Why do you remember your school friend's ID card, but not what you ate for lunch today?

I'm arriving mid-afternoon and the first thing that crossed my mind was that it was the anniversary of my first communion, an absolutely inconsequential date in my biography. Another day, while I'm looking for a headline for a news story, I remember the anniversary of a schoolmate who was never my friend. I suppose it stuck with me when he was handing out Sugus to celebrate it, long before playgrounds existed. As irrelevant as my Eucharist.

Random dates assault my brain, anniversaries of trivial events that haven't shaped my life: the day I saw Trainspotting at the cinema, of which I only remember a character waking up shitting himself in bed. Great scene. Or a concert that left no impression on me. Besides birthdays, it also happens with deaths: the anniversaries of Kurt Cobain or Rocío Jurado surprise me, without being a devoted fan of either grunge or volcanic melodic song. I know my family's ID numbers by heart, from when I used to fill out scholarships, and those of friends for whom I've bought plane tickets.

This useless ability has never awakened any admiration among mine; rather, it has turned me into a joke. If at a dinner someone recalls an adolescent anecdote, there's always a sarcastic one who finishes: "Of course, that was on November 23, 2002...". In reality, they don't finish the joke, but rather enter an absurd drift where they can end up referencing from Mayra Gómez Kemp to Napoleon. I stay quiet, even though I know that day was October 14, 2000. And then, already assuming I'm the date geek, I burst out laughing in communion. With my friends. Not in church. "You're kidding me," they tell me. And that's the least, if you've been freely acting as Chandler Bing and Dorothy Sbornak with them for years.

I don't know what psychological, neurological, or magical explanation there can be for remembering useless dates and phone numbers of people you haven't called in 20 years. I imagine my brain turned into a crazy lost and found warehouse, where half of the characters from Inside Out are throwing balls of memories at each other, high on speed, while the other half wanders sleepily, with their eyes rolled back, trying to hold onto the memory ball that contains what I ate for lunch today. It must be because I destroy my short-term memory by writing columns like this on sleepless nights.