Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Having learned to read with the help of my mom the librarian and the daily arrival of The Washington Post, I remember well the Carter years when Post headlines lamented how difficult it was to take out any sort of loan. Around that time, Johnny Carson remarked that “Scientists have developed a powerful new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings standing — it’s called the 17% interest rate.”
Compound interest is a powerful force, as Einstein reminds us. Most of us who buy houses pay more for the interest on our loans than the cost of our homes themselves. Because of this, many of us feel like that we work for the banks, even if we actually work for UC Davis or the local Irish Pub. Eventually, if you are lucky, compound interest also works in your interest, especially if you start saving early for retirement. Depending on how long we live, my wife Kate and I hope eventually for compound interest to benefit our children and our charities. Saving more than you owe is a marvelous feeling, I imagine, a feeling that comes to Americans later and later in their lives, if at all.
Many of us take years to try to control the deleterious effect of compound interest in our lives. Habits work that way, too. Many of us develop bad habits (especially when we are young), and then at the beginning of the year, we resolve to break all those habits. For example, I saw so many new faces gathered around me this past Sunday morning! I admire people who use time in the gym or time on the meditation cushion to reconnect with their best selves.
When we implement automatic plans to act on our best intentions, it could be said that the “flip” in our habits mirrors the “flip” in our (hoped for) relationship with interest and banks: our habits begin to work for us. Every January, we develop goals and resolve to check items off long lists. W.H. Auden once said that “Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.” [Editor’s Note: If he were writing today, Auden would surely note that this aphorism holds or should hold true for any person, regardless of gender or gender identity.]
Course syllabi, such as the ones that I’ve been revising over this holiday break, also represent a series of plans and promises. As a member of the professional writing faculty at UC Davis, I try in all my classes to remind my students of the relationship between clear and purposeful thinking, and clear writing. It takes many writers, such as myself, a lifetime (rather than the mere ten weeks of an academic quarter) to understand this dynamic meaningfully. The work towards a goal is usually more important than accomplishing the goal, for via the work, we grow.
We would all like to think and communicate more clearly, and to do so we form and implement our plans to open our eyes. With this wish in mind, some of us harness the power of mindfulness to interrupt all our routines, whether helpful or unhelpful, so that we might make purposeful decisions about our lives, rather than merely adhering unthinkingly to habits. Sometimes the most purposeful decision is to refrain from acting. Instead, we should more often take time to take notice, to reflect, and, at least once a week, to settle.
When Kate and I lived in London one long, dark, and stormy fall, we lamented the looming rainclouds and the constant rain. Kate remembers closing her umbrella on only a couple occasions during that entire semester, so that she might gaze with nostalgia and longing at a patch of blue sky. Meanwhile, a few decades later on the other side of the world we celebrate the rain, hoping for all our Californian sakes that precipitation would revisit us later than expected in the spring, and start earlier than expected in the fall, filling our mountaintops with deep snow. I wish such relief would visit all of us who need it. As I write this, an entire continent of people and animals are wishing in vain for rain.
You can’t always get what you want, Jagger and Richards promised us more than 50 years ago. When it comes to saving for a rainy day, the habits we make (or are told to make), or an entire season of rain, you might just find (if you take the time to notice) that what you need, what we all need from ourselves and from each other, is much different from what we wanted, and much more nourishing and sustaining than what we could have expected.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, and on the following: arrows, prime ministers, American dialects, equidistance, famous witches, actresses who dance like lank jogs, grand estates, musical genres, rules, x-rays, the question of symptoms, musical coaches, unexpected visitations at Christmastime, famous sisters, international gratitude, programmable memory, ways to live, tigers, exports, sequel exceptions, Texans, unlikely ideals, states of mind, fictional rude film critics, geographical inertia, transplanted oilmen, cut ties, cats, small dog comparisons, words that start with J, and Shakespeare.
I’m starting a new year with an experiment. If I send the newsletter out first thing in the morning, rather than on a Monday afternoon, will more subscribers open it, read it, and then resolve to attend the Quiz? I bet for the new year you would like to spend more time with friends, and away from your devices. If so, resolve to join us tonight. And happy new year!
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
Twitter: @yourquizmaster
P.S. Here are three questions from the last Pub Quiz of the last decade:
- Mottos & Slogans. For about 30 years, what product promised “the pause that refreshes”?
- Internet Culture. The internet has been buzzing over the character from The Rise of Skywalker whom critics say had unfairly limited screen time and who shares a name with a flower. Name her.
- Newspaper Headlines. According to the Health section of today’s New York Times, “[t]he average American eats about [how many] teaspoons of added sugar a day”? Is the number closest to 7, 17, or 37?
P.P.S. “The past is a great place and I don’t want to erase it or to regret it, but I don’t want to be its prisoner either.” Mick Jagger