Paralegal Nick was all over the vegetables. He apparently had spent the better part of his life surrounded by loving, supportive produce. He knew all the varieties of apple. He identified lettuce correctly. When he found a Daily Double in the produce lane, he added two thousand dollars with ease. Sara, who had won the previous two games, chimed in with the French for green beans.
When Double Jeopardy! concluded I was several ells behind.
The other two were tied.
This is the point when the people who post often in Jeopardy! online forums determined that I made the Worst Final Jeopardy! wager of all time.
In retrospect, it’s obvious. When the players ahead of you are tied, you know that they are forced to bet everything they have, and you should just sit back and bid nothing and hope they get it wrong.
A man on the forum was so angered by my wager, in fact, that he Googled me and my entire family and posted lengthy, erratically capitalized screeds about what fools we were and how we had polluted the Great Game. (“THESE PEOPLE ARE RUINING THE COUNTRY WITH THEIR IDIOICY AND I AM SICK OF IT.”) Shortly thereafter, he suffered a bicycle accident. He attributed it to karma and posted an apology. This was the first and last time that a stranger has apologized to me on the Internet, and in some ways it is more miraculous than my appearing on Jeopardy! in the first place.
He was right about the wager, though.
They say that in high-stress situations like war and skydiving and landing planes in blinding snowstorms, there comes a point when your training just kicks in. “Ah,” you say, “just like training,” and you activate the chute, or start artificially respirating your companion under the foil blanket, or throw the plane into a splendid barrel roll. If only I’d been in a profession, “my training” might have “kicked in” at this critical juncture.
Instead, what kicked in was the sense that “In The News 2006” was a Final Jeopardy! category at which I was bound to excel. “I’m not betting on them,” I thought, with some totally misplaced satisfaction. “I’m betting on me!”
I am glad I have never tried skydiving.
To this day, I maintain that my answer was right, if not specific enough.
“Justice Peter Smith embedded a secret code into a 2006 ruling that said this author hadn’t violated a copyright,” Trebek read.
I blanked. I had just read an article on this very subject. I could visualize the article. I could see those tormenting black words on the page. I could see everything except who the article was about.
“Who is Dan Brown?” wrote my competitors.
“Who is that dude?” I wrote. This is technically correct, if lacking in detail.
You may know that during Final Jeopardy!, after that insanely catchy “thinking music” plays, the camera pans over you to show how satisfied you feel with your answer. Sarah and Nick exuded calm and confidence. I made the kind of face that you generally make when you accidentally walk in on your grandparents having adventurous sex.
In the end, I wound up with two thousand dollars, which just about covered the plane and the hotel.
My mother and I slunk away soon afterward.
Now what do I do with the rest of my life?
• • •
When you are a tall kid, they tell you to play basketball. When you hit a certain weight, people suggest that you look into sumo wrestling. When you hit a certain level of saturation in facts—well, why don’t you go on Jeopardy!?
Now that door’s closed.
Everyone else from that tumbrel is struggling alike. Sure, we make do. Bars have trivia nights. We can live off sliders and wings for the rest of our days. But there is more to life than sliders and wings, surely! What about glory? What about usefulness?
Ever since the advent of Google, our prowess has been on the wane.
I interviewed Ken Jennings for a story after he competed with the IBM supercomputer Watson and he was sympathetic. “Trivia geeks are not the public resource they used to be,” he admitted.
We drift listlessly around the watercoolers and dinner tables where we once held sway. Once, if you needed to know who Tom Hanks’ costars were in A League of Their Own, you called us. Now—any fool with IMDb and an iPhone can beat us to the punch.
Woody Allen summed up our predicament nicely. “My father worked for the same firm for twelve years. They fired him and replaced him with a tiny gadget that does everything my father does, only much better. The depressing thing is my mother ran out and bought one.”
Even as I type this, my iPhone hums in my pocket, capable of Googling almost anything just as fast as I can remember it.
The world is increasingly hostile to trivia. We require artificial environments to practice our skill: tournaments in pubs where everyone has to turn off his phone, game shows. The regular air does not support us. You know your skill is really valuable if, in order to practice it, everyone has to pretend that you are living in a different year without full use of modern technology. It’s like sewing clothes from scratch or healing people by letting out their bad humors. Maybe it works, but there’s a more efficient way.
I can’t help feeling a little like an appendix—both in the sense of that chunk at the end of a book that is full of unwanted information, and the useless body part that sometimes flares up and kills a person for no reason. Probably frustration.
It’s not just that my friends don’t need me and that Watson can take me on. I don’t need myself either. “Memory, my dear,” says a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, “is the diary we all carry about with us.” (I think that’s what she says. I’ll have to Google it, to be sure.) If I want to know where I have been, doing what, with whom, my data can tell me. “Where were you last night?” an officer will ask. “Wait,” I’ll say. “Let me check my GChat logs.”
We store things on the outside that we used to store on the inside. Not just facts, but moments, memories.
As I write this, I’m struck by how little attention I have paid to my own life. I remember fewer of the details of this excursion than names of fifteenth-century explorers.
