We toyed with the idea of going out for a trivia game earlier this week, but that didn’t end up happening. We decided it would be more fun to have a laid-back bar night with a friend and just shoot the shit.

Whilst shooting said shit, we three made plans to meet up for trivia on Sunday, our “normal” day.

With the new Sporcle Events season beginning soon, our tentative “plan” is for Sundays to be our trivia meetup days on most weeks. We may also still play on other days on occasion, depending upon my work schedule and the availability of the one other player we have in our rotation right now.

If our fifth guy – who has become a daddy in recent months – becomes available for occasional trivia games again, we’d of course be delighted to bring him back on board!

We gave a My Trivia Live game a shot a couple of months ago, but we have no real plans to start playing in that league again. I don’t like not being able to see the questions on a screen, and I also don’t like…other things about league’s local scene, either. Certain bad memories from earlier in the pandemic, personal stuff that’s hard to shake, bad mojo -yada yada. Rest assured it’s my hangup, I have nothing against this trivia league itself!

Confession time. I have to get this off my chest (deep breaths). When you’ve told another player to “Go fuck yourself,” at a game, it makes you not want to see them again. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. My husband had just taken a bathroom break, and this player – whose team had a perfect game – came at me out of the blue seeming to brag about that game and wanting to fist bump me. True, I’d had a rotten day before going out to the game – walking two miles to a car repair shop – in the rain- to pick our car up – only to have the mechanic tell us that we couldn’t sit inside the waiting room while they finished working on our car. He claimed it was because of COVID guidelines, which was BS – because those were lifted months ago AND THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE IN THE FREAKING WAITING ROOM. Fuck me…

Needless to say, we haven’t been back there since then. Not for trivia, anyway. Self imposed exile.

As for what I did in that trivia game, yes, I regret it and wish I could take it back. But It’s not the first time this player has waited until I was alone to pester me about how my game was going, even going as far as trying to peek at my score sheet in past games, or asking my husband about how our game was going while he was in the bathroom! I remember having to physically cover the sheet so that he couldn’t see it while I was playing with a friend’s team in a tournament! Sometimes he’s just too pushy.

There is also a bit of bad blood between me and another player on his team, but I’ve mostly gotten over it. I can handle being in the same room with this person now! 😆

Add to that my shitty day – and it being my first indoor trivia game since the pandemic restrictions were lifted and being anxious as fuck in a crowded, noisy room – and that is a recipe for a mental breakdown at the worst possible time. I…freaked out.

I know there is really no excuse for saying what I said to this guy, and I really do wish that I could take it back. But not as much as I wish I’d never gone out for that trivia night in the first place. I obviously wasn’t ready for it. If I could go back in time to tell my past self to not go out for this game – or that MTL tournament in 2019 – I would.

But who wouldn’t use a time machine for things like this if they had the chance? To wow your foes with the best comeback ever, invest in Purell’s parent company before the pandemic hit, go back in time to watch the gunfight at the OK Corral, keep Biff Tannen from getting Gray’s Sports Almanac, hang out with Billy the Kid at San Dimas Mall…

On a more positive note, I was absolutely floored by the random acts of kindness from a couple of my co-workers surprising me with Christmas gifts – and a guy on a trivia team giving me a $40 gift card at a trivia night! That was a very nice surprise, and my husband and I certainly appreciated it! All he said was that he “Appreciates my writing.” I needed a putty knife to scrape my jaw off the floor (lol)!

I know I’m not the most outgoing person in the trivia room, and I’m certainly not the best behaved. But sometimes it’s just nice to be…appreciated. Like getting that $10 gift card from that co-worker who barely knows me – just because she appreciated that I work hard – and do my job.

I told her, “Thanks, sometimes I feel pretty invisible around here!”

I really don’t know else to say…but thanks for putting up with me and all of my weird hangups!

😏

Here’s to a better 2024!