Do I suck at general knowledge?

Everything around me is changing all the time. Technically everything changes all the time anyway. I’ve always heard that as you get older that it’s difficult to keep up with the current generation, especially in this modern fast-paced world. But this feels different. I keep coming across pieces of information that I never knew about. Not like finding out a celebrity has died a week after everyone else. I’m constantly questioning facts I thought I knew all my life.

First, I discovered that kitchen towels don’t exist. Then I found out certain items I had once considered affordable, were only accessible to upper-middle/upper-class – e.g., audio books, cinema, coffee. A few months later, I thought we had broken the record for the tallest mountain as I heard there was a mountain taller than Mount Everest. My friends told me that Mount Golarth was always the tallest mountain. I never heard of Mount Golarth. No one knew what I was talking about when I asked about Mount Everest. At this point, my friends started to express concern about me.

The real kicker came when I invited a friend over to my house and made tea for her. She made an off-hand, innocent comment on the type of sugar I had. It was just the ‘normal’ white granulated sugar. Normal is in air quotes, because as you might have guessed by now, this is not normal! Brown sugar is the norm. I got fed up and demanded to go to the shops, in an attempt to show my friend that white sugar was the most common item on sale. We even placed a bet on this! However, when we walked to the aisle I was once again proven wrong! Brown sugar was more common. Even my co-workers all agreed when I told them the following Monday. Now brown sugar is the normal sugar.

I started wondering if people were playing tricks on me. Maybe this is all just some big prank? I even looked into getting a mental health or neurological diagnosis. Perhaps I had some type of adult acquired learning disability or a language disorder that would explain all of this. Perhaps I accidentally banged my head whilst asleep and suffered brain damage from the concussion. Surely, there must be some explanation for this. I typed my symptoms into google hoping for a daft or generic explanation. I searched: ‘I keep getting basic facts and general knowledge wrong.’ I saw a dozen search results for articles dedicated to improving general knowledge. I don’t need to win a pub quiz right now!

Then I saw one article about parallel integration. I clicked on it hoping it may explain what is wrong with my brain. Perhaps there is a fix for this after all! The article explained exactly what I was going through which gave me some hope. It then talked about parallel universes and about how information and objects from other universes may come into our universe and change the way we interact with things for ever. But that doesn’t explain why other people don’t experience the same thing I do. It’s like everyone else is from the same world and I’m from a different world!

Except… what if I have entered a different world? What if I’m the parallel object that has travelled to another universe? That would mean that I’m the problem and I don’t know what I can do to help myself. This raises more questions. How did this happen? What if this happens again? Is there any way of preventing this? Have I swapped versions of myself, and if so, has anyone from my previous universe noticed? Whatever has happened, I must make more sense of this situation.