so it's the weekend of another typical week and i have already spent most of it sleeping. because i need to rejuvinate the neurons that have been slogging away overtime from monday to friday. yes, i need to take care of myself!

spent last night adjudicating the julia gabriels secondary schools debate championships. ok not really adjudicating, but shadowing. which was just as hard work because you still have to fill out the scoresheets and discuss with the other judges and track. but i was damn happy anyway because i got assigned to an "A" div room, which means i was spared the sluggish matches that the other judges in B and C div had to put up with. and guess who were the other adjudicators in my room? david gabriel and jonathan pflug. omg; and i thought could slack! imagine filling up a scoresheet right next to someone who was ranked the top debater in the world only a few years ago. it's pressurizing!

in fact, when i saw the assignments i suddenly wished i was in a C div room, where you can like screw everyone over with 60-something scores and get away with it because nobody knows their shit either. but not in A div man. quite quickly, it occurred to me that i would have to cultivate the habit of tracking a debate, which i almost never do whenever i'm on the floor myself. because i'm too lazy. and so, i tracked. i tracked like i have never tracked in my life! and then i realized why judges say that they hate speakers who talk at bullet train speeds- it's just so damn hard to catch everything they're saying. and i also realized why guys make much more charismatic and likeable speakers than girls do- girls are so often too whiny and too... persistent. like some of them just never give up, especially when they hit a supremely idiotic point and don't know what to do with it, and just go on and on and on in the hopes of wearing the listeners out. it makes you just want to throw something at them to make them shut up. david gabriel was the worst of all the judges actually; after he judged the last debate of the night he was like 'oh, that was just awful. i was trying so hard not to fall asleep that i don't think i caught much of what she was saying'. and i was thinking to myself, so this is what the judges talk about when they leave the room and huddle together in hushed tones. and also, i can imagine how annoying -i- must be when i speak. 'tis not a good feeling, i'll say.

anyway now i know that adjudication really is very technical, and it's not as easy as just dumping a bunch of numbers onto the paper based on your instinct. like the most irritating thing is the rule about keeping the victory margin small; for the first 2 debates i started off with like 8 point differences. then i tried my best to find places to give higher marks to the losing team, and when that started taking too long, i gave up and randomly added 0.5 to some of the columns in order to narrow the mark gap =p i don't think you're supposed to do that, but whatever.

oh and i'm going to change my phone to the nokia 7260. it's the flattish one with the "S" motif snaking through the keypad, from the 'Distinctly Bold' range. (i never knew that you could be 'indistinctly' bold.) anyway i think the phone is a bit brickish, but its like an infinite improvement from the lousy one i have now, which keeps jamming when i'm typing messages. plus i think it's the nokia ad with the funkiest music yet; and possibly the funkiest nokia ad i've seen, though nokia's ads are generally uber cool most of the time anyway. i also liked the 7250 ad which was strung together by a montage of scenery and a pretty model's face, and was on the whole very aesthetically pleasing. if i ever do graphics and advertisements in the future i would kill to be employed by nokia. ohman. i think that must be like every geek's closet wish, or every closet geek's wish, whichever sounds better.

but of course, that will never happen.