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akujunkanI spent all of Friday evening and Saturday morning plunking away at my speech.
Finished making the visuals (not easy when all my photoshop menus spontaneously disappeared and I don't know how to get them back), then packed my stuff up and headed to the community hall 1.5 hours early.
The hall is in (what was) the next village over, deep in the mountains. We're finally getting fitting weather for the rainy season, so all the foliage was a dark hunter green against the rolling grey storm clouds. (Reminded me of Cleveland and made me all 懐かしい.)
Showed up, printed my speech out, and was invited to the waiting room to kill the time. Except--horrors!--my computer was not getting along with their projector, and it was looking as though. The room started filling up, and there I was hovering uselessly about the projector instead of quietly going over my speech as I'd planned. (As of this point I had only edited half and not yet run through it at all.)
By some miracle we finally got the projector to work with two minutes to go. Okuda-san (the woman who'd invited me to speak) gave a short introduction and then I was off.
The speech turned out like this: I started with a really sweet keigo greeting, figuring that I might as well give a kickass first impression before inevitably descending into 片言日本語.
Then on to the demographic makeup of Cleveland, which I used to segue to my 'people often don't know who's foreign in the U.S.' point.
From there to the middle school vs. junior high school system, school lunch (I got a good 15 minutes out of that), school discipline, the Indiana Academy, and the literally numberless joys of applying to college.
And by the time I realized, I'd spoken for over an hour.
The most exhilerating thing about it was that I rarely used the speech. I was just telling people what I wanted them to know without having to rely on cues or prompts. When I wavered or made false starts on sentences, it wasn't because I'd forgotten what I meant to say (common in uni) but because I'd consciously decided to say something different. Oh man it was cool.
I was a little worried that I was rambling on, but I recieved over half an hour's worth of questions once I'd finished. People were genuinely interested. I explained a bit more about IASMH/gifted and talented education, and did my best with the toughies. (Quick: summerize American race relations in 90 seconds). The audience seemed especially taken with my explanation of northern Indiyaaana dialect (which needs explained to those who've never heard it. ^.^)
So it went very, very well and I'm quite proud of myself.
Also: if only I'd been doing more of this stuff for the past year, I think I would really have liked my job.
That will be all.
Finished making the visuals (not easy when all my photoshop menus spontaneously disappeared and I don't know how to get them back), then packed my stuff up and headed to the community hall 1.5 hours early.
The hall is in (what was) the next village over, deep in the mountains. We're finally getting fitting weather for the rainy season, so all the foliage was a dark hunter green against the rolling grey storm clouds. (Reminded me of Cleveland and made me all 懐かしい.)
Showed up, printed my speech out, and was invited to the waiting room to kill the time. Except--horrors!--my computer was not getting along with their projector, and it was looking as though. The room started filling up, and there I was hovering uselessly about the projector instead of quietly going over my speech as I'd planned. (As of this point I had only edited half and not yet run through it at all.)
By some miracle we finally got the projector to work with two minutes to go. Okuda-san (the woman who'd invited me to speak) gave a short introduction and then I was off.
The speech turned out like this: I started with a really sweet keigo greeting, figuring that I might as well give a kickass first impression before inevitably descending into 片言日本語.
Then on to the demographic makeup of Cleveland, which I used to segue to my 'people often don't know who's foreign in the U.S.' point.
From there to the middle school vs. junior high school system, school lunch (I got a good 15 minutes out of that), school discipline, the Indiana Academy, and the literally numberless joys of applying to college.
And by the time I realized, I'd spoken for over an hour.
The most exhilerating thing about it was that I rarely used the speech. I was just telling people what I wanted them to know without having to rely on cues or prompts. When I wavered or made false starts on sentences, it wasn't because I'd forgotten what I meant to say (common in uni) but because I'd consciously decided to say something different. Oh man it was cool.
I was a little worried that I was rambling on, but I recieved over half an hour's worth of questions once I'd finished. People were genuinely interested. I explained a bit more about IASMH/gifted and talented education, and did my best with the toughies. (Quick: summerize American race relations in 90 seconds). The audience seemed especially taken with my explanation of northern Indiyaaana dialect (which needs explained to those who've never heard it. ^.^)
So it went very, very well and I'm quite proud of myself.
Also: if only I'd been doing more of this stuff for the past year, I think I would really have liked my job.
That will be all.