Speeeech

This happened a week ago. But whatever.

I had a speech tournament. My first.

It was a novice tournament, so everyone there was doing it for the first time, but it was still stressful. The night before I was utterly hyperventilating. But whatever.

I got up at 5:50 on last Saturday. (Yeah. Crazy, I know.) I put on my skirt suit and my makeup, packed a bag, ate a small breakfast, and drank some coffee. I got to school at seven and bundled into a car with three other sleep-deprived competitors. The driver (a parent) had gotten us munchkins, which was nice.

After an hour-long drive, we arrived at Most Catholicly Named School Ever, aka Sacred Heart. We put our bags down in the cafeteria/gym place (I really didn't get it either), then found an empty room in which we could do voice and body warm-ups. After that we returned to the cafeteria and checked the postings for where we would be competing. Then came the nerve-wracking first round.

For a first-ever round, I think it went pretty well. Nerdfighteria was included in the speech I presented, and one of the judges was a Nerdfighter  - I saw her smiling at me the whole time and, as I found out later, she wrote DFTBA on my ballot!

I was still nervous, though, and I was pretty much shaking when I came back to my seat. It turns out I got my lowest ranking in that round - third out of six places - but that's not bad either.

The second round was far easier, but my stomach kept growling at odd intervals. I was so tired that I hadn't noticed how hungry I was, and ended up having to surreptitiously stuff sunflower seeds in my mouth between speakers. That was awkward. But my speech went fine, and I got ranked second!

Then it was lunch/critically review your performance in the first two rounds with your friends/critically review other people's performances in the first two rounds with your friends/re-apply makeup/freak out all over again time. *cue elevator music*

Anyway, then there was the third round, in which I was also ranked second, and then we had time to sit around and do nothing/take photos with other team members. And then we went to the auditorium, where there were seniors who had competed in NFL (that's National Forensic League) finals, and they presented their pieces. There was a girl who did declamation just amazingly, a spectacular duo interp of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde, a phenomenal extemp person (where you're given like 30 minutes to prepare a speech and then you present it), and a hilarious humorous interp. It sort of made you think, "Why do I do this again?" but it was quite entertaining to watch.

Then there were awards for anyone who'd gotten first place, which I hadn't, and then we got our ballots, took a team picture, and went home. We were all simply exhausted, though I was vaguely hyper on the fact that two of the six people who had judged me were Nerdfighters.

People ask why I do speech, why I take the time to write and practice and wake up at 5:50 and give away my Saturdays. First, you get to talk all day, and people have to listen. Second, why does anyone do a sport or play music or make art? Because they like it, or because they want to get better at it. I love words. I love moving people with words. And that's what speech is all about.

"Reunion"

There was this thing. At the art center.

They called it a reunion but it wasn't really, it was just an invitation to come and make art with other people. And eat pizza. And ice cream. And it was brilliant.

I was the first one there and then this other girl came and we were talking and laughing with the teachers. We made a plan for what we were going to do on the giant canvas that was provided. Then we started to paint and some other kids arrived. I went downstairs to see my friends from ceramics since I wasn't attending this week. We ate pizza and ice cream and went on painting.

I did not feel at all emotionally attached to the painting that I was doing with the second girl who arrived. The other people were also doing a giant one. It was amazing not to give a damn at all and just go wild with color. Ours ended up as a real explosion of hues, and quite abstract too. The canvas was absolutely enormous. I've never done something so large-scale.

So. Much. Fun.

I talked with the girl about middle school and high school and social things and it was kind of fun because we had the same opinions on a lot of things even though she's a "popular kid" and I'm a "book/YouTube nerd." It's amazing how fundamentally similar humans are.

When I signed my name at the end of the evening, I looked at our work and kind of liked it. It definitely wasn't my favorite thing I ever made but it wasn't bad. Creating it was almost like letting go, just letting everything out, with vast brush strokes across the enormous space.

It feels good not to be attached, almost like floating, like being on a ship in the open sea. You choose what ports to enter, which ones you want to explore, and where you want to stay. "I can see...perfectly in this cracked darkness." ~ Paper Towns by John Green

Throwin'

I always feel the need to clarify this. In ceramics, the term "throwing pots" does not mean we're all chucking vases at the walls; it means we're making clay pots on the pottery wheel. Just making sure everyone knows.

This week I'm attending Afternoon Ceramics at the art center nearby. I skipped it on Monday in favor of a day at the beach with my friend but yesterday I arrived for class in clothes made for turning brown with clay stains.

