What is Ammunition?

"The phone on my desk at work rings, an unwelcome interruption. I'm a highly paid software engineer! How am I supposed to surf the Web and write e-mail all day if the phone keeps ringing?"

-This is unfortunately all too common an attitude with people's jobs. I think that if we are not in some job that challenges or excites us, then we do end up just trying to get through the day, occupying ourselves in other ways, not really throwing ourselves headlong into whatever it is we do. That's one of the reasons I have to avoid a cubicle job. I don't want to waste my life because I know that I have a great capacity to waste time even though there is so much to do.

"The earliest roots of trivia, in the sense of miscellaneous-and-not-entirely-useful-facts, date back to the 'commonplace book' of ye olde England. In Shakespeare's time, a commonplace book was a rather dull thing, a personal journal of instructive moral quotes culled from one's reading. But at the dawn of the Victorian age, a commonplace book was becoming something a little less commonplace: a miscellany of random facts the writer happened to find interesting."

-Apparently, Ms. Darrow wasn't crazy. I know I still keep my commonplace book from Senior year, and it's full of quotes I find and Final Jeopardy! questions that I see on television.

"Is there something about trivia that attracts the dabbler, the perpetual student, because it offers the illusion of real intellectual mastery?"

-I know I sometimes feel that way. I feel often that if I could forever be a student, I would. But accompanying that feeling is the idea that I know that I will probably never be a master of or completely devoted to one subject. I am a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none person. I'm comfortable with myself that way (I would probably be a general studies major if I could because I feel very limited just studying one thing), but our world is becoming more and more specialized, and I'm not so sure that someone with my kind of knowledge, preferences, and skills will be valued in this new, flat world where anyone can use the Internet to find what they want. I don't know if I'm the type of person that is needed anymore--old fashioned, obsolete, and maybe just plain old (in the head, at any rate).

About the 20s: "It was an age of fads--Charleston marathons, raccoon coats, flagpole-sitting--but, for a little while, trivia was king of them all."

"I don't want to look back and say, 'If I'd just been a little more prepared, I could have won,' I try to explain to Mindy. 'I'm just neurotic enough for that to bug me for the rest of my life.' It's true. Jeopardy!, by its own contestant rules, is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. If you get a cramp in the last mile of a marathon or don't quite make it up Everest, there's always next year. But you only get one shot at Jeopardy!, and odds are you're going to lose that very first game. Jeopardy! is a shark, mowing through America's self-declared intelligentsia with its huge, shiny teeth, claiming victims at the implacable rate of two a night (check local listings). You have to be in pretty good shape to escape the teeth for a night or two, but they get everyone eventually."

-Ken is making me paranoid. I know I probably won't get on, and I don't even really have a plan for getting on the show. But I also know that I have so many other things I want to do that I won't ever be able to completely dedicate myself to getting good at Jeopardy!. Can I do this? Is it even a reasonable goal? This summer already, I want to decorate my car, train for a marathon, train to validate my 40-year swim, read a lot, catch up on e-mails, clean out my school e-mail box, plan some parties, plan a trip, go on said trip, watch some classic movies, watch some modern movies, start developing show ideas, help write a serial...and that's just off the top of my head. All of that takes time (as does blogging, I realize, but it's also important to me to keep track of all this). Summertime should be relaxing, but I have trouble sitting by idle, even if what I am doing could be considered by some to be idle.