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I do a trivia question every week. It’s usually a history question of some sort, and the stakes are low; you can get the answer any way you want except for asking me (it’s literally impossible to cheat) and if you get it right you get a piece of candy on Friday. If you get it wrong nothing happens. Some kids do it every week, some when the mood strikes them or a friend offers them the answer, and some will pretend in late May that they never heard me mention it.

I usually theme the questions at least a little bit, and since it’s Black History Month I figured I’d highlight some figures from history and see how many the kids could identify. My building is pretty diverse, which I’m not using as a code word for “mostly Black,” I mean genuinely pretty well-mixed. That said, I’m not really expecting many of them, if any at all, to immediately recognize that fine gentleman up there; my theory was they’d either take a picture of the picture and ask some adults or do a reverse Google Image search, which I believe has been the process for the handful of correct answers I’ve received so far.

(Yes, I know “Who is this?” is not a trivia question in the classic sense of the term. Shut up. It’s my game and I can do it however I want. Next week will be Mae Jemison, I think.)

Anyway, the insistence from the first several kids that gave me answers that that was either MLK Jr. or fucking Steve Harvey has me questioning my sanity. And it wasn’t like it was white kids being clowns, either. At least one Black student asked me in apparent seriousness if it was King. I’m not supposed to give them help one way or another but I needed to shut that down immediately if I planned on surviving the week.

So. Without any research or double-checking, do you know who that is?

576c36a3a6f2a.image.jpg Ah, screw it. Furniture. I sell furniture now. Maybe that was obvious from the thing about the massage chair the other day; I dunno. There are not a ton of furniture stores in the area but there are at least as many furniture stores as there are middle schools, and I’ve made it three years without anyone trying to dox me, so screw it. I suspect talking about my life for the next little while will become very complicated if I’m not even able to reveal what sort of sales I’m involved in.

That said, the training wheels come off on Monday, so if you know me and you’re in the area and in the market for some furniture, come hit me up. Believe it or not the Fourth of July weekend will feature a sale. I suspect that detail will not help people pin down what store I work at. I have spent the week in a crazily intense crash course on basically everything anyone could possibly want to know about furniture, and I am trying hard to resist the urge to tear apart everything in the house to see how it is constructed. I have learned more about drawer construction in the last four days than I ever imagined it was possible to know. Drawers are complicated! Really damn complicated! I can tell you about like four different types of dovetailing and on Monday I didn’t know what dovetailing was. And lacquer! Do you know what catalyzed lacquer is? Because I do. Go ahead, point at a piece of wood on a piece of furniture and ask me if it’s solid wood or veneered. I’ll know.

Also, I really want all-new furniture. Like, everywhere in the house. I expect to spend my first four to six paychecks entirely on furniture. My wife may have something to say about this, I suppose. On a couple of different levels.

So that’s what I’ve been doing all week. I’m at OtherJob tomorrow, then I have Sunday off, and I work on Monday and on my birthday. Will there be celebrations after that?

I’m turning 40. Probably.