What is Ignition?

"My first semester at college, a time when most new students do nothing dumber than sign up for a series of early-morning classes they will never actually attend, I decided to push the dumbness envelope a little, and jumped out of an airplane. It was mostly my roommate's fault...I can't remember what they said at the [campus skydiving club] meeting, but it must have been 24-karat golden oratory, since it got my roommate to sign his name on the I-want-to-jump-out-of-a-plane list. This still doesn't explain why I signed up too. It must have been a testosterone thing. Nobody wants a scrawny diabetic guy from Yakima to be the alpha male in his dorm room."

-I've done some really dumb things in my life. I can't wait to go skydiving some day.

"My first dive was a tandem jump, in which you're strapped in a vaguely homoerotic position beneath a seasoned skydiver, who has to pull the cord and land and do all the hard stuff. Good thing, as I spent the whole dive, from wing-strut to crash landing, in a dazed state of severe sensory overload. It's an indescribable feeling. The brain, overwhelmed by all the new things rapidly hurtling at it (chief among them the ground), says, 'Well, that'll about do it for me,' and checks out. For many divers, this lasts a few seconds before they snap out of it. But in my case, the fugue must have continued for the full jump. I had momentary flashes of lucidity...during those brief intervals when my brain poked back in for a second, said, 'Ah, you're still falling out of an airplane, then,' and abruptly left again."

-I really liked this passage because it sounds a lot like something Douglas Adams would write. I suppose this was the point in the book where I started to type quotes on to this blog. Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors--I've probably read the Hitchhiker's Guide series close to twenty times, probably more.

"I mention this now not to show what badasses trivia buffs are, but because it was the only thing I've ever done that could have prepared me for my first Jeopardy! taping."

-Great...

In the Jeopardy! green room: "'How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?' one woman asks no one in particular. No takers. 'Three! One to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with clocks!' Some polite laughter ensues. 'Oh, you don't know how great it is to finally be in a room where people are actually smart enough to get my jokes!' I give us about ten minutes before the Monty Python sketch-quoting begins."

-Then again, there are some pretty interesting aspects to being around exceptionally smart people.

"Stage manager John Lauderdale walks us around the set. It seems slightly smaller in person. The camera must add ten pounds to things like plywood and blue polyethylene plastic as well. As I gape at the complex array of lights and cameras, it hits me for the first time that my big chance to look like an idiot on national TV is only hours away."

-Fortunately for me, I've started looking like an idiot in public from a young age. When my dad owned his dealership, my siblings and I had to be in the 'No More Bull' commercials he ran all over the Austin area. When I moved schools, a lot of people recognized me first as that 'No More Bull' kid. They apparently liked the commercials, as it took people a long time to forget them. From there, it wasn't very hard to lose my sense of what might be embarassing in a large public forum. That and Ms. Fletcher's drama class had me all sorts of made-up and running around the stage being silly throughout middle school, and I supposed it carried over to high school and college. Truly, all the world's a stage.

"The stage cleared, John Lauderdale counts down the seconds. I wish I knew some secret Zen technique to slow my racing heartbeat and breathing. Why, oh, why didn't I spend my twenties studying martial arts in Tibet like Bruce Wayne did in Batman comics?"

-Ehh...Tibet, Naval Academy...pretty much the same thing.


"We applaud Alex Trebek as he enters. This is the first time I've seen him up close. I was sort of hoping he'd show up backstage, give us all a fist bump and a hearty 'Sup, playaz?' but, in reality, contestants are kept far away from anyone who might know the game material ahead of time, the host included."

-You know, I hugged the principal, superintendent, and high-fived the valedictorian at my high-school graduation. I think people may have looked at me a little weird, and I don't think Dr. Veach was really expecting it, but I was just so happy to have earned that diploma...and I like giving hugs.

"The familiar plink-plunk of the Jeopardy! 'think music' begins playing aloud in the studio. A mixed blessing: on the one hand, it's the only way for contestants to measure the elapsing thirty seconds. On the other hand, when concentrating with thousands of dollars at stake, this tune is incredibly annoying. I feel like there's a gang of elves with pick-axes hammering away on a glockenspiel inside my brain."

"We three contestants are brought downstage to stand with Alex and pretend to chitchat while the credits roll. This is each show's most awkward moment. All four of you are pretending to be at a jovial cocktail party when, in actuality, two of you are kicking yourselves for muffing your chance at Jeopardy! stardom and lamenting what might have been, one of you is gradually realizing you're going to have to go through the whole stressful ordeal again in about ten minutes, and one of you is wondering how much of the Lakers game you're going to miss...It just feels good to have achieved something that I've been dreaming about since I was ten. Back then, I was so trivia-crazy that the people I watched behind the Jeopardy! podium were superheroes to me...I never really knew what to say when chin-chucking aunts and backslapping uncles asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, but deep down, I realize, this is it. Just this."