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When you’re under that kind of pressure and strain, you start mercilessly prioritizing and looking at your life.   At least, I did. It’s a refreshing exercise, to be recommended when you have far lesser reasons to do it.

In the last year I looked around my life and realize I do a lot of unrewarding crap entirely out of a sense of tradition and obligation.

Speech has been my major diversion and my major activity for most of my adult life.   I’ve been involved at the highest and the lowest levels, which are remarkably similar.   I’ve run Nationals, I’ve coached champions, I’ve coached teams that bombed and failed, and I’ve cleaned up the cafeteria after the tournament is done.   I’ve built up and run several of the best tournaments in the Northeast, perhaps even the country.     I’ve changed extemp, and changed what students learn in extemp; hopefully I’ve made it much more rigorous and interesting.   I’ve done a lot, for a part-timer.

What the last year has brought into sharp focus, however, is that I’m tired of it, bored of it.   I’ve been identified as a rare commodity: someone in speech who has my organizational act together.   I have the temperance to run big events: organized enough to keep them running, but free enough to not allow obsessions over minor problems derail tournaments.     You need an apathetic brand of OCD to be a good tournament director.     But I’ve been around long enough that my responsibilities piled up; since I’m someone who can get things done, lately I’ve been doing little else.

Running the state league was Not Much Fun.   I did it for two terms in a row, which is twice as many terms as anyone else has done in a while.   It’s essentially an ocean of expectations offset by a puddle of resources.   Change is difficult there, especially changes that would have made the league easier to run.   Instead, the Board is dominated by the same tired agendas that boil down to who gets which trophies and why.   Several of the people were willing to go to any length to achieve those agendas.   It became depressingly constant, and I don’t need it.   There’s a lot of good in the state league, but the people running it don’t get to experience a lot of it.   And I’ve realized, there’s not much good I can do with it anymore.

Running invitational tournaments is better, as you get to do whatever you want to.   But attending coaches also treat you as if you owe them something, when I decidedly do not.   To some degree, the speech world doesn’t deserve well run tournaments, because t0o many of its members do their utmost to make them impossible to pull off.   In debate we talk about how the same 2% of schools cause 98% of the problems; in IEs there are far far more trouble-making programs.     The tournaments were worthwhile and the work I did do was more immediately realized.   So I’m going to cut back, not leave altogether.   I found an eminently able successor to handle Columbia in Joe A.   I’m also skipping Princeton this year, having already formed a committee to take over.   A permanent solution for Princeton still awaits, but we’ll do right by it.

Penn remains a good weekend for a great cause, and Yale is my premier tournament, so I’ll keep those for now.

And finally and hardest, speech coaching had lost a lot of its appeal.   The kids were great and fun like they’d always been, but I began to dread speech itself.   I spent a whole year not really wanting to go to practice, even though I usually had a good time once I got there.   I’d mastered extemp, the speech event I do best; but it’s been years since I’ve seen a new idea out there that wasn’t mine first.   I have an image in my head of what extemp should be, and coaching at this point is not creation, but teaching each student to approximate that Platonic ideal to the limit of their ability.   There’s not much joy in that, once you’ve done it a dozen or so times.

Once a coach has really mastered an event, often they’ll stay in it to rack up a ton of hardware and feel good about themselves through their students.   If we expanded and aggressively recruited and had 20 extempers on our squad, we’d almost certainly have at least a few students who could be nationally competitive every year.   We could have an empire.   But I’m not that kind of person.   Trophies are cheap in more ways than one; they’re not worth the effort.   To some degree in speech, most of the education is realized in making a bad freshman into a good sophomore.   After that level, the rest is just ever more precious refinement; the educational differences between a national champion and a kid who breaks their senior year aren’t that great.   At that level, it’s more of a talent difference.

I coached and did this to learn myself, create, and grow.   And I’d stopped doing that.

So I was ready to stop coaching speech.   I wrote a note over the summer, strangely so far not replied to, asking for a quiet end.   It was too quiet — some of my old students don’t seem to know the score.     I left behind a solid group of extempers and a dizzying array of senior PF debaters.   And now at last I’ve come public.   I’m an ex speech coach.

I didn’t want this to be a Big Shocking Announcement with a bunch of tearful goodbyes, because I haven’t ever viewed myself as institutional.   Every year I asked the question “do I want to do this again?” and had to make the choice to continue, rather than it being automatic.     I’ve never had great loyalty to any particular school or program, not even my own alma mater — because I feel that excessive school loyalty is corrosive to education.   If coaching and help from me could make a difference to a kid who happened to be born in another school district, it’s not in my nature to withhold them.   Ultimately being part of an institution isn’t what I want out of forensics, and being a part of an institution is the only thing that would be left for me in speech.   So I bade it goodbye.

