Kate's Point of View

I went to an Old School party on Saturday that ended up in chaos ranging from adolescent flirting, drunkenness of the kind not seen since before the age of 21, black outs and a contest displayed my skills at their finest. The ambiguously themed party had drinks from childhood and packed lunches to take home with us as goody bags. Our hostess, before she ended up fetal and asleep, donned a hairnet and the DJ entertained every vintage musical notion that popped in anyone’s head.

Midway through the festivities we have a Bubble Blowing Content where we each had a few moments two chew two pieces of Bubble Yum bubblegum and prepare our cheeks and mouths for champion bubbles. In truth, this was an unfair competition since I regularly chew Hubba Bubba® bubblegum and am an avoid bubble blower. In fact, I offered to save out hostess some gum and chew my own but this was seen as a nasty tactic to scare off my opponents.

Apparently it worked, and dirty jokes ensued as I blew a bubble the size of my head.

When Wonder Boy and I went on one of our first dates we needed to get a bite to eat on our way to somewhere else. Time was tight so he suggested we go to Taco Bell. We went through the drive thru and he asked what I wanted. “One soft taco, one order of nachos and a water,” I said, after ample thought on the matter. He placed that order and then ordered “three cheese quesadillas with extra sauce” in such a way that I just knew he had placed this same order dozens, if not hundreds of time before. “Can you change my order?” I asked. “Two soft tacos, two orders of nachos and a medium Dr. Pepper.” My standard order.

That was perhaps the only time when I have play coy for Wonder Boy, pretending to be more dainty than I actually am. Dumb, I know. But I liked the boy and I wasn’t ready yet to share my love of liquid cheese. Only when he revealed his own passion – a passion like nothing I have ever seen before – for cheese was I ready to come clean.

My history with Taco Bell goes back a long way. In high school I went on a date with a boy. He picked me up and we drove to a nearby Taco Bell. After ordering food in the drive thru, he drove me across the street to the Kroger’s parking lot where we ate our food. Then he took me home. As dates go, it was pretty lackluster. So, despite the Chuck Taylors and longish hair, there were no more dates.

You know how people have these landmark memories like “Where I was when Kennedy was shot?” Well, I seem to be missing most of the ones that are standard for people my age but I do know where I was when I heard Princess Diana had died. I had gone to some festivity the night before and was still hung over when I got up to work at the local amusement park. Apparently in my enthusiasm to drink I had forgotten to make sure my work uniform would be clean for the next day. So when I woke up my shirt was wet in the washer.

There was no time to clean it so I had the genius idea to secure the end of the shirt in the closed sunroof of my car and drive to work with the shirt flapping the wind. As if the 10 minute ride would be enough to dry the shirt, right? So I drove just past the amusement park and drove to the Taco Bell to change. (I do not know why I didn’t just go into the locker room at work.) As I sat in the car putting on my still soggy shirt and cursing myself for wearing a flowered bra on a day when I would be wearing a wet, white shirt, I heard on the radio that Princess Diana was dead. That was my “when were you when” moment. At Taco Bell in my wet polyester shirt with a flowered bra underneath.

I went to college at Ohio University, which is where my two younger sisters (one for undergrad and grad school) and my younger brother all decided to go as well. (Actually, Jake is still there and will be there for a while longer now that he’s been accepted into the MBA program.) With so many of us there, our times in Athens overlapped quite a bit, be it for actually taking classes or just visiting friends and old stomping grounds. During one visit to Athens post-college with some fellow alum and after a hard night of drinking we went to Taco bell (the world’s largest Taco Bell I’ll have you k now) for some obligatory grub. In line for food was my sister and her friends, as drunk as my and my friends were. While trying to carry on some intelligible conversation with #3, I started laughing. I mean the kind of laughter that has no real reason but where you just can’t stop laughing. In her drunken state, #3 started laughing too. Mike, one of my friends, sat there looking at the two of us quite literally slack-jawed. “You laugh exactly the same way,” he said, or, or be accurate, slurred. I know it’s goofy to look back at this moment so fondly, especially since it was just a drunken moment in a Taco Bell in Athens, but I was happy then. Happy laughing with my sister and happy knowing that someone could look at the two of us and see our similarities.

