Confessions of a triva buff.

When I was a student I took advantage of free* university and a scholarship to generally have a good time and live out some Edwardian fantasy I had about university life. Shamelessly I enrolled in an Arts course studying humanities, history and literature. Without even a though of my future job prospects!
University was weird. There's so much going on there you really can try interesting and different things. Like... Fencing club: the place where nerds do battle. Or, the Young National Party: where being racist is OK!
Seriously though, all the political club people were unbearable. Like this one guy I dated for a while in my second year. He worked part-time for a local member of Labor and was, in the midst of John Howard's long and exacting run of power, a dedicated Labor Party supporter. Which was fine, until Kim Beazly failed to convince everyone that his inflated self would be able to steer the Nation well through troubled waters whilst illegal immigrant babies were being thrown overboard!
At least, that's what that media lot said anyway.
So, not as too much a surprise to most, Labor lost and poor unseen-of-late boyfriend, having been kept awake and campaigning for the last 43 hours on caffeine pills and alcohol, showed up on my doorstep. He was a pale and wasted image of his old self. He stumbled in and collapsed on my couch babbling about Keep Left signs mocking him and how only oral sex would make him feel better. So you know what I mean about political types being a little too dramatic.

University is where I learned really useful stuff; like my favourite author when I was a child was a paedophile, or that the South Pole was reached first by Roald Amundsen's and then Robert Falcon Scott's teams. Admundsen was also the first to reach the North Pole too. Anyway, the point is everyone remembers Scott and not Amundsen because Scott's name is much cooler. It's true if you don't believe me.
The point of the Amundsen and Scott story is to say something about trends: Only the most popular names, books, faces and films survive. Only that which is talked about most can survive Samuel Johnson's 'test of time'; the rule that if a work can survive time it is truly good. So, according to Johnson, can it be true that Madonna is on par with Shakespeare?
We used to discuss that kind of thing in class. I kept wondering why I had worked so hard in high school at trigonometry if this was higher education. University filled my brain with interesting yet essentially useless information. That is, useless in the workplace yet deadly on Trivia Night down at the pub.

What does the future hold for me? I hope I end up some kind of trivia buff who travels from dusty frontier town to dusty frontier town. Taking on the local buffs at their own trivia nights and surviving on the spoils: free drinks, dinner coupons, meat trays and magnum bottles of wine.

*free means I owe the Australian government loads of money. I don't have to start paying it back anytime soon though so I think it's free.