Day 38

I came home after work, as usual, with minutes to spare before needing to leave for my Wednesday night trivia show. I’m in a rush on any normal night in this sprint between jobs, but tonight Jaclyn declared that she wanted to bring Miles. I knew she needed to get out of the house, but I also knew that bringing him along could add time to the preparation and journey that I just didn’t have. I conceded, but gave her a pretty hard deadline of five minutes to be ready to go. I never actually thought she’d make it.

So tonight was Miles’s first trivia show. Playing as “Team Kanye Galactus,” he started strong before slipping further and further in the rankings. This also concerned me because one of the other teams was named “If We Win, We get to Name Brian’s Second Born,” and I needed as much of a buffer between them and first place as possible. (NOTE: At the end of the show, they told me that chosen name would’ve been “Chalupa Batman.” I was worried for nothing.)

By the end of the game, Miles and his mother weren’t even bothering to turn in answers anymore. So not only did they lose, they had given up entirely. All I could say as I read the team standings at the end of the night was, “You know, you always want your children to succeed…but tonight…tonight I know the disappointment of a father for the first time.”