Speech Meet 2008

Soo, Nicole and Erin and I finally just got back from the Speech Meet last night. It was pretty fun. Nicole and I both made semi-finals. We both entered the Expository and Dramatic Interpretation Categories. For the dramatic Nicole did a monologue from Spiderman and I performed Still I Rise by Maya Angelou. Nicole didn't place, but I got second in both of my categories, which was pretty cool. Oh yeah, Nicole's research paper was about Global warming and it's effects on the Arctic Ice Cap. Mine was about the bombing of Hiroshima during World War Two. It was kind of frustrating, performing our research papers. We'd read the rules beforehand, and they said that we could only write notes for our index cards, no fully written text or anything. And so, of course, we wrote out notes. Having just written out our index cards two days before the competition, of course it was hard for both me and Nicole to remember what all of our keywords meant. So I spent the majority of the competition freaking out about how I was supposed to remember anything for my research paper, and stuttering through each performance... "and, uhh, Edward teller said that if we hadn't bombed Nagasaki.. no, Hiroshima, then the shadows... no world..." yeah. it felt pretty disastrous. I bet i would have gotten ulcers if i had to bear through that any longer. But finally, on Thursday, right before finals, i realized that i could cut out and paste my research paper to my index cards. because that is exactly what everyone else in the competition had done, despite what the rules said. So after gluing down the last scrap of my paper, every feeling of foreboding of the anticipation of inescapable embarrassment disappeared, and all that was left when I walked back into the room where everyone was performing, only to find that I was already up next, was a feeling of pure relief and confidence. I don't think I stuttered even once during that performance.
So yeah. The Speech meet was pretty fun. I guess I'll do it again next year. But I'm definately not going to be doing another research paper.