What sort of loser joins a game of trivia on her birthday?
I had been invited out to dinner. But I was happy to do the usual and hang out with my friends on a trivia team.
I did ask myself just what sort of loser I was that this would be my evening of choice on the occasion of being born in 1958 and turning 58. This was no zero birthday, but I liked the symmetry of the numbers. It made it feel a bit special.
I have been going along to trivia as often as I can for the past few years now and probably have only known the answer to less than 10 questions. And even as they jump into my head, I tend to doubt myself. I am happy to hitch a ride with the more intelligent members of the group who know about African nations, what country adjoins another country, what symbols and colours are in what flags and the order of American presidents.
On my birthday night, my husband impressed me with a new untapped pool of trivia and recited numbers and all the letters of the alphabet in morse code. Add that to the botanical names of Australian plants and an ability to read a restaurant menu and it becomes immediately clearer why my brain can travel light, safe in the knowledge that there is limitless resources in the brain of the man I married.
But here we were, sitting around the trivia table with a full contingent. Our team has a hard core kernel of the truly knowledgeable and the rest of us nod sagely as they come up with the right answers over and over. As soon as the answer escapes their lips, we present it anew as if it is our own. The answer spreads like a fire until its origin becomes muddy.
But perhaps 58 is the age of wisdom. Certainly, while my contribution was meagre at best, I felt I almost matched my answer tally from the previous several years (not difficult, it being a single digit number). We were truly on fire.
We won that night, taking home a jackpot prize as a thrilling bonus. Once we realised this was a possibility, the tension and excitement had my heart beating like a butterfly.
So what sort of loser goes to trivia on their birthday? A winning one.
