With just five weeks until graduation, I've gotten to thinking about this whole "college" thing.
You know, the four-year, liberal arts, learn-to-hate-the-bookstore experience. The part of life where we start to feel like adults and get smarter ... and stuff.
But after eight semesters of hard work, how am I supposed to prove that I've acquired all of this knowledge?
Taking the GREs? My final finals? Examining the relationships I've built and the life lessons I've learned? None of these rubrics will do. Instead, I decided that I must try my hand in the only college rite of passage that truly can encapsulate students' wide range of learning and development throughout their academic career: Pub Trivia Night.
Think about it: Sitting down to test random pop culture trivia while drinking beer in a pub full of strangers. But don't think about it too hard, because your first reaction is probably the best. We learned this the hard way - "Ack! New Jersey! It seemed too obvious!"
So this Tuesday, I trekked a few blocks to Olde Magoun Saloon - which is worth the walk down Broadway just so you can ask passersby if they know the way to the Saloon. I gathered a stalwart team of Jumbos to tackle the trivia - cell phones and Blackberries not allowed. We settled down around 8 p.m. with our beers and scoped out the competition and the menu.
The dark-wood walls and dim lighting made it difficult to see, but the draught list was lengthy, and my Cambridge Brewing Company Amber brew was great. Our waitress - whose faint, possibly Irish accent was a topic of debate at our table - offered to let me sample beer before ordering a pint when she couldn't give a personal recommendation.
Over a delicious appetizer - fries and curry - our four-person team spent a lengthy amount of time discussing what to call ourselves. We wanted something that would capture our spirit and energy, and also our youth - we were clearly the only team in the Saloon that hadn't witnessed any part of the '70s.
So we settled on "Team Unemployed."
Now, onto that whole knowledge thing. We started strong and got the first two questions right. We were arrogant, high-fiving and ordering buffalo wings all around. The next twenty questions, however, didn't go so well. Do you know which actress, born in 1946, won her first Academy Award in 1996 after four previous nominations? I didn't. Or which U.S. city was home to the U.N. headquarters before New York City? I definitely didn't know that one. I kept waiting for a literature question, but the moderator never came through.
By the time we were ordering our second rounds, our drinks started to seem more like consolation prizes than celebratory toasts. We did perk up with the "Picture Rounds," where we labeled high school pictures of famous celebrities and named baseball movies from their random screen shots.
Eventually, the energy we'd put into each question in the first half of the game ran out, and we focused our efforts elsewhere: half-hearted attempts at eavesdropping on other teams. From there, our strategy devolved into creating answer submissions designed to make the moderator roll his eyes.
Team Unemployed came in last place, barely gathering even half of the possible points (humbling, but also kind of impressive). Knowledge is valuable, and indeed the ability to recognize Christopher Walken's yearbook photo is priceless. But there's a greater lesson here, important to share with you all: Next time, we're going to P.J. Ryan's, where I hear they dole out shots to the losing team.
Kate Peck is a senior majoring in English. She can be reached at Katherine.Peck@tufts.edu.
