Massachusetts Bar Association High School Mock Trial program, 2006-2009.
We won our trial today, and will thus be moving on to the first round of the playoffs on Monday. We will be playing the winner of Region #16, the Berkshires, which will be either Lennox or Longmeadow; they have a tiebreaker trial.
My plans for tomorrow night are almost completely formed. I am getting PUMPED! I am going to go to Ultimate practice before returning home, having dinner with my family, and going back out to the movie.
I am pretty tired from practice today. We are postponing tryouts until all of this DAMN SNOW has melted and we can actually get to the field. Until then, we are running outside, and doing workouts inside. Speaking of workouts, I came up with the most AWESOME workout today. To begin, I must explain my school’s building. There are three floors, and there are three staircases, one at each end, and one about 2/5 of the way down the hall. The workout is that you run up and down a single staircase about ten times to warm up, and then, when you reach the bottom, you open the door, and sprint down the hall to the next stairway. You run up and down that one, and then sprint to the next one. Then you run up and down that one, and work your way back and forth again. It is great because it combines light jogging (down stairs), heavy jogging (up stairs), and sprinting, which are all important in ultimate. Better still, it gets you used to changing which one you are doing and then going back to another; endurance and explosiveness. It is FABULOUSLY tiring. After, we joined up with the people who had been running outside, and had an excellent workout inside.
We have a trial tomorrow afternoon; a tiebreaker in our region. We are playing Tantasqua. We have never faced this school before, so we don’t know what to expect. Also, since we are up to the tiebreaker level now, this trial and all after it are coin flips. That is, we arrive, and the two teams flip a coin. The winner of the coin flip determines which side their team will present. We know which side we will call if we win, but we have to be ready to do either one. Thus, I will run my closing through a couple times tonight, and then get a lot of sleep.
Having trials on Wednesdays is great for me because it means I have no classes. Thus, I do not need to do any homework.
I am solidifying plans for Watchmen. We have an extra ticket because one friend backed out on us, so I will try to sell it to someone beforehand, or at the show, which I imagine will be pretty easy. The question I am dealing with now relates to the fact that I have discovered that another group of my friends is going to the theater right after school to get on line. I would go with them, but it is my sister’s birthday, so I will need to be at home. I am therefore debating the morality of having them save us spots on line. It would only be four people, so it is not as if we will be doing a huge disservice to the people behind them, but it could result in some pretty serious anger from the rest of the people on line. I have to consult with my friends tomorrow before making a decision.
Is that a word? If it isn’t, it should be.
Anyway, we might have a snow day tomorrow. I have elected not to watch Murder by Death with the rest of my family and instead do my homework to prepare for potential school. That way, if we do not have a snow day, I can sleep late and not feel guilty.
I went to a Mock Trial meeting after work today. It was quite productive. We had a trial on Friday (which we won), and are now preparing for a tiebreaker trial to determine the winner of our region (against Tantasqua, a team we have not played before, but who are also 3-0 at this point) on Wednesday. We have a lot to do to be ready. I am confident in our ability to do so, but it will require some really hard work.
Man, what an exhausting couple of days. Between two full time work days (another tomorrow), Mock Trial, and the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, I am wiped out.
Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about what the purpose of blogging is. I am still not sure. I know that I find it interesting because of the potential to act as both an extroverted and introverted journal simultaneously, but there is a lot of other potential, and a lot of other considerations. For instance, does one target the entries towards other people, or should it be more of a picture of what the author is thinking? Are they mutually exclusive? Ultimately I don’t think they are, but there’s a fine line between revealing your thoughts and acting like other people don’t exist.
I think I will probably write some more about this topic in the future.
This has been an exhausting weekend, and it is not over yet. Yesterday I was at work all day, and was fortunate enough to have someone bring in a computer that had been dropped repeatedly, and, I kid you not, had port spilled over the keyboard. Last night we cooked a sumptuous Valentine’s Day meal, which included steak, sweet potatoes, and other such awesome things. Then we watched The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey, which is officially one of the best movies ever. It is transcendently beautiful and astute, especially because it was made before the era of reality TV.
I discovered a fabulous article on the BBC. My first name is Rafael.
