I am back from a UTC tournament, and it's still today! This may be the first time we've ever gotten back from a Chattanooga tournament before 1am. Yay!

We were supposed to leave at 7 this morning. I woke up to a clock that read 7:05. My first word of the day was definitely "FUCK!!!" I arrived at our meeting place at 7:15, bleary eyed, very rumpled, and breathless from sprinting. Luckily I hadn't been left behind, though apparently they were thinking of replacing me with a post.

The best part of this particular tournament is the flinging of the Moon Pies. See, the Honda Academic Challenge has like, $150,000 in corporate-sponsored scholarships as prizes. The UTC Moon Pie tournament, with three boxes of pies donated by the Chattanooga Bakery, is the 2nd largest corporate sponsorship in all of quiz bowl. Muahaha. At the start of the tournament, these Moon Pies are flung to all participants...it's kinda like Mardi Gras. Ten minutes of chaos. I caught 5, but 2 were banana. I also got a couple of Moon Pies pelted at my face; that's always fun.

On to the actual tournament. As usual, I captained the B team. We played 10 rounds and, for the first time, finished undefeated! So we got first place in our division. In individual scoring, Solomon got 4th and I got 2nd! The A team got 3rd in their division, with Steve and Gerry finishing like, 3rd and 4th individually. So, all in all, we did very well.

Solomon and Chi gave me the nickname "The Rampagin' Cajun," when I went on a tear in which I got 60, 70, and 100 points in three consecutive games. Unless I get super-good over the summer, that's probably the last time I'll score 100 points in a game. My quickest buzz went a little something like this:
Reader: "It begins behind the gymnasium of the Experiment House --"
Me: *buzz* *bounce* "The Silver Chair!!"
Reader: "Um...yes."
*shocked stares*
Me: "...what?? It's my favorite Narnia book!"
*stares*
Me: "Rillian? Puddleglum? ...Let's move on now."

And! At one point there was a question on Zoroastrianism that refered to Zarathustra as "Big Z." Confused the hell out of me; I sat there for a few seconds thinking "Zsarachnor?? What the hell??" Luckily I snapped out of my stupid moment and got the question.

Thus ends my Division II quiz bowl career. (Division II is for players with less than 2 years of college quiz bowl experience.) Not too shabby.

Hmm, looks like I'll be waking up before noon tomorrow. Joy of joys.

Have to kill the time between quiz bowl practice and APhiO exec. So here I am!

Practice wasn't very good. We had fun, because a lot of the time was spent laughing at all the silly little inside jokes we have from our recent road trip/competition. Like "Ta...thah...bah," "I'm gonna wait," and "This is Otto Diehls!!" Then the not-fun part...we used questions from a tournament we went to earlier in the year. Which means that my knowledge wasn't being tested, just my memory. I suppose that's good, because quiz bowl is all about remembering clues that you've heard before. At first I just played along, amazing everybody by buzzing in on the fourth or fifth words of questions. But that got old. It's not very fun when you can not only say "The answer is lichens," but say, "I said 'slime mold' the last time I heard these questions. This packet is from round 7, which we lost to Georgia Tech. Scotty was reading for us, and the next four answers are the Battle of Puebla, 'Young Goodman Brown,' Druze, and Lithium." When I am president, we will not read packets in practice so soon after actually playing them. That is my pledge. Vote LaKedra, because you care about the future of the Emory Academic Team...and because she's the only candidate. So far.

Somebody left their denim jacket here at the computer kiosk. It's an extra-large, but it's teeny! Maybe it's a child's jacket. A lot of girls here look like they are wearing children's clothes.

Just got back. Had sooooo much fun. The tournament was great; one of the best-run tournaments I've ever been to.

( Ramblings! )

Now, I've got so much work to catch up on, I might cry.

I'm in a highly distracted state. That's why I'm not panicking nearly as much as I should be. Everything is under control.

Since I have taken my last physics exam until the final, all my notes and assignments are stacked nicely in a corner. They await the hours of studying I'll probably put in, hoping to ace the final like I did last semester.

My qchem notes are also in a corner, in no particular order, because I just can't be bothered to go through them right now. I think I have an exam in two weeks. Yes...exactly two weeks from today.

I have an anthro exam a week from tomorrow. I'm bringing the book to read in the car, because I cannot think of a better time to read anthro.

I have a French paper due, the rough draft at least, a week from tomorrow as well. I keep most due dates in my head instead of a calendar. Funny, I manage the assignments and stuff for five classes in my head, but I need a post-it note to remind me to watch "The O.C." at 9. ANYWAY, I plan on getting most of that paper written in the car as well. I need secondary sources, but I can wait to find the ones that suit my paper.

