May 19: Trivia Night

It’s a short post today, because, for the first time in a long, long time, I have actual things I have to do. 

I don’t mean school work. That always exists as a have-to, and will right up to the day when I’m back in the building trying to limp my way over the finish line of this blindfolded three-legged race of a school year. I don’t mean cleaning, because I’ve found that unless I spill something that will leave a stain on something else, cleaning during a stay at home order never reaches the level of being a crisis alert. I don’t mean walking the dog; he’s already had two of them today, and a quick duck outside and hurrying over to the neighborhood walking path will only take us five or ten minutes, which is hardly enough time to count as a commitment. There just aren’t a lot of have-tos when there isn’t anything or anyone holding you accountable.

Tonight, however, is Night 3 in a series of Staff Online Trivia Nights in which people from my school have participated. Our trivia nights have been pretty great. They give people a chance to see each other and talk, catch up on the latest non-pandemic news of each other’s lives, and actually engage in a form of social interaction. 

The whole thing had been my idea, which probably just means I was sitting here ten times more lonely than anyone else and needed a way to break out of that. Early on in the quarantine, I had seen and heard about different groups starting up online happy hours or Bingo games, giving people a chance to feel a little less cut off. The group of people I ate lunch with every day back in the B.C. era (Before Corona) would do the Isaac Asimov Super Quiz in the newspaper each day, and occasionally, depending on who happened to be walking through the lounge when we did it, trivia nights and the people who did them would come up conversationally. Doing an online one seemed like a logical next step. 

I put the idea out there on the staff Facebook group we’d set up, just before this pandemic donkey fest got underway. It turned out there was interest! I sent out an email to the school staff and found even more people anxious to join. 

I took on the responsibility of hosting of putting together the categories and questions, then hosting the event, which turns out to be a perfect way of disguising how much I really don’t know about things. The first time we did it we had about 25 people coming and going, many with drinks in hand, all seeming pretty happy to see other faces than the ones of the people they were confined with. The second night was a smaller event with about ten people, but it still turned out to be a lot of fun. Tonight we’ve got twenty people who have asked to get the Google invite tonight, so I think it’ll be a fun time. 

All I know is how nice it will be to go to bed tonight feeling like I’d just gone out for a staff event, even if it’s taking place only ten feet from my bedroom door.