A Day in which I get to be AWESOME

I was in Barnes & Noble today buying a birthday present for a friend (because WHAT could possibly be a better present than getting a book?).  As I was standing in line, they announced that they would be having a John Green trivia contest in 5 minutes.  Since I had just finished reading Green’s An Abundance of Katherines , and I was there anyway, I thought I would go see what kind of questions were in the trivia contest.

OK, so let me just tell you–these were some TOUGH questions.  How many people lived in Gutshot, TN?  What is the full name of John Green’s dog, Bubble?  When did the Vblog brothers start (which I happened to get right, but it was just a lucky guess).  What does John Green say is the 4th best job in the world?

Then there were the questions that drove me crazy because I felt like I SHOULD have remembered them.  Which Katherine didn’t fit the theory?  Who said he was seeking “the great perhaps”?  What paper town were Quentin and co going to in their road trip?  Where did Augustus and Hazel first kiss? It bugged me that I couldn’t remember those specifics.

Fortunately, there were just a FEW relatively easy ones, such as “What literary work did ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ take its name from?”  But those were few and far between.

However, after five rounds of questions–plus a tie breaker–they collected our sheets and it turned out that I had won!  However, it is kind of a case of the old saying, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”   I only had 10 right (out of 51 questions), so that is kind of pitiful.  However, everyone else in the group (which was not large–there were only 10 or so of us doing the contest) had between 4-7 questions right.  In our defense, the people running the question said they thought it was really hard and had come from the corporate headquarters, and if they had done the questions they would have made them much easier.  I know what pulled it out for me was the round where they asked what character (from all his different books) had said what quote, because I think I got 5 out of the 10 quote questions right.  I actually recognized a couple of them, and three others I was able to figure out who that sounded like, based on my knowledge of the books.  Those questions played more to my style, which is to focus on the big picture of the plots, characters, and such, rather than smaller specifics, like memorizing how many people live in Shotgut, TN.

But still….that means that I hold the title of 2014 JOHN GREEN TRIVIA CONTEST CHAMPION OF THE CARY BARNES & NOBLE!  So, taking off on what John says at the end of every Crash Course video, today I didn’t forget to be AWESOME!

So let that be a lesson to you.  No telling how that summer reading may pay off!