Eloquently Twisted

The pen moves over the paper, I start with an eye, I always start with an eye and the idea spreads outward from there. It’s now a cat, the pen moves in my hand. They’re talking about questions.
We’re at a quiz.
The quiz is in a badminton club. The idea that the badminton club has a pub above it amuses me, so does watching the players on the court.
‘Shuttlecocks!’
I say with glee. ‘Can we call our team The Cockshuttles? Wait, something more subtle…’
‘Enterprise willy’ Colm suggests.
We don’t have a team name though, we only have a number. It was 20, there aren’t twenty tables so she scribbles that out and writes 13. Lucky table 13.

The pen drawing cat stares blankly at me, it’s head is a little too big.
When I’m faced with a pen, (there are 4) and large pieces of white space on pages, I draw. Almost compulsively. The fact that I am not good at quizzes also plays into this.
Colm’s friends are good, they go to a lot of quizzes, it’s a social thing which has been going on for years and over that time you accumulate vast quantities of trivial information. Information which I do not have, information which will be tested to remind me that I clearly don’t have it.
I quell the feeling of hopelessness rising, that I’m on the team to be the legible writer and to draw something different on every single sheet which is a job I have designated myself.

The questions are asked, I write down the answers, one of the answers relates to pandas, so I draw a panda. It’s eating bamboo. The speech bubble beside it says ‘Bamboo is shit’.
Beneath it I write ‘Tourette’s Panda’. We hand it up. The guys answer the questions, history, geography, sport, politics. They get most of them right.
I’m drawing a platypus, I draw a moustache, glasses, a tie, a hat on it. Then name it ‘Business Platypus’ and give it a briefcase. One of the answers was platypus.

I imagine at this point, the confusion of the person correcting the question sheets. That they are being returned with mostly right answers but also bizarre drawings which have been painstakingly shaded. Maybe she thinks we’re cheating.
The person collecting the answer sheets requests that I keep drawing as I sent up one answer sheet without any drawing and it was noted. I draw a shark. I wrote ‘Quiz Shark’ beside it because that’s what these guys are. Quiz sharks, they find quizzes go to them and usually win.

There’s a sense of freedom in not being able to answer the questions, at actually feeling really dumb for a moment that I don’t know about European rivers or something a golfer did. It reminds me that I choose to exclude myself from the knowledge, that it didn’t happen suddenly and that I found myself specialising and focussing in strange areas of information and it’s application.
I have a PhD. I answer maybe 3 questions that no one else can. One of those refers to an 1980s cartoon which I know because of my addiction to reading about such things on wikipedia. And now I feel that my retention of any information only relates to my job, certain TV shows, a catalogue of innuendo, internet memes and pop culture references which would only come up in a quiz which I set for someone who wanted to be my friend.

We won the quiz, as I went up to get the prizes the woman asked how we heard about the quiz. I said ‘One of the guys plays badminton’
That, was technically true, he does play badminton… just not there.
We win a bottle of whiskey, a voucher for a car service and oil check, a really big mirror and a voucher to get a photo printed onto canvas.
It was like we won a boss battle in a pretty poor Final Fantasy game.
Colm and I ended up with the GIANT MIRROR and the canvas.
So sure, I didn’t feel smart overall but sometimes it’s nice to do that, sometimes it’s nice to just sit at a table and draw animals with hats while the adults talk about the answer to question five, round four.
I don’t know the answer, but neither does business platypus.
Silly business platypus.