So, it's been a while, but I finally am back to update the old blog again. It's just very hard to get back into the habit once you get out of it for a while. So, I'll summarize what's gone on since our last meeting.

First, I lost the presidency of APDA to Robbie Pratt. Sadness.

Second, Nick and myself did very well at Nationals. For posterity's sake, and for your (possible) entertainment. Here is a blow by blow account of my experience there:

Friday:
The drive down to Nationals was fairly uneventful. Everything went on without a hitch, including registration and other stuff. This was a welcome difference from Worlds this year where it took about 5 hours to get a hotel key. Soon we all settled in and first round pairings were announced. We hit the Liz Holmes ironwoman, and she ran a case that was somewhat interesting, but basically came down to diversity v. a good education for your child. We choose the right side (good education), and picked up a pretty good round.

In second round, we hit Tom Ross and his partner, who was known as "Tapper" and we ran one of our vague opp choice cases that collapses in PMR. Unfortunately, Arthur Traldi was our judge and was not a fan, we were dropped.

That night the party was very good. It one of the best times I've ever had on the circuit. It featured me drinking spiced rum, and everyone else getting absolutely wasted. As always, I did many impressions, and there was much embarrassing hitting on of straight guys (Michael Baer, you are such a good sport). One of the more entertaining parts was when I did my Pat Nichols impression to Pat Nichols, and we argued in our Pat Nichols voices for a minute or two. Oh, if we only had a video recording of such an event!

At some point Colleen cut me off from the booze, and I stumbled back to bed.

Saturday:

The day began with me retriving my shoe from the Brandeis room where I left it the night before. I put on my suit with my power pink tie. I had actually been debating whether to wear my best tie that day. I thought that if I got to outrounds, I would want the pink tie to debate in, and not some inferior shirt-tie combination. I then thought that that line of thinking was a little presumptuous, so I put on the pink tie, feeling that I'd need the luck to get there anyway.

I had breakfast, small talked with people etc and so on........

We got to GA and they announced pairings. We hit NYU A, which was Christian and Alex. I was not particularly thrilled with the pairings, because while I've had some nice times with both people, Christian and Alex are not the most pleasant people to hit in a round. There was much bitchiness on both sides. They ran an annoying case about the EU. I had a 12 minute MO. Just not a very good experience in general. Nick and myself left the room with a feeling that we had lost the round, and were not in the best of moods.

However, our anxieties about the last round were allieved when we saw the pairings for the next round. We were hitting W&M A (Inspector Pratt and his inquisitive assistant, Mr. Ford), which meant two things. First, we had definitely won the last round. W&M was most likely 3-0. However this also meant that we were the "pull-up" meaning that we were 2-1 but hitting a team in the 3-0 bracket. This was a little unlucky. The good news was that we had Adam Unikowsky as the judge. He is someone who would not be afraid to drop a good team to us if we won the round, which is untrue of many judges at a lot of tournaments.

We had a decent round about public defenders, and we came out of the round feeling good about our chances. About fifteen minutes later, we got the word from Robbie that we had won. This could accurately be described as the turning point of the tournament for us. Before that we were a midling team in the 2-1 bracket struggling to hold our own, now we were 3-1 and had just nocked off one of the best teams in the country. I ran around like a giddy school- girl, telling everyone I knew about my triumph.

The next round we hit Blenkinpov on gov and lost. We had run out of our tricky collapsable cases to run against them, so we knew it would be an uphill fight. But, so it goes.

In 6th round we hit Brown A and ran our undefeated opp choice case (both sides are right!!) against them. They chose the non collapsable side, and I was very happy. We won and finished 4-2.

That night at the banquet, we felt like we had had a good run, but that we would not have the requisite speaker points to break. There were too many shitty rounds, too many missteps early on to warrent a break at Nationals. However, as information trickled in things looked increasingly promising for us. First was Kat Arthur telling us she had picked us up with 26.5s, which was huge for us. Next, was the leak we got that 5 out of the 6 top 3-2s lost, also huge for us since those were the teams we needed to leap frog to break. Next was a piece of intangible evidence from Specian, who told us that while he couldn't get information on who was in the break from Unikowsky, he did detect a smirk on the debate savant's face, indicating a possible surprise outcome in our favor.

The break announcements came: Princeton A....(other schools)...Harvard BP....(others).....BU A

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There was much celebration. It was a validation of what I had spent so much of my time on for three years. I had broken at the most important tournament of the year, and people finally had to respect me as a debater. People congratulated me on my sucess....it was wonderful.

That night, Nick, Specian, Jonathan, and myself set to work on a truly crazy case to shock and awe our unlucky opponent. We heard it was going to be Princeton A, so we crafted a case that they would melt on, and that we could collapse in PMR (of course).

The next morning we heard our pairings and it was confirmed that we were hitting Princeton. We flipped for sides and they won. For whatever reason, they chose gov. Some theorize it was because the feared whatever nonsense we were prepared to run against them, others say they were hit by hubris and felt they could beat us with any case they had........

(due to the time I will continue this later)