But this is not, as it happens, a complete goodbye.

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One of the things about going into a sustained crisis mode is you become exceedingly selfless and selfish at the same time.   A hard deadline on time with someone pushes you to give everything you can, and many things you can’t.     The price is you take a scalpel to the rest of your life.   My house hasn’t been truly clean in months.     There are any number of friends I see about a quarter as often as I used to.   There are an even larger number of plans for life that are on hold.

So you drop commitments.   At first, people understand.   But your struggles aren’t theirs.   Others’ fuses are inevitably shorter than your own.   To you, the troubles are a reality you live with every day.   Others forget, or come to think of it as “that stuff that happened months ago.”   They adjust back to their normal reality quickly, and forget to account for yours still being unresolved.

Soon enough, emails or phone calls start to demand to know where you’ve been, or why you haven’t replied lately, or followed up on some months-old promise.   That gives you a devil’s choice: you can either go through the motions and fulfill whatever duty others are flinging at you, or you can once again play the Dying Family card, and be the one who causes guilt and stress in return.   It forces you to wear yourself out, or be extremely one-dimensional.   Soon, people stop asking you how things are going; and you appreciate that they do: running through the litany again doesn’t make you feel any better either.     Soon enough, others stop pitching in to help quite so automatically when you falter.   And you can’t blame them, because the bad times aren’t theirs, so they reserve less to pay the price of it.

I’ve always had a strong sense of loyalty and duty, to family and to others in general.   However, I’ve learned over the last year that that sense of duty can cause others to take my presence and my generosity for granted, and come to treat it as a right, not a gift.

The challenge gets worse still when you divide yourself between multiple troubles.   There aren’t any right choices.   An hour spent visiting my uncles and their families wasn’t spent with Dad; an hour with Dad is an hour taken from my grandmother.   I didn’t spend a lot of those hours with my grandfather before he died last summer.   That opportunity is lost for good.   So I’m determined to do the right thing now.   But there is no right thing.     And you need to spend some of those hours on yourself, or else the other hours will be no good.   You have to be there, but you have to be strong. The perfect balance is a myth.

Humanity isn’t meant to contemplate time as infinite; infinity hurts us to think about, and the mind runs away from it and retreats into our finite world.   But the hints of death inevitably bring infinity to the forefront.   You start wondering what matters, if anything can matter up against the long forever.     And if nothing does matter, then what’s the point of being strong?   Today these people are alive; in some near future many won’t be; but tomorrow I could be hit by the proverbial bus myself.     Everything seems short-term, immediate, and taxing.

Before you call the suicide hot line on me, be aware that this happens in bad moments and terrible times, not constantly.   For the most part, the human mind is good at defending itself from these thoughts.   But they’re there all the same.   We were better at life when it was unchanging and circular, and we didn’t have to confront the possibility of the infinite.   Our science has harmed us by breaking the circle of time and replacing it with progress, which is linear.   So that’s esoteric.   But it makes sense in my head.

So what do I do about it?

2. The Argument

So this post will go up on Thanksgiving.   I wrote them all together, ahead of time, but decided to space them out instead of inflicting a Wall of Text on the world.

Thanksgiving is a lot of people’s favorite holiday, give that the preparation is minimal compared to Christmas, and the effect longer; it’s a particularly good meal, followed by some football and napping.   Low obligation, high reward; the opposite of Christmas where you spend four weeks frantically preparing for ten minutes of unwrapping.

Perhaps this is bad timing then, but when your bad times come unrelenting, you reach for any excuse to keep silent.   You don’t want to become the life hypochondriac, the person who others dread to ask “So how are things going?” and fearing an honest answer.   But here, I suppose, on the web, people can stop reading at any time.   So onwards.

2010 is going to be a very long year, in the sense that the 1800s were a very long century; they began rightly in 1789 and ended in 1914.   The 20th was thankfully short, extending only from 1914-1989.     Just so, my 2010 began in July 2009, a night where I was in a bar during camp having late night appetizers and drinks and conversation about debate while back home my grandfather died.

This was an ordinary tragedy, though a sudden one.   He was 78 years old, a lifelong smoker, didn’t suffer a long illness, and was starting to lose mental acuity.   He’d forget sometimes whether he’d eaten lunch that day.   He was tired, and would not have wanted a long twilight of semi-helplessness.   We miss him terribly; he’s the first loss in my core family, the first one missing who was always there every holiday.   But I have a hard time begrudging it.   I knew my grandfather for 31 years; I would not insult the memory of his long and good life by suggesting it was too short.

