55 Hours Of Living Fully: Part Three

A couple of days ago, I began my latest multi-part account of a personal experience. Where I left off yesterday, I had just gotten home very late after bible study, and had my Toastmasters meeting the following afternoon to think of. More important than the meeting itself was what transpired before the meeting: a practice of the humorous speech which I would be giving that evening for a Toastmasters contest. Regrettably, I was late for the practice session, thanks to a failure in the chain of buses I had to take. Naturally, I was beating myself up and cursing up a storm in my mind the whole way there, and as usual for nothing. The people I was to practice on were casually eating lunch and seemingly had given no thought to any question of my punctuality. I was terribly rusty and raw in delivery of my speech, and giving in in the middle of a bustling cafeteria helped matters none at all. I felt good about getting the gears moving anyway, and they say a bad rehearsal makes for a good performance. I always say that with the hope that it is true in such situations.

The actual club meeting went fine, and I went home. From that moment, my mind was in preparation for the aforementioned contest. I gave the speech over and over again in my head. When the time came, I headed out for the bus which would take me over to Pasadena's Old Town, where the contest was to be held. More specifically, hosting the contest would be a facility owned and operated by the Scientologists. The building itself was a remarkable historic old bicycle factory, and it is to the credit of the Scientologists that they paid tribute to the building's roots in some of the interior architecture. At the risk of repeating myself, it was quite a place. Solid brick and reminiscent of the Bradbury Building downtown on the inside. All that aside, I will admit to being somewhat uneasy in the place. I believe in tolerance, however, and so I live.

These contests are always quite a thing. Loads of people, including plenty of organizational big shots. It's nice to get to know people in the larger system and reconnect periodically. Of course, I was quite preoccupied. I was to give the speech I referenced earlier, as well as compete in the evaluation contest. The way that works is that contestants watch someone else give a speech, and then give a speech offering a constructive critique. I'm not the best at presentation where evaluations are concerned, but I like to think that I'm able to deliver something with substance. With those things on my mind, I was a bundle of nerves. I helped with setup here and there, ate a moderate amount of snacks (adhering to my belief that filling up may have deleterious effects on my performance) and thought nothing but the words and actions in my speech. Should you be reading this after having been in attendance at the event I describe, I do apologize for having been perhaps distant, unresponsive and inattentive.

I was freed from the burden of socializing by the event organizers, who led me and my fellow contestants through a tedious and lengthy briefing of procedure. It wasn't without benefit. The event then started, and I attempted to find some peace and tranquility. First was to be the evaluation contest. The speaker whose speech we were evaluating chose to interact directly with audience members during it. I sat in the front row as I so often foolishly do. She may not have realized that I was one of the contestants who would be evaluating her. I'm afraid I may not have been very helpful to her cause as an audience member, devoted as I was to my own cause as a contestant. My evaluation was maybe not the worst, but suffered from poor presentation and a division of my energy and attention.

After that, it was all about my humorous speech, which was ostensibly about outlining a plan for restoring California to prosperity. Naturally, the various elements of the plan ranged from quirky to downright unsound. I knocked it out of the park with that speech, or so I was told by people who saw it. The judges tended to disagree, and I finished out of the money in both contests. When that happens, you don't find out exactly where you placed, only that it wasn't first or second. I'm inclined to think I might have been last of four in the evaluation contest, but may well have been third in the speech contest. I might have gotten resentful and bitter about losing, but I try to be philosophical. There are any number of reasons other than merit that enter into the mind of a deciding contest judge, who is human, after all. Additionally, even unjust judgments offer something to further personal growth, which is after all the name of the game. Tomorrow, I'll get into what happened after I left the contest.