YLC St. Louis had our annual Trivia night on Saturday night and it was just awesome! My job usually means that I'm meant to be visible and vocal at fundraising events. Ironically, I am a rather shy person, with a big personality who scores really high as an extrovert in personality tests. My natural place at big events or parties is sitting in the kitchen in the middle of some metaphysical conversation about some arcane subject. I'm a natural nerd/dork. But my job often puts me center stage, among large groups of people and I've found the only way for me to do that successfully is to have a role to play that covers my shyness and allows my natural extroverted personality to take charge. The trivial pursuit of playing a role has been my security blanket for years now as I shyly interact with large groups of people. And so it was on Saturday night....."It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously" Oscar Wilde
I fell into a bed after midnight with a few thoughts from the evening.....The first and least surprising was that I may be the least gifted trivia player in the known universe. Perhaps even in the multi-verse. Fortunately no one was depending upon my ability to access the deep recesses of my mind to dredge up random pieces of information that were collected eons ago by accident and dumped in the back of my mind for future reference as I walked through life. At some point in my life the librarian in charge of bringing the information to the front of my mind quit and went to work for a tidier mind than mine. It has left me with a distinct disadvantage when playing trivia. I have to walk all the way into the back of my mind, dig around among the piles of random unreferenced information accumulated over 41 years and try to find that one random fact among so many. I can never find it in the time allotted.
The next awesome fact I allowed to scurry through my exhausted mind in the wee hours of Sunday morning was how much fun it is to just play. I was given the simple task of selling tickets for the Raffle. I had no idea what the prizes were; no clue how we would draw winners, and because I had never been to a trivia night before I had no idea what the night's schedule would look like. So armed with absolutely no sense of importance or competence I spent the evening being utterly trivial. I think I met every one of the 150+ people there and witnessed almost half of the people give $10 for 6 tickets. It is clear that I shine best when asked to do something trivial!
I quoted Oscar Wilde at the start because he is one of my great mentors. He has guided me into the depths, revealing how humanity strives for the shiny baubles of the ludicrous while ignoring the noble and laudable, all the while presenting a mask of seriousness to one another.
Too much of my life is focused seriously on the trivial, while I trivialize the serious things in life.
Hope you and your week are not taken too seriously.....
