people in female bodies?) and one that's gender neutral.

[laurajv]

I once wrote a story where Ray specifically had anomic aphasia, and yes, it is more and more understandable the older I get.

[laurajv]

ohai

*hides face*

(eta: the one with the head injury was "Baresark": https://archiveofourown.org/works/775 )

[lexin]

I've had word loss since I was 20. I put it down to being at university and being under stress while taking exams. It's really simple things I forget - the first one was 'mushrooms' and I remember being in a shop and pointing at them saying, "Those white things, there." Of course that was in the days when there were greengrocers.

[fox]

❤️

[resonant]

I think it took me a couple of years after the kidlet was born before my vocabulary came all the way back. (And of course once you have a kid your life rarely allows you to pay attention to one thing at a time; I'm still fighting that, and the kidlet is 23 and doesn't even live here.)

[resonant]

The character who was like that for me was Rodney McKay. So easy to write his dialog - it was the voice I heard in my head all the time going "You're wasting my TI-ime."

[china_shop]

Hee! ❤

[desireearmfeldt]

And doesn't Dira's hockey AU (Hawks and Hands) have hockey-player!Ray with the aftereffects of too many concussions, including word-retrieval?

[isis]

I have been doing this (and, oddly, 'refrigerator' is one of the words frequently subject to this temporary word-loss) ever since well before menopause. My husband marvels that I am a killer crossword solver and yet forget ordinary words fairly often.

[nestra]

It's happening to me either because of perimenopause or migraines or pandemic or whatever, which is VERY INCONVENIENT when I am supposed to remember words and write them for a living.

[panisdead]

SO familiar. I usually get stuck repeating the word right before the lost word, or else, "Uh, uh, uh, uh--" which people interpret as stuttering. (Fair).

[jesse_the_k]

and it's brilliant! I can hear every word of your Ray saying:

I dug with words which as anyone knows are not my best friends, and I dug with yelling at him every chance he gave me which was a lot, and finally I dug with my fist. Bam! Just like that.

[resonant]

Interesting. Is Korean more gendered, like Spanish? Or is it just that specific word, like in English "top" and "blouse" imply feminine while "shirt" is neutral?

[resonant]

I lose "aristocracy" quite a lot, and also, ironically, "articulate."