Hall Pass, Please

Lars has never fully grasped the flawlessness of my memory.

I really think that in the absence of any real documented data, he uses his own experiences as the basis for truth. It's a basic human instinct - assimilate all of your experiences and available information to take an educated guess at something. People do it effortlessly all day long, thousands and thousands of times over.

So consider Lars's frame of reference. He can't remember the names of the people in his office sufficiently to introduce them to you (he's been there 7 years...) and assumes that everyone else's memories are similarly flawed.

Not only is my memory not as unreliable and patchy, it is airtight and uncommonly detailed. By contrast, for example, not only can I tell you the first, middle and last names of all of the people in my office, I can tell you their favorite TV shows, their spouses and children's names, where they live, if they have a tattoo and it's location and design, where they worked before now, and other little colorful tidbits like beer or wine affinity, political affiliation, dietary preferences, and if their kids are Bieber fans or Harry Potter fans, or partake in some other pop culture craze.

And I could do this for everyone I've worked with for the last 20 years. Even now. It is not a matter of nosiness. It is a matter of information, however useless, going in and never ever going out.

It is simply a matter of how I learn. If I experience something, I can remember the finest detail. What people are wearing, who sat by whom, who should have thought twice about their hair color. Everything.

It's a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing.

And now, Lars has to know that my memory will serve me well. He has to. Doesn't he?

When we were first in the throes of our Divorce of Record Setting Acrimony, and he was bullying me in and out of things, he attempted to take one of these vacations on a week that the kids were in my custody. And I got my lawyer to intervene. Not because I wanted to be vindicitive and stomp all over something happy in his life (which would have been admittedly appealing, for sure.) It was a matter of safety and ethics.

Safety because the trip, like the upcoming one to Disney, was to accumulate CMEs. CMEs that would require three 8-hour days of uninterupted classroom time. My question, posed through my lawyer, was "Who exactly is accompanying them on the trip and supervising our minor children in the hotel while Lars is in class pretending to care about EKG strips?" I want a first and last name. I want to see a reservation in that person's name, and I want some convincing evidence that they are not a kook. Like a background check.

Ethics, because I knew what credentialed but streety Mr. Lars Royal had planned.

When we took our first CME trip of this kind, Lars registered on the first evening of the conference and was completely baffled that the registrar, upon his signing in, handed him the certificates for all of the classes, ALL OF THE CLASSES, upon registration. Yep, before having ever sat in a desk or cracked the binding on a singular manual, Lars had all the CMEs money could buy.

And a free pass to blow off each and every one of those classes, and still get credit for them. Surf's up, people!

My argument was that if he could not demonstrate planned supervision for the kids, they were not going. The fly in the chardonnay for him was, he was the planned supervision, but he could not say as much, because he'd have to admit his plan to blow off classes. And my argument to that was, that if he weren't actually going to class, there was no genuine need to go on this trip.

Of course this was an argument I made with my first lawyer, and essentially had to make myself. I fired her not long after. (Please see me for details if you are about to engage a divorce lawyer yourself.)

So is he naive enough to think that I'd forget the details of the 4 or 5 trips we took together where he sort of half heartedly attended a sporadic selection of classes but mostly enjoyed the balmy clime of Gulf Coast Florida?

Evidently he does.