Saturday, January 7, 2012

When People Think You Did Better Than You Actually Did At Competitions

Some people, like me, are freakish speechranks stalkers who can recite the 8 Open Interp quarter finalists at the first NITOC off the top of their heads. (I was one of them. Gotta know your competition, so you can glare at them afterwards. Unless you beat them.) On the other side of the spectrum are the people who have lives. These are the sort of people who say things to me like:

"You broke to finals, right?"
"So you qualified in all of your events?"
"Didn't you win Humorous?"
"Didn't you win every event at your first tournament, including LD and Policy debate, even though you had a cold and could barely speak?"

Honesty is kind of irksome sometimes. Especially when it comes to tournaments when you don't win every event, which for most of us is always, and you want to pretend like you did but darn speechranks begs to differ. Oh, and for the sake of honesty, I should probably tell you that no one has actually said anything that even resembled that last quote. But people have asked me the others, and I often have to reply: "no."

It's terribly sad.

And not fun.

At all.

But, this blog is virtually nothing but light-hearted, amusing, and optimistic exaggeration. So you know there's got to be a "bright side" somewhere. Well, friend, it so happens there is. See, even if you didn't do as well as your non-creeper friends and acquaintances think you did, they think you did. This means several things:

1) You are conceivably capable of doing as well as they mistakenly think you did.
2) Your friends think highly of you.
3) You have friends.
4) Your friends have lives.
5) You also have ears to hear them.

And if those aren't reasons to smile, I don't know what is. Even if you don't do as well as you maybe could have, they think you could have. You should think so too, but instead of being depressed and feeling like an epic failure, just go out there and do it next time. Whatever "it" is. If you don't know, ask your friends.

You're homeschooled, and I think you're awesome.

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