surreal

Everything this weekend seemed very surreal, confusing, far away, messed-up. I definitely wasn't really in the best place to go to a tournament. I just wasn't psyched, which is sad, because it was state.

Anyway, I just kind of slept all the way there. The first surreal thing was that for the first time in my debate career, I wasn't in a hotel room with my LD friends, like Brittany. I've always been with Brittany. I was with some policy friends. They're my friends at school, sure, but at debate everything is very segregated. So it was very weird.

I just didn't feel like I was debated. It felt so distant. I guess I was doing alright, because my record was my usual 4-1 (Hannah Payne... oh man, even though I put some red hair dye in my hair, she still beat me my fourth round), but it just felt weird.

I had to debate Ally in octafinals, and that made me very angry. I hate debating my friends at tournaments. I guess doing it in prelims is alright, but in octas, it's like knocking someone or being knocked out by someone you care about. So that round was pretty messed up too. I didn't really want to win, but I did want to win, because it was state, my last state tournament.

(The whole idea that it was the last state tournament I will ever go to was also very weird and incomprehensible. It felt off.)

Anyway, I was very depressed after the round. This compounded when I had to debate Amanda in quarters, who I really like as well. I just wasn't there. And I ran a new case that my coach Amanda wrote the night before because Amanda had seen my neg, and that was probably a mistake on my part to run it. But I'm not sure if anything could have fixed that round. From my first speech, I just fell apart. Things split down the middle. I thought, "I'm going to lose," and I was trying to understand how it could be state, and how I could be out. I kept looking at the judges and knowing that what we were both saying was very confusing, and Amanda had the last word. I didn't know how to fix things. No, I didn't feel like I had the power to fix things. It felt out of control, like all the dominoes had been put in place before the round and someone had flicked them over, and I was the very last domino, just waiting to be crushed by the weight of so many tournaments, crushed, finally, at state.

I debated pretty terribly. I tried to pully myself back together for my second speech. I won the argument that should have won me the debate, but I did not explain to the judges well enough everything that was going on so I really didn't win it. She won it because her last speech, which contradicted herself in many ways (not that I wasn't) was the last thing they heard.

I shook the judges hands, and I ran out of the room, and I ran to the bathroom, and I cried. Not as much about the round, although I hated myself for screwing it up. No, I don't really understand what I was crying about, but it was something big and complicated that was building up for a long time, like a long chain of dominoes. The whole world was illusory and far away, and I was sitting on the cold tile. Nothing made sense. Nothing felt right. I wanted to win, and somehow it was over, over on the cold tile.

Brittany helped me a lot. And eventually that incomprehensible sadness was swallowed into a nothingness. I felt blank, hollow, empty. Only today is the sadness beginning to seep back in a little. The rest of the day was so bizarre. We all seemed like paperdolls, being moved around by little girls clasping the popsicle sticks taped to our existences. It was so flimsy, all of my hopes about state dissolving in a round that I lost because of my own fault.

Amanda, my coach, was very angry. She came stomping in, talking about how the ballots said I lost because I had too many arguments and because I argued topicality (and of course, I should be burned at the stake for mentioning anything remotely policy-like in LD, even if I never said the word "topicality"). The ballots were really weird. I sat on the bus later and calmly ripped them up, because it seemed like the thing to do.

Now, it seems like yesterday I wasn't at state. Yesterday didn't happen. This weekend didn't happen. I'm not really worried about it. It doesn't feel real enough for worries. I just know NFL's matter, and I can do well. I don't feel angry, even though it was my fault I lost quarters. I don't feel sad, even though I had hoped a lot that I would get at least to sems. I don't feel scared. I just feel... fake. Unreal.

The boy that won is a boy I have debated four times this year, and beat every single time.

I got 6th place and Hannah Payne got 7th.

Oh man you should have seen her face.

It was priceless.