Daring to...Bore Me to Death

Last weekend was the area's culimination of the National Annual Youth Writing and Speech Competition. For the last month, I've been coaching students with speeches, judging branch, and area competitions, and finally I hosted the area prelims. This year's topic was "Daring to Dream." Ick. Ok, well, most writing and speech competitions are pretty lame, and this one was no exception. It wasn't so bad, in fact, I was impressed with how well the students performed, but after reading ten copies of "Daring to Make New Friends" I found I had lost the taste for it.

So Saturday, after a month of rehearsing, Victor and I hosted the competition. We had to dress up, which, I'll admit, the idea of nice clothes and a microphone had me a little excited, but after three hours of standing in adorable, yet painful shoes (which all adorable shoes are) I was ready to go home. To keep myself from focusing on the searing pain of cute leather cutting into my delicate foot flesh, I listened intently to all the children's speeches. All 32 of them! After a while, I began to zone out and the pain and boredom created an oddly zen-like moment. This was dangerous as I needed to be aware of when the students finished so I could introduce the next one. Luckily, I found other ways to keep myself occupied. I kept a little tally of how many times I heard the same speech. Here are the results:

• Daring to Make New Friends: 8. How many times did I hear the phrase "It's not as easy as it sounds"?: 3.
• Daring to be the Best You Can Be: 3. This one was a refreshing change from the others as I was only repeated three times.
• Daring to Try Again: 5. This wasn't so bad as it usually contained at least one humiliating moment and those are always entertaining. But the analogy of the kid learning to ride a bike has to go! How many times Thomas Edison was mentioned: 3.
• Daring to Face Your Fears: 3. Not bad! My 2nd favorite speech was in this category. One girl (who sadly didn't make the next round) talked about "kicking dinosaurs butts" while doing air kung fu!
• Daring to Forgive: 3 (I think--at some point during my zenning out I lost track). This one contained the best/worst speech of all! It contained lines such as "during the night my feelings turned into a burning hatred!" delivered with a smile. :) Right around the time the girl who gave this particular speech mentions the Count of Monte Cristo, you begin to wonder how many people she has buried in her basement...

I won't detail the rest, but they were all some variation on the themes I've mentioned. It was pretty painful, but not as painful as watching the girl who has tried three times, and three times has failed to make it to Taipei for the semi-finals. Crying kids are not fun to watch! All in all, I will say it was an interesting experience and I got paid.