Hello and happy new year, mixers!
It’s weird that we’re back in January and that we have a whole new set of months to get through… again… and then again. Not to be all nihilist about it, it’s just weird!
I had a great time looking through my 2023 reading summary on StoryGraph, the non-Jeff-Bezos-owned version of Goodreads. The highlights: I read 40 books (surprised myself!) and 10,384 pages and my average rating was 3.77 stars. Friend me if you haven’t already — I love seeing what other people are reading and their thoughts on books once they’ve finished reading.
As usual, here are my most recently published Forbes Health stories:
4 AI Therapy Options Reviewed: Do They Work? (This was fascinating and sometimes creepy and disheartening?? Maybe I’ll write more personally about what I found on here.)
Cerebral vs. BetterHelp: Which Is Best? (I wish it said “Which Is Better?”)
Now on to the main event.
A common pasttime among 20- and 30-something city yuppies is pub trivia night. I am a theoretical fan of trivia in that I enjoy playing games and maintain a competitive edge; I almost always say yes to a trivia night invite.
The issue with playing on a pub trivia team is that someone inevitably asks “What’s your specialty? What’s your category?” Common answers include music, politics, geography, celebrities. Sometimes, a person’s expertise will precede them: “I got so and so to join because she’s so good in the music round.”
I, on the other hand, can only answer with a shrug of the shoulders and a coy smile, maybe a vague “You’ll see!” It’s never the answer they’re looking for because now they don’t know where I fall in the team dynamic or when to turn to me when a question is announced. I offer no quantifiable value to the team. I become a nonentity as a contributing member.
That’s not to say I don’t end up answering any questions. I can usually contribute a thing or two. But these contributions fall in separate categories. No one knows when to rely on me. I don’t even know when I can confidently answer a question. All I can do is sit there and hope the jumble of facts in my head becomes relevant at some point.
Here is how that jumble stacks up against usual trivia fare.
Music. Some folks might think that I’d be good at a music round. My previous post was about music, after all, and I used to log 50k+ minutes listened on Spotify before the pandemic. But while I enjoy listening to music, I don’t know much about music. I know some oldies and some current pop songs, but no, I don’t always know who sang what. I can’t list all of Beyoncé’s or Rihanna’s albums, let alone the years they came out. I can’t tell you which album a song can be found on unless it’s on Up! by Shania Twain.
Sports. The Immaculate Grid game (and Derek) have helped me learn more baseball players than those who were/are on the Angels, but that would require the trivia game to ask weirdly specific, but also basic, questions. Baseball is the only sport I can help you with, and even then, I have no mind for stats or years. The only other athletes I know are LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Tim Tebow, but please don’t ask me anything other than how to spell their names.
Surprisingly, this small section of sports knowledge came in handy for a trivia question the other week that asked us to name the missing California baseball team: Athletics, Giants, Dodgers, Padres. THE ANGELS!! IT’S THE ANGELS!!!!
Politics/policy. I enjoy learning about history (mostly through podcasts these days), but dates do not stick in my head. I can tell you when The War of 1812 was and that’s it probably. I can remember some names in conversation, but if you asked me a specific question like, “Who distributed the treasonous newspaper Le Poisson during the French Revolution?” or whatever, my brain would look a lot like this. Besides the last three presidents and Abraham Lincoln, I have no idea what number president anyone was, nor can I name enough presidents or count backwards fast enough to figure it out. Don’t even ask me about vice presidents.
My one semi-victory in this category was the other week, we had to answer what fundamental freedom was missing from this list: religion, speech, assembly, petition and BLANK. I said freedom of the press, so we wrote that in. Another guy said he thought maybe freedom of association? We changed the answer to association and got it wrong. (It was press.) Why didn’t I say anything? Press sounded right in my head, but I wasn’t 100% positive that it was technically in that list, and the guy who said association is smart so????
Movies/TV shows. This actually may be my best bet if I had to choose my category, but I remain hesitant because trivia questions often stray from my random movie tidbits (like Viggo Mortensen breaking his toe when he kicks that helmet in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and that’s why his yell is so extra anguished) and veer towards real facts that other, normal people would know like directors and their oeuvres, the years something came out or won an Oscar, the role an actress/actor won an award for, the number of seasons a show lasted. Ask me about Twilight and Harry Potter and nothing else!!!!
Luckily for my competitive side, I often end up on teams with people who know plenty more than I do. I’ve been on a few trivia teams in the past year or so, each with varying degrees of success. One team is stacked with several smartest-person-in-the-room people and almost always places in the top three. Another team has placed in the top three a couple of times, other times crashing and burning spectacularly (although we tend to blame that pub’s points-wagering system and the hosts’ poor math skills).
I may be useless knowledge-wise, but I try to make up for it with my positive attitude. In any case, it pays to have smart friends, as long as you accept payment in the form of a bar gift card (1st Place), a free round of drinks (2nd Place) or a round of well half shots (3rd Place).