Next the new family, the Smiths, who I’d only just started to know and see, suffered twin horrors.   My uncles Curtis and Ron were both diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer months apart from each other.   At the time, I didn’t realize how quick and short things would be.   I regret that now; Ron died in April, and Curtis followed in June.   The loss to me personally is one of potential; I didn’t know them well, and now never will.   But I tried to share the loss of their families as best I could, to lessen it what little I might.   If you’re in a family for three months or three decades, family they still are.

On January 30th, 2010, my father was then diagnosed, when he fell into seizures from a brain tumor that started from the cancer in his own lungs.   I was at a speech tournament at the time. The next two weeks were a blur of sudden drives and surgery and research and a dawning realization.     Extensive small cell lung cancer is not something that is survived; the average life expectancy on diagnosis is 6-12 months.   By two years time all but a handful are gone.

Dad has outlasted the 6 months, and there’s no reason to believe he won’t outlast the 12.   How much beyond that, we do not know, but it’s likely measured in months.   Small cell lung cancer spreads quickly, but also is more responsive to treatment, and his has been held at bay so far.   But the treatment is almost as bad as the disease; it weakens you, takes your appetite, and slowly takes your will.   It’s hard to extend a life when that life is not one you want to lead.

My aunt Carol, my father’s sister — I have several aunt Carols on various branches — is in the late stages of COPD, which is the family of disease that includes emphysema.   She likely has little time left.   My grandmother is in the early stages.   The doctors put her on oxygen a few weeks ago.   Any real danger can be years and years away, but the oxygen has rattled her a lot, and robbed her of her freedom.

Those are the facts on the ground, as it were.   I have a very large family, and a large family means a lot of weddings, and a lot of funerals.     But the funerals should come when people are 95 years old and tired of everything.   55 is not a good age for a funeral.

The next post will be about the changes.   But I will extract one bit of meaning from the above litany.   Every single one of these events was added to, or entirely caused, by smoking cigarettes.   Why are these things even legal?

1. Intro

Usually I talk here about debate, or speech, or related concerns.   I don’t promise to make this a blog about such things, but since debate is my major outlet, it seems to fit.

Debate is also a useful shield sometimes; among debaters, one can talk about debate for a very long time, and never have to touch on anything else.   It surprises outsiders, but we rarely talk about our own politics or the affairs of the world, much less more sensitive ground like religious belief or our own views of the ethics and morals we toss around casually.   Debate encourages distance and dispassion from the topics we tackle; bringing our own ideas into a debate discussion, even between rounds, may feel too much like judge intervention to us. We don’t really argue much with each other, not nearly as much as outsiders expect.

The other counter-intuitive thing about debaters is that the average debater is an introvert.   There are spectacular exceptions, of course — cough cough Cruz cough — but the typical debater is a rather quiet kid who thinks intensely and can deliver a great speech, but fundamentally keeps her own worries and own life to herself.   And this typical debater grows up to be a typical coach, the same introvert, whose talk about herself is further limited by the quelling presence of minors we’re here to educate.   Revealing personal thoughts and events inevitably exposes weaknesses, and we’re encouraged implicitly to maintain our infallible sheen of perfect authority with the debaters under our care.

I’m no great exception to any of these rules.   I joined speech and debate because I knew a lot about the world, politics, events, history.   I joined speech and debate also because various people dragged me into both.   And finally I joined speech and debate because I was absolutely terrified of speaking in public.   One of the few wise things I knew when I was an otherwise pretty stupid teenager was that the purpose of education is to address your weaknesses, not to showcase your strengths.   That of course runs contrary to the kind of education a lot of teenagers strive for — and a lot of parents want for them, too.   But we’re all permitted a few unique insights in life, and that was one of mine.

However, our veils of ignorance are imperfect at best; concealed moods and private reality bleed through.   We don’t address either particularly well in debate.   We commune in loud silence, covering our refusal to talk by talking too much: talking about the best link turn to that politics disad or the way overused debate theory in LD makes everyone want to never judge a round again.   We have rich full lives with sudden joys and deep problems, but it only shows through, confusingly without a hint as to its origin, in a particularly vehement bashing of PF.

I’m guilty of all these sins, to some extent or another.   I’ve not lived in perfect concealment; a fair number of debate denizens know something of what goes on beyond the tab room for me.   But a much wider circle has been in the dark for over a year now.   I’ve dropped a lot of soft responsibilities this year — the ones that accumulate from tradition, the logic being that if you did a job last year you will again this year.   These soft responsibilities can be very hard on those of us who don’t teach or hold official title. I know there’s a fair number of folks out there who think I’ve abandoned and left them behind — and no I’m not talking about anyone specifically, since there are many diverse groups under this heading.   However, I’ve always been careful to not be committed or promised on an ongoing basis to much.   I simply ask that people try to recall what I’ve actually promised, and try to recall what you’ve asked, when you catalog my sins.

