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Nothing exposes lack of recall better than a trivia night.
Not that you fancy yourself a walking encyclopeadia, but gee, youd figure you could remember your own name.
Round after round of questions about nothing in particular, raising serious questions about what you were doing all those years at school?
They call it memory but its really forgettery.
Stripped of mobile phones, the only internet allowed is your brain mayday mayday.
Thats probably why they sit you in groups, so the collective unconscious can buddy up early to address the big topics, like a name for the team.
To be frank, this can gas the squad mentally, particularly after theyve used up so much juice trying remember their own names, let alone their teammates.
Reassuringly it soon becomes apparent that nearly everybody at the table knows nothing about most things, but just enough about some things to get the team in the game.
Take native flowers for instance.
My heart sank when a sheet of blossoms was passed around.
A veritable Rorschach Test of weeds.
Looking at those ink blots all I could hear upstairs was crickets, chirp chirp and of course waratah.
It was red. A waratah is native and red. It could be a waratah.
In the absence of knowledge, theres always hope, no matter how inaccurate, and when all is said and done (and retracted), mistakes are a part of learning.
Actually, at trivia nights, mistakes are just mistakes, which gets noted by everyone, until everyone makes one.
Then they unify the team in the knowledge that there is no Messiah/savant and its gonna take a group effort to maintain face. In typically indirect manners, usually.
Alarming, really, how memory can be retrieved/constructed.
Little shards of insight start appearing to questions youd figure youd never know the answer to if they didnt get bounced around the zeitgeist.
Pole vaulter? Gold medal? Olympics? Red hair? WARATAH!!! Brothel. Steve Hooker. Bingo.
A pinball process of unreliability, but quite fun when the alternative is sitting there all night looking like a stunned mullet.
Amazing how much you can convince yourself an answer is an answer when its not. And interesting how the collective feeds off confidence, no matter how unfounded.
Confirmation bias is the enemy and thus you need your filters so the lemmings dont go over the edge, too often.
Concepts like the vibe and you got that last one right that we all got wrong so maybe we should go with you this time really come into play.
At the end of the night, its hard to remember how the team got so many answers right, let alone when they should have played their double score round.
Next time dont forget to go early.