Behind the Inhaler Pt. 11

I'm writing my blog early again because I'm afraid I'll forget.

On Saturday morning I crawled out of bed at an ungodly hour to drive myself to the High School, where I then jumped on the bus to the Upper Arlington for a  Speech and Debate Tournament. I love the Speech and Debate team, it's always an amazing time. The class is a blast, as are the people in it. At tournaments we always barge into an unused classroom and have "circle up." Circle up is organized chaos. All 40+ of us stand on the outsides of the room and preform our pieces, sides, and pros. It's loud, hectic, and very difficult. We then have a long tedious opening ceremony "good luck teams," "we're behind schedule," etc. and then we break off into our rounds. Individual Event'ers  (I.E.'s) have three rounds (unless their is a power round, then four for the top six teams) while debaters have four rounds (five if their is a power round). Each I.E. round (I'm an I.E.'er) can last up to an hour and a half. Fortunately I'm in DUO so there's always entertainment. After our rounds the I.E.'ers (since we finish earlier) wait around for hours. At Perry it was three and a half, at Upper A. it was two and a half. We play various card games, mafia, the word story game and present small blurbs of our pieces. Finally after hours of waiting debtors return and  the awards ceremony commences. Top six placers are called in each event and then awarded. My partner and I hoped to break top six. You can imagine how shocked we both were when we realized we were the last two standing in front of everyone. Just hearing "And your Duo Interp. Champions from Gahanna Lincoln are Stephanie McCann and Emily Peszlen." sent my mind into shock. It's very humbling receiving a standing ovation something I will probably never forget.

Anyway lets get into how this works into what we've done in class so far. This week we've talked about human rights. My being about as racially ambiguous as it gets have never really felt the sting of segregation or had any "rights" denied due to my background. I never know what to fill out on the sheets. White? Black? Asian? Native American? Why don't they have an all of the above option? I don't know. I am mostly Japanese believe it or not. As I get older my Native American roots seem to be dominating my genes. Any way you look at it my ancestors had to deal with human rights issues.

I like being racially ambiguous because it's incredibly difficult to pin and stereotype me. I'm Asian so naturally I should be smart, yet I have giant eyes. I'm Native American so I should be one with nature, she has the forehead but is allergic to everything outside. She's black so she should like watermelon (don't take it the wrong way, I'm just using a common stereotype) guess what she's allergic to melons.

I sometimes wonder what my ancestors would say or think if they were shown a picture of me and were told "this is the distant product of you." Strange thought isn't it? What would it be like to meet a relative who lived hundreds of years ago? Once they got over the whole culture shock thing I think it'd be very interesting. I wonder the same thing with my not so distant relative like my Grandy. I sometimes wonder if she'd like what I turned into, or if we'd still be just as close. I wonder how my great grandpa Tomojiro would think knowing that he has a great granddaughter that's not only white but American. He lived during all the American Japanese conflict. I guess I'll never know.

Me and my trophy from Speech and Debate...well a part of it. I couldn't get it to fit in the whole picture.

The upper part of the trophy and the squish ball I was also given...haha

What I see when I ride. This is Edward, he is just a little camera shy. If you're curious as to what that metal thing is than you should know that it is a hackmore. It is a bit-less band that is used with sensitive mouthed horses. Edward responds really well to a hackmore, but most people can't ride him in one seeing as he's so strong and it's not a very "quick" bit.

My riding Edward this weekend. I thought I'd share some of my riding with you all in case you were the slightest bit curious. Notice that I worked him into an amazing headset (his neck is low and his face is almost flat).