Okay, first things first, partly because I will forget later: in a feat of human exertion hitherto unseen in my family’s kitchen, I made Melissa Clark’s chocolate babka this weekend. As the recipe so baldly notes in the beginning:
Baking a chocolate babka is no casual undertaking. The Eastern European yeast-risen coffee cake has 14 steps and takes all day to make.
I didn’t actually register the 14 steps part, but even with that, I would say throw in about 5 steps to accommodate such things as “collect stray fragments of dough that fly across the room,” “wash your hands every other minute” and “swat fruit flies away if you’re working in a humid kitchen.” Given the fruit-fly-filled circumstances, all in all, the babka took about 28 hours to make. It rose for a total 17 hours in various misshapen forms. It watched me age just as much as I watched it age. Romantic, no?
But the results are worth every sugarcoated second – with a moist, deeply flavored brioche-like cake wrapped around a dark fudge filling, then topped with cocoa streusel crumbs.
Don’t even know what brioche is exactly! It’s a bread, but that’s about as much you can force out of me on the brioche front. And unfortunately, even if I looked it up this minute, if you asked me again in 3-5 business days, I will just attempt to outsmart my brain, try to make something up on the spot and say something like “sponge” or “crust” or “same as brie?” Very un-witty, very un-pretty, all the things detested by the Divya Brand. This will happen because I promise you I will forget.
I mentioned forgetfulness in passing in the last issue, but I did want to dive into it again because, as a simpleton, I didn’t think forgetfulness would be the thing affecting my brain at 23 or 24. In all honesty, it is such a wildly unsexy way for a mind to be altered at this age. (In case you forgot, my life and activities are a study in high glamor and hedonism. Party-goers and drug addicts routinely request my advice on de-vanilla-ing their lives.)
Anyway, I mistakenly wailed to my brother that I forgot the name of the senior caregiver next door for a hot second, and that, surely, this was a sign that my very soul was withering, and then my brother whom I love and respect solemnly told me that I was en route to a dementia diagnosis.
Now, I am Older and Wiser and on the side of sibling dynamic where I can give my brother advice about say, taxes, but. I do still need to take whatever he says to me with a pinch of salt because he once convinced me for a period of five or so years that I was hatched out of an egg in our fridge. He also nearly named me Maruti (pronounced mary-ooty) after his favorite car at the time.
Maruti Murthy. With that name, I could have gone through the rest of my time on earth needing nothing else to blame life’s poor quality on. Maruti Murthy would have been the easiest cop-out of literally anything. Did I show up late to class? Did I break a promise? Did I trip you? Well, consider my name and consider what you’re asking of me. That’s right.
Anyway, my brother stomped all over my try-hard brain and left the room, but unfortunately, it is one memory I have been able to recall with startling ease. As is par for the course with these things, I Googled it and of course, the garden-variety reasons came up. Stress, lack of sleep, hyperthyroidism, lack of vitamin B12, You Simply Suck etc.
I sleep well enough and take my vitamins and don’t have hyperthyroidism, and for the life of me, I can’t think of how I might be stressed. I am usually of the opinion that I could have it a lot worse and just being fervently thankful that I have what I have. This isn’t even coming from, like, a pious-saint-holier-than-thou place, it’s coming from Twitter, where every day I learn about how terrible and degrading, and thus, stressful life can be.
The closest to a real conclusion that makes sense is that I am simply not focusing and that I am thinking about too many things at once. Like, for instance, right now I am thinking should I move the babka into the fridge? Can I finish the Punjab chapter of my book tonight? I need to restock toilet paper. Should I meditate or should I stretch? Should I ask for work to expense a course? I’ve to get a postcard for my pen pal. Should I pee after drinking water or drink water after I pee? And things of that nature, generally.
The quandary here is that I am not sure I want to stop thinking all this if it means I have better memory recall — because who will I be if not a haphazard collection of thoughts that trespass on each other? So for now, my only recourse is like, fine, I will submit to a potential collapse of my memory if it means that I can think about peeing and the Succession theme song and a Slack chat at the same time. Super-toxic relationship with my brain, I know. We’ve been in an on-again, off-again thing for a while now. It’s fine. It’s fixable.
So now, tell me, are you all forgetting things too? Or facing a severe downgrade of an ability you used to have an excess supply of? Tell me about how your body is failing you. And if so, are you Doing Something About It?
Just for the record:
I am reading Despite the State: Why India Lets its People Down and How They Cope by M. Rajshekar. It’s full of a lot of numbers but put together, very illuminating about how the national- and state-level rot runs deeper than the last two election cycles.
I baked the thing. AND I made an Instagram movie about it.
In the interest of keeping up with current events and pretending I knew what a hedge fund was, I watched The Big Short because I didn’t remember enough for my 3-month economics course on the global financial crash of 08-09. Simply prolific gum-chewing from Jeremy Strong. I didn’t realize Brad Pitt was Brad Pitt until I read the credits.
Jeremy Strong reminded me that I needed to rewatch Succession, a modern-day Game of Thrones starring betrayals, cocaine, daddy issues, and the holy temple of power-hungry dinosaurs and tech-boys. And money. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
What am I forgetting?
YES not that I'm glad you're forgetting, but I'm glad to have someone to revel in it with. Wholly an unsexy way to be. What I am DOING about it is trying to see if I have ADHD because TikTok is *convinced* that I do. And I don't know what ELSE to do because if I did I forgot