There is a point in the Sherlock Holmes books when Sherlock asks Watson (human Watson, not IBM Watson) how many stairs are in their apartment and Watson has to confess he has never counted. Upon reading that I went home and counted the stairs. There were nineteen. This piece of knowledge has never come in handy. But I know how Watson felt.
It’s not that I don’t notice things. I notice all kinds of things. I have an uncanny and frankly irritating memory for any actor who has ever appeared in anything ever, particularly if I have not seen the film in question. But the things I want most to remember—the isolated moments you know are Important—go sliding away. Graduations and weddings and funerals blur.
Memories committed to paper perish like insects pinned to cards. The moment writhes a little on the pen and that is it. I wish I could tell you what we sang before the game and what I said to Alex, and what-all happened, with precision, but I’ve given you all the shreds I have. Instead I can tell you about Ethelred the Unready and list all the characters in Othello.
I suppose the strange selectivity of memory is half its charm. Our lives are burning houses, and we come running out with whatever we can carry.
Sometimes I think the reason I don’t remember more about my Jeopardy! experience is that I know I could find it if I had to. There’s a tape somewhere. There’s an online archive of all games and players. If I want to know exactly what questions were asked, I have only to Google it. It’s not like Ancient Greece, where if you wanted to know what happened to Achilles at the end of the Trojan War, your bard had to dredge it up from memory.
Most of my memories these days are like that—stashed on the outside, strewn carelessly in texts and GChats. “I can always search the archive,” I murmur. “It’s out there if I ever care to look for it.” But you know what happens the m
oment you say “I’m going to put this somewhere special, where I’ll remember it.” You might as well say, “I’m never going to see this again.”
But when you can take everything with you, you’re no longer forced to choose the things you cannot leave behind. You no longer have to carry anything with you, at all.
• • •
In theory this was the point of all this wonderful new technology: to store everything externally and free our minds to think great thoughts. Throw a stone in a high school or university and you hit someone who is pleased to say that We Have Moved Away from Rote Memorization of Facts Toward Frolicking Freely in the Fields of Pure Thought. You don’t have to learn what to think. You just have to learn How to Think. Then you will be prepared in the unlikely event that you ever run across a fact.
Maybe it’s time to let go, embrace the free mental space.
Been on Jeopardy! Done that. Better clean house and approach the future with an open mind. Maybe trivia is over and I need to accept it.
But that’s the trouble with trivia. You can’t get rid of it. It chooses you, not the other way around. You think I really want to know the names of all these Law & Order guest stars? I’d much rather remember the song we sang, or any of a myriad of moments that count.
Instead, I get these odds and ends. I can’t choose to remember the hundreds of ordinary wonderful days when nothing much happened, the faces that I saw every day that didn’t change—it is only the moments that are out of the ordinary that stick their claws in, the nights spent in unfamiliar rooms, the jolt of a phone call with bad news that pulls you up gasping like a hook yanking you to the surface. Instead of saving the good parts, the ordinary warmth of days, I remember trivia. I have to go through my life constantly aware that starfish eat things with their anuses.
It seems unfair.
But maybe there’s a point, after all.
Ken Jennings thinks there is. “Even when machines are doing more of our thinking and remembering for us, it’ll be more useful to have the wealth of information,” he said. “To make informed decisions about anything in life, you need to have knowledge. If you need a Google search, you’re still at a disadvantage.”
The trouble with only learning how to think is that without the necessary roughage of fact you wind up backing into your opinions. You don’t start out with a healthy ballast of information and so you can assume that there is something optional about facts, that they can be produced or dredged up at a moment’s notice and made to agree with you. You go hunting for facts that support your case. “Why is this good?” you Google. “Why is this bad?” You induce instead of deducing. Facts become a kind of parsley garnish to your premade opinion.
Life with them is a pain. But life without them? Unthinkable.
• • •
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
You have to tell yourself something.
Once Jeopardy! is closed to you, a big life full of trivia night sliders and wings and nothing to do with your facts stretches out ahead. Losers can’t appear on it again until the host is gone.
So these are my alternatives. Accept my increasing irrelevance in a world where trivia is something you entrust to IBM’s Watson or your phone, where even the highest-level human beings can’t hope to compete.
Or try to find a way back in.
And as long as the host lives, what can I hope to do?
That’s why one of us has to go, Trebek.
It’s nothing personal.
Grab Life by the Debutante Balls
“It’s not really a debutante ball.”
That was the first thing my grandmother said when she announced that I was going to have a debutante ball.
“Your mother had one. She knows. It’s more of a nice family party, a sort of coming out into society.”
“Okay” I said as I looked up from my Ancient Greek textbook. “I’ve always wanted to come out.”
My mother and grandmother exchanged a nervous look. This, the look said, was what came of sending me to an all-girls’ school. Our school motto was “Hey, a Few Years of Wondering Whether You Might Be Attracted to People of the Same Sex Is a Small Price to Pay for Confidence in Your Math Skills.” (I am pretty confident in my math skills.)
