Trivial Pursuits

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• If you didn’t do the Believe trivia event last night, you missed out.
• On getting crushed by External Affairs of the Heart.
• Mwahahaha. Ha.
• (I didn’t do the crushing.)
• As it turns out, I may be awful at trivia.
• I think I answered, three, maybe four questions the whole evening.
• I thought my head was full of random debris, and maybe it is, but maybe not the right kind.
• However, I talk some decent smack and was a benefit to team morale.
• (That’s what I’m telling myself this morning, anyway.)
• What I’m really saying is … Thank you, Jeff.
• Jeff, who for those of you who don’t know, works in Grants, which means his job is vitally important to the whole College.
• Jeff has also appeared on Jeopardy.
• And you can read about that in the upcoming issue of Community magazine when it drops in May.
• Thanks to all the other teams for participating.
• You did goodish.
• …
• Heh.
• This is what’s called being a poor winner.
• Last year, we lost to Dr. Stone’s team by one point.
• It didn’t sit well.
• Like an eyelash in the eye, more like.
• Poor losing, as well, it seems.
• I tried to talk the Teenager into attending with me.
• Had too much homework.
• A bunch of geometry, some sort of Spanish worksheet, and then an essay on a passage from Othello.
• (Kid has basically been in pre-College for the past two years; they even use MLA for their essays.)
• Which was more effective, Shakespeare’s original language, or a modern translation?
• Modern translation.
• Heresy, more like.
• I know I’m a nerd, but I loved Shakespeare.
• Went to the touristy rebuild of The Globe when I visited London.
• I have not, yet, watched the new MacBeth with Denzel.
• It’s on the list.
• Anyway, she had me read her essay to make sure it was “okay,” with the caveat that it “wasn’t as good as usual because she was tired.”
• Yeah, kid, I feel that.
• It was fine, obviously. She’s a good writer, and I’m happy to see she’s honing that “cranking out paragraphs while exhausted” skill she’ll need in College.
• Trivia hangover.
• I fell asleep last night with a rough outline of what I was going to write about this morning.
• Should’ve maybe stayed up and written it instead.
• I had some good stuff.
• I think.
• No, I do not keep a notebook by the bed.
• Nor a pen.
• Nor a tablet.
• There’ll be no Coleridgean nocturnal poems sprung whole from my dreams.
• Guy did a lot of drugs, didn’t he?
• Embarrassing story:
• In junior high, I learned of Rime of the Ancient Mariner​ not from my English teachers, but from the Iron Maiden song of the same name.
• As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.
• When we finally covered that poem in class in Junior AP English, I told Ms. Simmons about the Maiden song.
• She had me bring the … cassette … in, and we listened to it.
• That song’s like … almost 14 minutes long​.
• We listened to the whole thing.
• I became acutely aware that a) the song was really long, b) not everyone’s cup of tea, and c) possibly awful.
• I sat there and squirmed, scooting lower and lower in my unpadded public school chair wishing I could be invisible for having inflicted that upon my classmates.
• Moral of the story: Iron Maiden is not for sharing.
• Have a weekend.