I will remember you

The reverse of this problem used to plague me, and still does to some extent, although the years have killed off some of the brain cells in question, or Facebook eliminated the subconscious need to do this: I used to remember the faces and names of everyone I met, and where I knew them from. Were you in my Hebrew school class in fourth grade? Hippie summer camp? Had we once briefly spoken at our 3,000-student high school? Whoever you are, I'd remember you like it was yesterday.

While it can be frustrating not to remember names (ahem, teaching large non-lecture classes - why my high school physics teacher called us by number, not name), in social (and, if you're not a grad student, I hear, professional) situations, it can often pay to seem aloof. That you've remembered a face and a name will be taken to mean that you've been thinking of this person since fourth grade, that they made a really profound impression, that you have in fact been waiting by the proverbial phone since the fourth grade for (fictitious) Lacey Zimmerman to come back into your life.

Lacey's forgotten you, we can imagine, because you're unimportant to her. Therefore that you've remembered her must indicate that you have disproportionate interest, that she made quite the impression. But having exceptional names-and-faces memory, at least on a conscious level, doesn't mean this, because you're remembering everybody's face and name, including - indeed, primarily - people you hadn't thought about in years, until there they are on the subway across from you. (Now, alas, if I see and remember Lacey, it's because Mark Zuckerberg wants me to know what she was up to last weekend. If she isn't on that site, she'll at most look vaguely familiar.)

So what does it all mean? If you remember names, is it because you on some level imagine that in every last situation, you're the peon to the other person's Pretty Big Deal? Is it that on a subconscious level, even when you're interacting with people definitively below you in whichever official or unofficial hierarchy, you conceive of yourself as an underdog? Or, to put a more positive spin on the same interpretation, is it that you think everybody is important? Is it just... good memory? The same trait that makes it possible to pass the kind of exams that ask for heaps of rote memorization? Whatever the case, if we're going to cover the plight of [yes MSI, forgot the rest of that sentence, thanks!] those who forget, I'd like that of those who remember all too well covered equally.