90% True

Posted By Caulimovirus on March 3, 2008

.: Friday kills me. I’m one of those people who cannot nap during the day. I can block out light completely, but sound is more difficult to manage. What’s worse, the quieter the sound the more it affects me. A large cafeteria full of yammering kids, clinking cutlery, and industrial strength air conditioning — all intensified by echo — becomes a pleasant white noise machine that I hardly notice. An empty room with a ticking clock is indistinguishable from torture.

.: Unfortunately, all the ideal sleeping locations on campus (cafeterias, power plant cooling facilities, well-ventilated laboratories) lack couches, and all the places with couches aren’t ideal sleeping locations for me (libraries, student union building, every lobby in every building).

.: I pick the SLC for its couches and its near continuous medley of athletic noise: bouncing basketballs, ricocheting racquetballs, and squeaky sneakers. While lying on a couch with a spare t-shirt wrapped around my eyes, I hear an old woman and a middle-aged man approach a nearby couch. I do not hear exactly what they talk about, because my two halves are busy debating over what to do about them: my rational, just side pleas for fairness and equanimity, while my angry, sleepy side demands murder.

.: And so I go for the next twelve hours. Operating on less than four hours of sleep, I drive my friends to Austin.

.: I prefer being the driver to being passenger, because Driver Controls the Radio. This principle of transportation is well-established and respected in every industrialized nation. Even though I’m more likely to crash than my relatively well-rested friends, I’m not about to give up this fundamental right of travel. After subjecting everyone to piano-rock reinterpretations of Dr. Dre and old fashion country musical stylings of Roger Miller for an hour and a half, we arrive at Michelle’s house in Austin.

.: We wake at 6:45 to be at our destination by 7:30. Michelle’s dad leads us to the event, and he creates a small diversion on the way there. We arrive understandably late, but since we’re not official volunteers it doesn’t matter. Our job (or task might be a better word) is to keep all the kids busy and energized.

.: Hunter makes an announcement in the cafetorium, and several elementary school children run towards the stage. We start with Vulture, a nice warmup exercise that loosens the limbs and vocal chords. I can’t find it on the internet, but the words are simple:

Walk like a vulture, Sally, Sally
walking down the alley all night long
I looked down the alley and what did I see?
I saw a big fat man from Tennessee
I lifted my skirt up over my knee
and showed that man from Tennessee
My momma called the doctor and the doctor said
“Ooh, ahh, I got a pain in my side
Ooh, ahh, I got a pain in my head”
Row row row row
Shake your momma, shake shake your momma
Shake your momma, shake shake your momma

.: We follow Vulture with a game of Freeze. Little kids like this game because they think it’s easy to play. They think it’s easy to play, though, because they don’t know how to play it. You’re supposed to watch two people play a scene for a few seconds, and then you yell “Freeze!” The players stop what they’re doing, and you tap out one of them. You then assume that person’s exact position and initiate an entirely new scene based on that pose.

.: Unless you’re a kid. Then you wait for one player to reach the middle of their first sentence, yell freeze, and refuse to go up on stage. After your friends push you towards the stage, you tap out the closest player, assume their position, and immediately let your arms drop to your side. Your first line is always “What’s that?” or “What are you doing?” or some variant thereof. Before the other player can respond another kid yells “Freeze!”

.: After two rounds of games with the kids, we find the hospitality room and eat lunch with the other judges. One of my out of state friends spots a piece of paper taped to the chalkboard.

“You guys have a state pledge?!”

.: We do, but I don’t remember saying it much. I look at it to remind myself, and I notice a curious addition:

Honor the Texas flag;
I pledge allegiance to thee,
Texas, one state under God,
one and indivisible.

.: Not minding the redundancy of “one” in both lines, this addition is needless and ridiculous. Non-natives mock the idea of a state pledge, and for good reason. Sneaking “under God” into the pledge reeks of insecurity on the believer’s part. Moreover, Texas is divisible.

“It makes you wonder what they’ll add ‘under God’ to next,” says Hunter. “Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, under God, California, Colorado…”

.: We play our next round of games outside. I introduce the kids to Top That, a game where you try to incrementally best the person before you. “I bowled a perfect 300.” “Well I bowled a perfect 300 blindfolded.” “Well I bowled a perfect 300 blindfolded on one leg.” The kids at least know how to play this one, and it goes all the way around the circle without a hitch. The last kid has to pick an untoppable accomplishment, so naturally he announces, “I’m God.”

.: The event ends at 3:00, but we leave an hour early. We eat second lunch at a Mexican restaurant with the word “salsa” in the name. Of the half-dozen or so salsas they offer, one doesn’t suck. To celebrate Amy’s earlier utterance of “damn it!” in front the kids, we spend a few minutes creating our own inappropriate scene suggestions. I would list them here, but my mom reads this blog.

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