Alas, I should have given it a name

My pen ran out of ink this afternoon!

Yes, that’s right, alert the media and break out the bubbly! This calls for a celebration! I’m going to party like five years ago it was 1999!

Okay, perhaps I am getting just the slightest bit carried away. Just maybe. The amazing part is, though, that this has never happened to me before. Once, way back in grade school, I found a pen that had very little ink left and I used it until it ran out, but I have never been the sole user of a pen that ran out of ink. Every other pen I ever possessed (809 pens to be exact - I counted) was lost before this momentous occasion could take place.

Pens are slippery little things with absolutely no loyalty. They jump out of your backpack. They dematerialize from your pencil case. They roll off your desk, and disappear into “Behind the Furniture/Appliance Land.” They tempt passersby, waving their flexgrip barrels, just asking to be slipped into a concealed pocket. Because of these nasty pen tendencies, I am only now, with pen #810, able to complete the entire cycle of pen life. And how did I commemorate this milestone? I threw the pen in the trash!

It was an ever so satisfying experience!

(ps. I don’t really count the number of pens I’ve owned. I mean that would make me crazy, right? So, I would never actually do that. No, of course not. Yeah.)

Have you ever stuck a pie piece in the wrong way and had to pry it out with a knife? Uh, yeah, me neither.

"What mighty contests rise from trivial things"
-Alexander Pope

If you have not heard the above listed quote, then you obviously have not played enough Trivial Pursuit. I have. That is, I have played enough Trivial Pursuit…and then some. I wasn’t referring to the fact that I have heard the above quote, because that is rather obvious considering that I included it in this blog entry. Anyway, I’ll pretend to assume that you don’t know what I’m talking about and explain that this quote appears on the original Trivial Pursuit box. Some would call it “Genus One,” but actually it’s just “Genus.” As I learned from Encyclopedia Brown so many years ago, you cannot have an authentic sword inscribed with “presented to so-and-so at the First Battle of Bull Run” because at the time the inscription was made there would have been no way of knowing there would be a second one. This reminds me of a story that a co-worker of mine told me when I was working construction a few summers ago. It began like this, “Y’know the first time I hooked a battery to my braces it really hurt.” The FIRST time? As in, you didn’t stop after that?! There was more to the story, but really the first line sums it up.

Sorry, I am way off subject. My point was there is no “Genus One,” because it wasn’t named as such when it was released. Obviously, it was necessary to have another paragraph of tangential information to explain that. Yeah… Furthermore, I am so partial to the original edition that I would prefer to think that there are no other editions. But then again, I can’t really claim this honestly, because I actually love all trivia games – I like to fancy I have purist notions, but I’m weak. Trivia is aimed at retrieving the exact kind of information my brain likes to hold on to. Where are my socks? What time is my meeting? How long since my last oil change? I don’t know. Memory of practical knowledge is not my specialty, but I can tell you the capital of Mongolia and the author of Night of the Iguana. I can also tell you the name and lineage of every cat, including kittens, that our family ever owned (this is more impressive than you may think since we’ve had more than 50), but I seriously doubt a trivia question will ever call for such information. So…yeah.

As you may have guessed, this disjointed mess of an entry was influenced by a recent playing of Trivial Pursuit – last night. Not my favorite version, but still a lot of fun. So I decided to write about the game…and other trivial things.

G’night.