What's up with my memory issues lately?

My every day memory has been seemingly slipping for the past few years. It is often simple stuff like where I parked my car in a big parking lot, or where I left my wallet around the house. It’s always been annoying, because I often times forget things that friends or my girlfriend will tell me, and as you may imagine that causes problems (“What do you mean we’re going to so and so’s tonight…”, etc).

Lately though its been really bad. The other day when I was about halfway to work in the morning, I legitimately could not remember if I had even closed the front door to my house. This would’ve been problematic because my g/f is house sitting, so no one was still home, and we have two cats. I actually e-mailed my land lord and had her send someone to check (thankfully I had closed and locked the door). I often get inside somewhere, and stop to find myself wondering if I put the parking brake on in my car, afraid it’s rolling away as I ponder.

I’m beginning to think this may be more than absent mindedness and could be some legitimate problem. I am a very busy person. I haven’t worked less than 60 hours in roughly 3 years, often times exceeding that. Aside from that I have a band which usually takes up several hours a week as well. I have many student loans, which combined with my other bills leaves me with around 15 monthly bills to remember. I don’t get as much sleep as I would like too, and I don’t take the best care of myself (not overweight or anything, just not big on exercise or healthy eating). But all of these things have been long standing habits, and the memory issues have really only gotten bad maybe in the last year.

Frighteningly I can remember obscure historical facts, or stories from 10 years ago in my life, with ridiculous detail. A few weeks back I was driving with my g/f, and I’m not sure how I got started, but I ended up telling her in extreme detail the events surrounding the US presidential election of 1800. Complete with candidates, VP names, electoral college totals, etc, etc….I proceeded to forget where we were driving too after telling her the story.

What’s going on with my memory?