What better place than a speech and debate tournament to be hurt by your own materials?
I've been doing speech and debate for all of high school (except my junior year which I spent doing a whole new speech event called "Become fluent in a foreign language"), and not once have I ever been subject to physical pain (that wasn't hunger) from any of the tournaments I've attended. But on March 1st, my third-to-the-last tournament, things took a turn for the worse.
To give some background context, there are two events I like to do - expository speaking (or expos, which I've been doing the longest), and after dinner speaking (ADS) which I just started doing and will get to talking about later. Expos involves carrying around boards used as visuals, and in most cases a portable easel as well. I love expos, but carrying all that stuff around can be such a drag. (Hm, I guess it provides a decent upper arm workout) Especially having to set everything up in a round and put it away. So after my first round of expos was over at the tournament, I was hastily putting my stuff away thanks to an ADS round I had to speak in right after that. My easel is one of the more complicated ones I've seen on the circuit; you wind a handle to lengthen its legs, and then wind it back to tighten it and let it stay. If I'm in a hurry, I hold it upside down and let the leg fall into its case. Except I must have placed my finger in the wrong place or something, because the leg fell abruptly and I felt my finger get pinched between the edge of the movable leg and its case. I felt a sharp pain but thought nothing of it and continued to keep my stuff. And then when I looked at my finger, it was actually bleeding profusely out of a slit on the middle phalanges. The blood had even reached the other side of the finger. I washed my finger and then asked for a band-aid.
Much to my dismay, I saw a small smudge of blood (that could easily pass as a smudge of red paint, thankfully) on one of my expos poster boards while I was giving the speech in a later round. Oops.
I told my friends on the team of it and then added that those visuals were literally made out of my blood, sweat, and tears. Because, well, they are now.
I've been doing speech and debate for all of high school (except my junior year which I spent doing a whole new speech event called "Become fluent in a foreign language"), and not once have I ever been subject to physical pain (that wasn't hunger) from any of the tournaments I've attended. But on March 1st, my third-to-the-last tournament, things took a turn for the worse.
To give some background context, there are two events I like to do - expository speaking (or expos, which I've been doing the longest), and after dinner speaking (ADS) which I just started doing and will get to talking about later. Expos involves carrying around boards used as visuals, and in most cases a portable easel as well. I love expos, but carrying all that stuff around can be such a drag. (Hm, I guess it provides a decent upper arm workout) Especially having to set everything up in a round and put it away. So after my first round of expos was over at the tournament, I was hastily putting my stuff away thanks to an ADS round I had to speak in right after that. My easel is one of the more complicated ones I've seen on the circuit; you wind a handle to lengthen its legs, and then wind it back to tighten it and let it stay. If I'm in a hurry, I hold it upside down and let the leg fall into its case. Except I must have placed my finger in the wrong place or something, because the leg fell abruptly and I felt my finger get pinched between the edge of the movable leg and its case. I felt a sharp pain but thought nothing of it and continued to keep my stuff. And then when I looked at my finger, it was actually bleeding profusely out of a slit on the middle phalanges. The blood had even reached the other side of the finger. I washed my finger and then asked for a band-aid.
Much to my dismay, I saw a small smudge of blood (that could easily pass as a smudge of red paint, thankfully) on one of my expos poster boards while I was giving the speech in a later round. Oops.
I told my friends on the team of it and then added that those visuals were literally made out of my blood, sweat, and tears. Because, well, they are now.
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