I’ve also dropped a small number of things I actually did promise and commit to, trying my best to hand them off in a responsible and sustainable manner where I can, and where it was welcomed.   For instance, I’m not going to Princeton this year, and I’m not in charge of Columbia, though both are in good hands.

Why?   Well, more on that in the next post.

My, what large tournaments you have, Grandma…

You know, every year when I start putting together the Yale tournament, I go through a few irrational moods. The week before Yale, I totally dread it; that’s the moment where the tournament’s size, scope and complexity are most clear, but the details on how it’s going to work exactly are most unsettled.   It always passes as I get into the week before.

Two months before Yale, I always worry about registration. The worries are twofold; what if everyone suddenly secretly hates me and the tournament will be 50% smaller than last year. At the very same time, totally without cognitive dissonance, I worry that the opposite will happen, and the tournament will suddenly expand by 50% and I’ll have no idea how to manage it all.

Well, guess what:

  • Congress 111
  • Dramatic 150
  • Duo 56
  • Extemp 101
  • Humorous 123
  • JV LD 124, 16 WL
  • Oral Interp 132
  • Oratory 118
  • Parliamentary Debate 21
  • Policy Debate 35
  • Public Forum 121, 60 WL
  • Varsity LD 161, 43 WL
  • Totals 1276, 96 WL

That would be 1470 total students. Dear God.

Now, that’s not what the final numbers will end up. We’re working on a different venue for PF so we can hopefully at least clear off at least some of that waitlist. VLD and JVLD will stay stable; going beyond 160 leads to badness with breaks/competition. And Speech and Congress (which had waitlists until today but we found more on-campus rooms for them) will likely shrink through the usual last minute attrition.   Depending on how much they shrink, we’ll have to expand the initial break a bit, especially in DI; breaking 150 to 24 is brutal, especially so early in the season.

Unfortunately, with Yale being as large as it is, it’s grown to inhabit multiple venues.   That means that the attrition in speech can’t go towards admitting more students in PF.   These numbers still represent easily 30-50% higher registration numbers than we’ve ever seen at any point during Yale registration.   Furthermore, many events (VLD and PF in particular) hit their caps and in PF’s case blew past the previous tournament registration record on the second day of registration.

I moved registration up to August 1st this year in the hope that I could spread out the registration at least over a week and people didn’t have to pull the Midnight Vigil to get their spots in.   It didn’t work.   It’s doubly irritating that I’m sure that some of those registered debaters aren’t actually firmly committed to coming, and many on the wait list would be 100% committed to come if given the chance now, but won’t be able to if I admit them off the list the Tuesday before the tournament.   I wish there were some way of running registration such that the people who were totally committed to coming had priority over those who haven’t figured it out yet but want to grab a slot just in case.   Right now the first-come first-served system rewards first those teams whose coaches are on the ball, which isn’t the worst approximation, but isn’t good by any means either.

But as it stands, there’s no way for me to know who is who.   Some tournaments (VBI, Glenbrooks) solve that problem by requiring advance payment before registration; that’s a good way to know that someone is more than casually committed to attending.   But with Yale happening early in the year — it’s the kickoff tournament for many of its attendees — I doubt that requiring advance payment is feasible.

So that’s the story for now.   It’s going to be a fun tournament; despite the growth, we’re going to offer 5 prelims in speech instead of 4, and will probably (depending on the final numbers) be able to finish it in 7 time slots instead of the former 8.     We’ll have the much sought for 7th prelim in LD (and possibly, no promises here, but if it grows enough and we get the rooms we may hold a 7th in PF as well).   Plus there’s the atmosphere of Yale in late September; it’s the perfect time of year to be outdoors in New England.   It’s the start of the year and the first time you see many of your fellow forensicians, at the point in time when you’re least sick of them.   The kids are getting back into the groove too: it’s the first major tournament for most of them, so the strive for it — success at Yale may be a barometer for a good year; but doing poorly is more of a kick-in-the-pants incentive to get to work than an individual tragedy; it’s early, and some very good kids just aren’t ready yet.   So you can gain, but you can’t really lose; it’s no one’s last chance to get to the TOC or whatever.   That means you rarely have a competitive Cloud of Doom hanging over the tournament.

Maybe this year I won’t dread it the week before.   But maybe not.