h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yesterday I got up early to travel to a speech meet in a nearby town. I competed every hour and a half four times, and got really sick of my speech in the meantime. Repeating and repeating and repeating...
My event is HOI--Humorous Oral Interpretation. It's the easiest of the events (except maybe Serious Interp) because all you have to do is read from a binder something another person has written--no memorizing or quick thinking. The hard part is in the presentation. You have to hold on to your binder with both hands all the time (no gestures) and keep your feet planted firmly on the floor without moving them. Since most HOI-ers use many different characters in their pieces, this means that we have to develop lots of different voices and body positions, until the end result sounds/looks like Donald Duck dodging bullets in the Matrix.
The piece I'm reading this year is the insult scene from Cyrano de Bergerac. It's very fun to perform, because Cyrano belts out twenty different insults in varying tones, and each one must be presented differently--mostly accents pitch. (If you have not read Cyrano, you should. It's about a French guy with a big nose. Basically. There's plot and stuff too.)
Even though I didn't score very well in the meet (Scores: 5 5 5 3, each round out of seven competitors, 1 being best) I still had a lot of fun. HOI is the liveliest event, and full of entertaining personalities. I met some new friends and got to listen to hilarious writing. The not-fun part of the meet was the awards ceremony. Though my school--Flathead--is the only school in its size class and can never score anything but first for that class, we still got beaten heavily by the other schools. Of course, that was without our varsity team, which was off in the state capital humiliating the college prep schools. So it's all good.
We have another meet next weekend (Dec. 8) and a really big one after that (Dec. 14 and 15). I'm looking forward to competing in them and doing this all over again.

My December meet went pretty well. I don't know why it wasn't a December 8 meet, though.