I have attended something at the art center for at least one summer or vacation per year since fourth grade, except for last summer, when I did a five-week intensive dance program instead. But in any case, the teachers know me.

So I arrived about ten minutes early to find one of my former teachers digging in the recycled clay bin and slopping it onto boards to make it dry into clay that's fit for working with instead of just muddy slip. I offered to help because I love getting dirty in this way, and I needed to get my clean clothes flecked with clay already. "You grew a lot," she says.

While doing that I realized that someone who had been with me in the pottery classes I'd attended two years ago was in my class again. We reacquainted ourselves with each other and remembered our jokes. Since we've both been to Israel it was mostly about the messed-up-ness of security and terrorists in airports and trying to drag pottery wheels into the airport. It's probably the best time I've had in an organized class in a while.

I'd really forgotten how much fun it is to go somewhere with the intention of making art, to come with a group of people and get your hands so very dirty. I don't know if anybody else does this, but my friend and I start talking to the clay in the middle of conversations. Like, one minute we're talking about depression and then he says to the mug he's making, "Don't flop over, I'll kill you if you do," and we're talking about television. That doesn't happen without the occasional lunatic talking to random objects.

Today I'll go back and throw a few more pots. Ah, pottery. The most fun I've had in a while.

You Shall Not Run

So I've found that when I sit in one place and do nothing (specifically, while watching YouTube or Doctor Who or reading) my nose runs less.

I am resolved to move as little as possible today. Not that that's a major deviation from what I normally do when provided with a computer and a library and some art stuff.

By the way, has anyone else realized the irony of saying that "feet smell" and "noses run?" No? Okay, fine, I'm alone.

Though I would like to mention that when the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson was told by a lady that he "smelled," he said, "No, madam: you smell; I stink." There you go, nice tidbit of knowledge for you. Now you should probably go look up "lexicographer," because in all respect you probably don't know what it means.

Hi?

Okay...I haven't updated. Yeah. But here's a big long one, okay?

This year, 2012, is the Tel Aviv Art Year. I believe they chose now because a new museum building has opened and the Tel Aviv museum now houses the largest collection of Israeli art.

So last Saturday night (the twenty-somethingth) they officially kicked it off at the Tel Aviv museum grounds. The great thing about that area is that it's quite cultural; there is a large theater nearby as well as a library. The event was entirely free, including entrance to the museum. There were all sorts of performances and activities. In one corner there were people singing opera, in another there was an audiovisual stage with mainly loud rock music. Street musicians had been asked to come and play. The sculpture of people feeding pigeons was covered in sunflower seeds as it should be (but they only put out the sunflower seeds when it's a special event). There were lots of cardboard houses arranged into small cities, and most of them were taller than me, so it created small "streets." There was one area with tons of colored cardboard blocks which could be stacked and made into all sorts of amazing structures (this is part of the Dreamfields urban innovation project). Everyone was building, no matter what age or what language they spoke or where they came from. There was also a computer component to this - you could play the Dreamfields game and it would be projected onto the wall of the museum.

On another wall, there was a place for shadow play, with a white light that invited people to create strange shapes and pictures. Our silhouettes appeared enormous on the wall.

I loved it. All the art and culture and connection and bright lights and people, all together. That night, it felt amazing to be alive.

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Yesterday I went to the Bahai gardens in Haifa, where I was for the weekend. The gardens are famous, with their carefully planned terraces. In the center is a shrine for their founder - the Shrine of the Bab - who is buried there.

It was weird, from up there I could see all of lower Haifa - all of it that isn't on the mountain. It all seemed so temporary, like a bubble - the gardens so carefully created and maintained, the shrine's pristine gold dome, the rusty city, the dirty buildings with laundry hanging from the windows, the old neighborhood's red ceramic roofs, the glassy new buildings rising up from it all, the people bustling and running from place to place like so many ants. I could easily imagine that one day it would be gone and only the trees and the wide sea would remain, moss and ivy making crumbling ruins of the plaster walls. I don't know why I felt that. But its temporariness made me appreciate it a bit, I guess - the gardens planned so that they would seem like the product of much work, the buildings washed of the dust that the smog carried everywhere, the old train tracks still there, unused, flowers peeping between the steel rails.

Later that day we walked in my grandparents' neighborhood. We passed a building that was once beautiful but now was just abandoned. The windows had cardboard on them from the inside and the garden was overgrown. People come and go, they work and they rest, and what they leave is up to nature to take up.

And that's what nature did.