Skippage & Slammage

Listening to a little Demetri Martin. The man cracks me up and makes me go, "Ohhhh dear" at the same time. It's great.

Today, I participated in my first poetry slam! It was...enlightening. And scary. There were six of us, all with very different types of poems, against a panel of four judges: two faculty and two students.

Yeesh, the performance itself was fun, but the judging afterwards? Tough tough tough. I didn't realize they were actually going to critique our poems to our faces and hold up pieces of paper with numbers on them. I mean...wow.

But they did, and I went first, so I had the nerve-wracking job of being the first "graded". The judges were quite complimentary, but it's always hard to take critique, isn't it?

In the end, once all of the totals had been...er...totaled, I tied for second place with an average score of 9.2 out of 10! Yay! And the girl who won first place is a friend of mine, and she's absolutely awesome, so it was easy to be happy for her.

Sometimes it's hard to know when to be competitive and when not to be. It's weird. Because I'm not, by nature, a competitive person. But as soon as you put me in a room against six other people and there's judging and ALL EYES ARE ON ME I suddenly want to win. It's very strange.

I had to put things in perspective once everything was over and I got second place. Tied for second, no less. I had to talk myself off the ledge, a little. There's a part of you that's like, "Share? Me, share? What are they talking about?? I will NOT share! Did you HEAR me out there? I was brilliant!"

But that's silly. And human.

And I had to remember the thrill of reading aloud, the snapping fingers when people liked something I said, the chuckles at the appropriate parts and the murmurs of approval at the OTHER appropriate parts. Yes, it was fantastic. The experience was well worth while. And second place is extremely flattering, since it was my first slam competition.

Basically...I gotta take a chill pill and a bite of humble pie.

In other news, I skipped Algebra class this morning. I even walked into class and sat down, and then my teacher started in on graphing functions and I realized that I wasn't paying attention at all, and that I wasn't in the zone, and I wasn't destined to be that day. I needed a me day. So I skipped.

Sitting at Tully's with a grande ginger peach tea latte and a notebook, I didn't feel the least bit guilty. Oops.

-The GLS