“You’ll need two male escorts,” my grandmother said, moving on quickly. “They’re going to need red sashes, and you’ll have to wear a floor-length white gown for the Presentation of the Daughters. Or your aunt can arrange escorts for you. I’ve got her on the lookout for smart young men.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a debutante ball at all.”
“And gloves,” my grandmother said. “You’re going to need long white gloves.”
I frowned back down at the Greek textbook. Truth be told, I had been waiting for this moment my whole life.
Everyone has one erroneous belief that gets him through the chilly February mornings of the soul. Some people think the Rapture’s bound to strike at any moment. Then your neighbors who wouldn’t hang out with you because you kept speaking in tongues will finally get what’s coming to them! Then all your hours chanting psalms and waving palms and avoiding shellfish and sex and sexy shellfish will let you blend straight in with the heavenly throng. Other people get really into Survivalism, operating under the assumption that civilization is hanging by a fragile thread that is liable to snap at any moment, and that when it does, only the people who have spent hours camping in the dank woods and learning how to identify poisonous mushrooms and dress a deer carcass while fighting zombies with one arm tied behind their back will make it out alive.
I have no delusions about my ability to make it through a Rapture or apocalypse of any kind. In disaster movies, I am the person getting mowed down by killer hornets in the very first frame. Survive in the wild? I can barely survive in the grocery store. Until this week, I thought that dressing a deer carcass meant putting it in a little outfit. The only way I can tell if a mushroom is edible or not is: If it is in the woods, it will kill you, and if it is in a Trader Joe’s in a little cardboard tub covered in plastic wrap, it is probably safe to eat. (This system would not hold up very well in a postapocalyptic wasteland.)
I know all this. My belief had nothing to do with that.
My sustaining conviction was that if I ever traveled back in time, I’d be cool.
I certainly wasn’t cool in the present. I was sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen, teaching myself Ancient Greek over the Christmas break. At social gatherings with people my own age, I stuck out like a sore thumb in a gathering of cool fingers with an unlimited command of pop culture. Crouched over a copy of Jane Eyre, I had missed all the basic cable moments that defined everyone else’s childhoods. Clarissa had explained nothing to me. Why was it always Degrassi that they wanted to talk about, and never Admiral de Grasse, the French fleet commander around the Battle of Yorktown? While people around me started debating the plot twists on The O.C., I left lunch early to sit by myself reading Moby-Dick in the vestibule.
The past was my consolation. I knew with every fiber of my being that if I was ever seated at a dinner table next to Oscar Wilde, I’d be able to engage him in conversation for the whole evening. Or, heck, Dorothy Parker. I wasn’t picky.
I just had to make it back there. My vision of this heaven looked something like the wall pattern in the café at Barnes & Noble, where D. H. Lawrence is saying something to Thomas Hardy while James Joyce knocks knees with Virginia Woolf. Depending on time period, the exact combination varied. 1865 would give me Victor Hugo and Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, who’d once stayed at Dickens’ house for a few weeks (“which seemed to the family ages,” Dickens complained). Go back further, and I could grab a couch next to Plato and Alcibiades at the Symposium. My Greek wasn’t quite ready, but I bet I could pick up most of it from body language. Wherever it was, I’d
sit down and, for once, be right at home.
Well, maybe not quite. The trouble with all my time travel dreams was that I was, well, female. Louis CK does a great bit about how impossible time traveling is if you’re anything but a white man. He has a point. Land pre-1900, and you’re bound to have a very tough time of it, losing your rights to land and property and the vote and even pants.
But—wasn’t that a small price to pay for finally being with people who shared my base of reference?
So I became a time travel survivalist, prepping constantly for the moment when some benign anachronist would realize my distress and come spirit me away. After the house was dark, I lay awake under the covers reading my way through the collected works of Aristophanes, boning up on the Athenian politicians who had been the butts of fifth century BC jokes. (Get it together, Cleisthenes!) It wasn’t homework, in the traditional sense. But I knew I had to do it anyway. I had to be ready.
• • •
Outside, on my grandmother’s patio, my cousins were texting their girlfriends. How they had girlfriends already, I had no idea. We were barely into ninth grade. The ball was years away—not scheduled until college—and we clearly didn’t need to find dates yet. What were they doing? Evidently their middle school experiences had been vastly different from mine.
I was still recovering from middle school. My reading had offered few insights on how to navigate it. Captain Ahab, for instance, went to zero middle school dances. I supposed I could share a few of the numerous fun facts that I had learned about whale sperm in chapter ninety-four, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” but it was difficult to yell over 98 Degrees. Rudderless, I spent many a freighted hour in my bedroom pondering what I was going to wear. I didn’t own a pair of jeans, and I knew you could get impregnated up a skirt by mistake if you danced too close (or something). Fortunately, I had a lot of loose-fitting khakis that had been treated with Scotchgard, so the building blocks of a winning outfit were there. What revealing tank top or halter top, I pondered, would I wear over my khakis? The blue one with stripes? The red one with flowers on it? Should I wear a pencil behind my ear, as was my custom on school days, or omit it?
A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Page 13
