Here is the most mundane and miscellaneous and pointless and personal of questions: what things have you committed to memory, whether on purpose or just by happenstance? Possibilities include:
Songs
Poems
Parts of plays, movies, TV shows
Phone numbers, addresses, etc.
Credit card, Social Security numbers, etc.
Anything else you’re particularly proud of.
Feel free to relate any interesting stories about how you happened to memorize these things, or perhaps conversely, things you want to remember but can’t. (Like practically all phone numbers, now that we have offloaded our memory into our phones.)
For me, in the order listed above,
My elementary school song (“Towson Elementary, we love you…”)
Almost all the lyrics of almost all the songs by the Beatles.
“Madeira, m’dear” by Flanders and Swann
Jabberwocky
I’ve never been an actor, so no character parts, but like most people, I can recite snippets of things from Shakespeare to Monty Python.
My wife’s phone number, and my mother’s (which is the one I grew up with), but not my father’s or my sister’s.
I make a point of memorizing the credit card we use most, so I can enter it when ordering online or on the phone. And I know my SSN.
About a hundred or so songs on the guitar. A lot of 80s metal, classic rock, and blues. It’s entirely muscle memory. If you asked me the chords of “[song]” I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but I could play it for you without even thinking about it. I pick up a guitar and my hands just do it.
The full lyrics to countless hip-hop songs primarily from the 90s.
Way too many musical compositions to list, including the entirety of Vivaldi’s Gloria[ and a substantial portion of Handel’s Messiah as a tenor and as a baritone.
The preamble to the Declaration of Independence for 7th grade. Ozymandias for 5th grade.
The times tables up through 9x9, required by my 4th grade teacher.
All the conversions between millidays and hours:minutes:seconds at 15 minute intervals and at 25 milliday intervals, utterly useless for anything except my own entertainment.
SMFA700A9F4
PCFA
G
for exiting out of a seized-up program under Mac System 6 on a 68K box, if you have the debugger installed.
In fourth grade I had all the then-known moons in the solar system memorized in order (innermost to outermost for each planet).
When I was in HS I listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall album so much I could literally recite it end to end. There are a few other records like that: I’m pretty sure I could karaoke all of Leonard Cohen’s The Future (had I a singing voice). I also had some George Carlin records in my walkman so much for a time that I could reel off his routines; the Hair poem was a favorite and I can probably still do it now, thirty years later. As DCnDC cited above, plenty of hip-hop songs as well: “Bring the Noise,” “I’m Your Pusher” and “Crackhouse” still flow fairly easily for me.
I still remember the landline number my wife had when I met her in 1986. Not only that, but her mother’s number too, which I had occasion to use somewhat regularly since her mother’s house was a nexus for their family activities.
I can’t, however, remember the cell phone number she has today. Knowing this, she finds opportunities every once in a while to bust my chops over it. “I don’t have to know it,” I tell her. “It’s on my phone.” To which she replies, “What if you don’t have your phone and you need to call me?” My comeback is that if I don’t have my phone, how can I call her??? But we both know that’s weak because if push comes to shove, I’m likely to have other phones available if I take some initiative.
Similarly, I still remember the account number for the checking account I had at National City Bank back when we met. They subsequently merged with PNC, and I still haven’t committed the new account number to memory (which, really, is no longer new).
LiBeBCNOFNe
NaMgAlSiPSClAr
These are not remembered as lines of the periodic table, but as words. Liebeebuhcuhnoffknee and Nahmigalsipsklar, repeated ad nauseum by Mr Naumann in Chemistry class.
October 15th was the day I learned about Supplementary and Complementary Angles. I know this because anytime someone in Geometry didn’t apply these rules correctly Mr. Sapko would scream out the date we learned it “and you STILL don’t remember it!”
Mrs. Cheesesteak’s SSN, this definitely makes banking and taxes easier.
I unfortunately remember too much sports trivia and sports color commentary. My mind can reproduce pretty accurately stuff like, “Aikman back to throw, Harper’s breaking away, Harper’s got midfield, Harper’s got the 30, Harper’s got the 20” or the score of particular games (I became consulted as some sort of live encyclopedia about sports on some occasions.)
Every single School House Rock song from Saturday mornings in the 1970s. Even ones I only heard a couple times. There are top ten songs I’ve heard on the radio far more frequently, but the lyrics don’t stick the same way SHR songs have.
Good one. I forgot to suggest instrumental performing. Back when I still had a piano I had memorized a number of pieces, ragtime mostly, but it’s been years, and if I sat down at a keyboard now I probably couldn’t get all the way through most of them.
When I was maybe 13 or 14 years old (1973 ish), a friend of mine, to kill time on a bus ride, had a contest to see who could memorize the serial number on a dollar bill one of us had.
Do you mean the Preamble to the Constitution (We the People) ? I have that and the first (long) sentence of the Declaration (When in the course of human events…).
That’s so embedded I didn’t even think of it. We did 10x10, although I understand that lots of people learned 12x12.
Pretty much all the lyrics to the Beastie Boys album, Paul’s Boutique. I listened to it many hundreds of times, start to finish.
Also, lyrics to a lot of Bob Dylan songs including some that are quite long like Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts (that song gets me in the feels in one of the closing lines: “Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair”…not sure why. Always has, always will).
I know a few close friend and family phone numbers by heart, my National Insurance number (UK equivalent of SSN), my bank account and credit card numbers, and the kings of England since 1066 (as per the rhyme already mentioned) - but not their dates.
The one I’m most pointlessly proud of though, and that I’ve never had occasion to use until now, is this - so thanks for the opportunity! Why I memorised it, I do not know.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published, and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.