Epic Banality

Every Wednesday the gang—which generally includes Guinness, Voltron, Hotelie, Soldier and K.L.—and I head to our favorite pub, Fadó for some drinks, dinner and a furious round of pub quiz. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, people form teams at their respective tables and compete for a number of rounds of trivial. At the end of the night the team with the most points wins some kind of award. At Fadó first place gets a $50.00 gift certificate and there are prizes for second and third as well. We’ve been at this “traditionally” for about six or seven weeks. We’ve never managed to win and even when we’re in the race, the last round always proves fatal. In the last round the points are doubled and we always seem to fare poorly.

Tonight was different. Tonight, even though it required some morally flexible means, we emerged victorious. The night began with naming our team which is given a theme each time. The theme for tonight was a made up 80s dance move. We thought that “The Blumpkin” had a nice ring to it. Over the course of the match we answered the questions pretty well, but for that extra added push in the last round we effectively bribed one of the waitresses for the answers. (She was a hot waitress according to K.L., and I have to agree. Incidentally, so does Guinness.) Also, I stole one answer (the number of stars on the Australian flag) from K.L.’s Blackberry. So, we’ve got unclean hands now. We also have a $50.00 gift certificate.

There was one more issue. The girl adding the points wasn’t terribly good with complex arithmetic like… addition. So, we were originally scored in third place when the final scores were announced, but after a dispute it was discovered that she couldn’t add and when the recounts were done, The Blumpkin came out victorious. (And, as an addendum, it was hilarious hearing the announcer use our team name on multiple occasions. I think he had a bit too much fun emphasizing our name too.) So yeah, $50.00. It won’t buy you one helluva blumpkin or anything, but in the seedier parts of town, it can get you a cheap one.

My night was made more interesting on the drive home with K.L. While we were driving the handles of a plastic grocery bag kept tickling against my leg, so I picked up the bag and was curious about the contents. It was a shirt. No big deal, but K.L. made a joking comment about it being a dead rat. I retorted by saying that she keeps a lot of her trash in a small bag in the refrigerator because she hates bugs. For whatever reason this caused her to rehearse a story for her life as a high schooler.

So, here’s the story:

At her high school K.L. noticed a bunch of small frogs and thought, “Well, they’re there so I should take them.” Yeah, I know, weird. It gets better though. Why take these small frogs and put them in a paper bag? She told me, “It was in case I needed them for a spell.” I asked her if she was a Wiccan or something at that point and she said, “No, I wanted to have them just in case though.” Just in case she needed to brew some magic potion or something I guess. I wonder if she stashed away any eye of newt as well. She did confirm that she had a guy in her gym class pluck some of his own hairs for her for the same purpose. Just in case, you know, she needed them for a spell.

Back to the frogs though. They died. Frogs and paper bags don’t seem to mix. So, put yourself in her shoes, you have a bag of dead frogs. Do you:

1. Dispose of them and never speak of this again.
2. Salt the dead frogs to preserve them—again, just in case you need them for a spell and you certainly wouldn’t want their deaths to be in vain—then store them in a jewelry box from 1997 to 2007, disposing of them then because your parents are moving out of that house.

If you chose the first answer, thank you for being well adjusted. If you chose the latter, you’d do what K.L. did and it’s hard to find the words to describe precisely how that categorizes a person. Weird perhaps? I think that’s not a strong enough word by any stretch.

Oh, and K.L. assures me that the frogs’ death was purely accidental. However, can you really use live frogs in spells? I’ve never seen any. And K.L. also tells me and firmly stands by the fact that she’s sure other people have done this same thing and that her actions are in no way weird or out of the ordinary. That’s precisely what makes her weird.

So… there you have it. I’m as speechless, as those of you reading probably are right now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Anecdote, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.