Today I went to Costco in the morning to pick up my new glasses, which are very subtle. Then I worked from 12-4. Now I am home. My family is on their way back from a show at my school (M. Butterfly [which I was REALLY bummed to miss (they sold out of tickets to last night's show [we got tickets to the matinee today (which I couldn't go to [because I was at work (but last night my friend told me that there were in fact seats available at last night's show [so I could have gone (which makes me pretty angry)])])])]), and we are going to go to dinner at our friends’ house in Conway. I have not seen this family for a long time, so I am looking forward to it immensely.
As I got my requisite slice of pizza for lunch it occurred to me that I have been eating junk food all day. I had pie when I woke up, a hot dog at Costco, and then pizza for lunch.
Pizzazz (Gonna Give It To Ya!) is a video made by two of my coworkers when they were in college. It is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time.
We are having a Mock Trial meeting at my house tomorrow. I will be bedinnering the team. Pesto.
Over and out.
Now we have a week long vacation. This seems like rather poor planning to me; we have had one week of second semester. It was a good week, but it is weird to come back and then leave again immediately.
That aside, I think this is going to be a fabulous semester. I have awesome classes.
Besides these, I have three independent studies in Spanish, multi-variable Calculus, and Physics E&M (electricity and magnetism). I have not done much work on these for the past few months, so I will be doing a lot of catch-up this vacation. My hope is to burn through the Calc assignment I’ve had sitting around for about three months, get a few more from my teacher by email, and finish all of the Physics work I should have had done by the end of first semester. The Physics study is a bit harder than Calc. First of all, Will and I are preparing to take both of the AP Physics C tests in May, so we have an actual rubric to measure ourselves against. Secondly, my advisor gives me assignments for Calc, but my advisor for Physics was too busy to do this. So while he’s still my advisor on paper, and is very helpful when I have questions about the material, Will and I are making up our own assignments as we go. We’ve created some shared Google Documents to keep track of our work on these two independent studies, but have really fallen behind since then. No more.
It is good to reach the end of the week. I will be working both days this weekend, three days next week, and potentially next weekend as well. Also, the Mock Trial team is meeting four times over vacation. One of them is to go bowling.
I am leaving the house in a little while for some freelance work. School was tiring today, but very productive, especially Mock Trial. We debriefed (a rather silly word) about yesterday’s trial, and we are working on our plans for meeting several times over next week’s vacation. I have also almost finished working out my work schedule for next week.
We won our trial today. One more in the region. If we win that one, we have a tiebreaker against Tantasqua to determine who proceeds to the playoffs. Since we have school vacation next week we will be trying to meet at least once or twice to make up for the lost class time. We might also go bowling. Fun is an option.
Homework will now ensue. A two-page scene “with conflict” and a paper on the French Revolution.
Our car broke down on the way home from school today. It had been making strange noises since yesterday, starting with a loud squealing, which I determined to be a bad belt yesterday. On the way home today very odd things began to happen. The radio turned off and then on again, started to sound fuzzy and crackly, the lights flickered, and then all electrical power cut out entirely. When I tried to turn on the heat and my father tried the headlights, the car lurched and started to lose power. Then, about five blocks from the house, the engine shut off entirely. We are pretty sure that the belt that I noted as bad is the one that drives the alternator. If the belt stopped working (when I opened the hood this afternoon it seemed very loose), the alternator would have stopped, and we were thus running only on battery power. As the voltage drained, we lost electrical systems, before the entire engine shut off altogether. My father is on his way home from the garage now. We will find out about the car tomorrow I suppose.
Meanwhile, I have a trial tomorrow. We’re leaving at twelve-thirty, and as it’s Wednesday, I have no classes whatsoever in the morning. I will spend my time relaxing, eating, and doing homework. I am not sure how we’re going to get to school without a car. I suppose we will figure it out.
Also, Will Szal’s site is up and running now. Check it out; there’s some pretty awesome stuff up, and more in the works.
We won our first trial!
This evening I took a hot tub in subzero weather, which was a fabulous experience.
I also watched X-Men. Similarly fabulous.
Sleep approaches.