Things have changed over the last several years. Taco Bell franchises in Ohio stopped selling Dr. Pepper. Both Jason and I have had to severely curtail our Taco Bell intake in our old age. But now, and this is just too much, the Taco Bell in Athens has closed. So this weekend when I head up to Athens with my sister, #2, and my mom to visit Jake I will have to settle for pizza to absorb the alcohol in my stomach. And it just won’t be the same.

I am the oldest of four kids ranging in age from 22 to 28. All of us are out of the house whether it be owning a home, renting an apartment or living in the kind of dwelling that can only be referred to as a home while you are in college. Every holiday the four of us traipse back home and except things to proceed as they did when we ranged in age from 4 to 10.

It’s been a struggle. Apparently my parents thought having to buy treats and plan surprises from make-believe people and creatures ended when either you stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny or when you moved out.

They were so wrong.

My mother sent out an email detailing plans for this year’s Easter celebration. A lot has happened in the last year, including my parents changing from the church we all know from our childhood and my mom getting a full-time job. The new church necessitates celebrating mass in a new facility that is a little too foreign to us kids. The new job, I’m told, means that the Easter Bunny doesn’t have time to supply us with an Easter basket full of goodies.

Have you ever heard of such nonsense???

When this announcement came out yesterday, it was rejected 400%. Me and my siblings experience a rare moment of unanimity and all declined our invitation to this bogus Easter event. The best was when my sister explained that her boyfriend’s mother not only had Easter baskets for her kids but that she actually MADE THE EASTER BASKETS BY HAND. After that even my parents thought it would just be better to celebrate with her boyfriend’s families.

This morning Mrs. Easter Bunny let us know that Easter, WITH BASKETS, is back on. And that this year Mr. Easter Bunny is helping.

So my childhood can continue. At least until I am 29.

This past week on This American Life one of the segments focused on people who love quizzes – people who love quizzes so much they participate in 36 hour (sometimes lot more) long quiz competitions. They started interviewing this one quiz-lover named Dave and I’ll admit that all I could think about this guy was, “What a loser.”

He talked about his love of the trivial. His love of learning. At one of his jobs he actually had a boss come up to him and complain that he made too many literary references in his conversation. (Mind you, he did not do this in his job. This man’s boss was complaining about his literary skills.) The guy was understandably confused. Then one day he and his friends were having a conversation about monkeys, something Wonder Boy and I do more than you’d care to know because monkeys are awesome, and he started throwing in all of these facts. I think the way the guy put it is that he was “forcing knowledge on people.”
What he liked about quiz competitions and clubs and such was that the people there wanted to learn. They appreciated his huge bank of random facts.

Then the host, Lisa Pollak, said, “The thing that can be annoying in the real world is the same thing that makes you good at solving puzzles.”

This is when I started thinking, “Aw shit. I identify with this guy. Dammit.”

Pollak went on to say, “On a puzzle team, Dave can be himself, only better. I think this is true for a lot of people whose talents require the right context in which to shine. Think about it. A boxer without a boxing ring is just a guy punching people. In a puzzle competition a buy with a mind for obscure facts can be a star.”

So the thing is, I think this applied to me and a lot of friends. (Yes, that’s right. I am applying this new loser status I’ve just realized to some of you.) See, I’m smart. But I’m smart about random stuff. I love school and I love learning but it’s not the mainstream stuff I love. I will never remember dates and I will rarely remember peoples’ names. But weird facts? That’s where I shine.

Put me at a game board for Trivial Pursuit and I start to salivate. Add Danny, both Jasons and Alex to the table and you watch our cheeks flush and our feet get antsy. It’s an environment where we can finally make use of all of the trivia we’ve been collecting.
It’s also possibly my most annoying state for all of the rest of my family. Sorry guys.