Last Days

Thursday was the last day of my Volleyball class this quarter. It was like any other day, except that that the teacher congratulated us by telling us that everybody present at class that day happened to have an A. He also named the Most Valuable Player and Most Improved Player, and I happened to be the latter.

Thursday was also my last day of my Excel class. The teacher knew that not everybody would be able to finish the week's work by that day, so she allowed us to finish our work by Monday and e-mail it to her. I was one of the people that needed that extra time. In any case, I'm 96% sure I have an A in that class.

Today was my last day of Trig class (ignoring the final on Wednesday). We didn't do much, other than review some stuff for the final, and turned in our final projects which involved vectors, a piston, teamwork, and using arcane spells to divine answers to the questions.

Today was also the last day of my Fiction Writing class. We got back our final projects we turned in on Friday (10 pages of writing). I got a B+ on the project and the class itself. The teacher's illegible handwriting indicated that my strong points were irony, sarcasm, and the ilk while my weak points are descriptiveness in terms of setting and character and such. Strangely, one of the authors he recommended me to read was Kurt Vonnegut.

Anyways, the main attraction of the class period was the contest to "write the opening for the worst novel ever." There were about 9 people who volunteered to read their entries to the class. Mostly, the entries either fell into the lines of "trying to hard" or "not trying enough." Personally, I think I struck a perfect balance between the two with my entry (warning: may not be suitable for human consumption):

Untitleable
The sweet smell of her sweetsmelling crimson lip-liner, which immaculately accentuated her puffy lips, inebriated her awe-stuck consort as they happily skipped in an exuberant manner over the white stripes of a zebra crossing before they stopped to snog each other on the yellow lines, making sure to intertwine their twin tongues in the fashion of a wet silk rope, thus halting all traffic from progressing down the parkway.

Despite the fact that I was unable to read that without laughing, that piece beat it's closest competitor by a factor of two, thus netting myself the prize of a book which I'll probably never read.

Talking and Talking

Today I had the "pleasure" of giving my third sacrament meeting talk ever. I gave my first talk somewhere around Pioneer Day 2006, and the subject was (obviously) about pioneers. When I was called to give that talk, I started hyperventilating into a paper bag before I even put down the phone. Fortunately, for my second talk, which I gave about a week before this blog started, I only started hyperventilating when I heard that I would be speaking along with some High Council speakers. This time, I didn't hyperventilate at all, despite the fact that the bishop only called me on Friday. Then again, that probably had to do with the fact that, coincidentally, I had to speak about the same subject as last time (that is, the Sacrament).

In any case, I think I'm getting better at this whole "public speaking" thing. My talk was met with nigh-universal praise. All I need to do now is learn how to not sweat like a pig and how to inflect my voice so I don't sound monotone.