The funny thing about Trivia Weekend is that, when I was in school here, I avoided it like the plague because I didn’t want to be branded a nerd. Which is all relative, since you have to be a bit of a nerd to attend Lawrence in the first place. But whenever I walked past my dorm lounge and saw it strewn with phone cords duct-taped to the floor, dorm phones, clunky old desktop computers (this was in those distant halcion days of the 1990s, before wi-fi, cellphones, networked laptops, or even useful EtherNetworking. Kids from the conservatory, the computer science department, Lamba Sigma, and the Phi Taus (the nerd frat) would be sprawled across the floor and the lounge couches. I would hurry past them on my way to my own sorry excuse for a social activity, equally nerdy in its own way.

But now I’m back up in the Fox Valley, my first visit in three years, soaking up the familiarity of my old nerdy stomping grounds. I’m actually in Little Chute, a village in the paper-mill industriopolitan sprawl of which Appleton is the epicenter, in a big house owned by a wealthy man whose son has spearheaded the off-campus Trivia Weekend champion team for several years now. We have a full kitchen from which we can special-order meals, and about eleventy-thousand networked computers, most of them Apple laptops, I’m proud to report.

I don’t really know any of these people, except Ransom and Angie, who rode up separately, and Aden. I don’t know if I’m actually going to be of any service to the team, but I welcome the opportunity to get out of Chicago and surf the web in a room of people surfing the web. And I did just answer a Simpsons-related question off the top of my head.

Tomorrow I also plan on going to the campus and walking around a bit to see how the place has changed since I graduated. I will probably have a beer or six at the Viking Room and generally be Johnny Nostalgia all weekend long. Just a warning.