if i have counted correctly, 9 people were there.

i had this important conference call yesterday and so right before it i was getting my notes together and it reminded me of speech team in high school. yeah we called it speech team. i don't know why we didn't call it forensics or something. lame. anyway, speech team included everything from debate to poetry interp. i very much wanted to do dramatic interp but i couldn't make the "coach" understand. mostly she was really busy trying to sleep with the boys on the team. no joke. she was picking up high schoolers before it was really the hip like it is today. i guess you could say she was a trend-setter in that sense. her complete focus on this goal, however, caused her to pretty much disregard the aspects of the team that didn't include sleeping with the boys. like, you know, evaluating the participants, helping them develop skills, doing her job. so anyway the depth of her "evaluation" of me was to observe that i am a genius and to declare i should do extemp. i had zero desire to do extemp, but it was that preparation for extemp competition that reminded me of prepping for the phone call. that, in turn, reminded me also of a brief foray into original oratory that ended before i had even originated a single oratory because the suggested topic (from the "coach") was youth in asia. i just couldn't come up with a solid speech about kids in china & japan. turns out, that's not what the topic was about at all.