I have a pchem lab report due Monday! If I have a wonderful burst of productivity right now, I may actually be able to finish the data analysis, print it out, and use it to write most of the report over the weekend.

The goal for this weekend is to win ONE match. I should've studied a lot more for this competition, but oh well! The most amazing quiz bowl players have very poor grades, because they don't study for their actual classes. In fact, one whose name struck fear into my heart last year, had to leave school and works at an Arby's or something now. Not that there's anything wrong with working there; it's just silly that anyone could have flunked out of school because they studied too much.

Okay, time for that wonderful burst of productivity. I'll write alllll about Nationals when I get back.

Edited to add: So much for that burst of productivity. Damn data's screwy, I'm getting negative values for time, it's a mess. So that'll have to wait until Monday too. I can see the report now.."We were very successful; results were achieved before the experiment began."

Physics lab wasn't too bad; there was even romantic lighting. We were outta there by four, so I was able to come back here and do work. Finished the physucks essay due Friday. Yay!

DUC dinner rocked (as much as DUC dinner can rock, that is). Not only was there couscous, but I got EXTRA. And if that wasn't enough, Twist n' Shout Pesto has made a comeback. AND!! I had pink lemonade, which is there all the time, but it just makes me happy.

Quiz bowl practice rocked, as much as a practice with only four people can rock. Where oh where has everybody gone? Anyway. I got a question on van der Weyden based solely on the name of his teacher, because I know my van der Weyden. And there was a bonus part that asked for the seven-word phrase engraved on that plaque they put on the moon. "All your moon are belong to us" was my guess, because if you can't be right, be funny.

Now, let's see if this streak of awesomeness can continue long enough for me to churn out a lab report.

Forget that...it was alllll about the quiz bowl. 13 rounds of fun ACF format, which means a) it was long and b) it was HAAARD. I did meet and surpass my goal of answering 10 tossups, by answering 20. I also got more negs than I've ever gotten in any tournament, ever. That's actually a good thing, since it means I'm learning to be more aggressive and confident in what I know. Which means sometimes I turn out to be wrong, but that's a-okay.

Emory A (me, Steve, Peter, Gerry) ended up going 11-2, which was enough for second place. Not too bad! Our first loss was to a Kentucky team that was literally, just one guy. He ended up going 13-0 and winning first place. Our other loss was to a two-person team, who I think got third. Hehe. We'll find out later whether we're going to be going to Nationals, but it looks good!

I was only on the A team because I know chemistry, and I fulfilled that purpose well. There was a visual bonus where we had to identify orgo reactions based on drawings of the mechanisms. That was when I felt most important.

Hmm...I also answered the question on "Le Bateau Ivre" really early. I guess it's a good thing I randomly picked it for the presentation I have to do Thursday. And I got "Dead Souls," which is Russian lit, accidentally when I mistook the word "censors" for "census".

Moment of the day: In the middle of a question on some ethnic group, a Vanderbilt player buzzed in and guessed "Lapps?" That was wrong, so the reader said "No...finish for the other team," at which point I couldn't resist and said "No, FINNISH for the other team." Yeah...trust me, it was really funny. Like, the match had to stop for a few minutes as everyone recovered. And it was recounted to everyone at the tournament during the final announcements. Yay, dorkiness!

Two more trophies are now adorning my desk. Third place individual scoring, first place team in our division! Which means we get a bid to the national tournament, in St. Louis. Yay. Yaaaaay. It's rare for three-person teams to do that well (the normal is four), just because...you have fewer people to cover different areas.

We played 12 rounds, which is a good number. With the timed format, things didn't drag on as long. Our record was 11-1, with the 1 loss caused by the worst mistake I could have ever made. That was, allowing the coach of a team to read the questions for us when we played that team. Normally it's not a big deal, it's not like there's rampant quiz bowl cheating. But this guy sucked as a reader. He sucked BADLY. My team could barely understand him, and of course his team was used to him so it wasn't so bad for them. We suffered that round, and ultimately lost, even after I requested a reader switch. So yeah...my bad. Now I know better.

Thanks to Tara!!!! for lending me Xenocide, which allowed me to buzz in with Orson Scott Card quite early. Whee. That was the first question of the whole tournament, so you could say it set the tone for the rest of the day. Also, thanks to Kimmy!!!! for telling me to learn about Vermeer works, one of which came up.

All in all, I'm satisfied with how I did. The subject distribution was good. I got questions that I should have, and I don't feel bad about the ones I knew nothing about, usually because Chi and Solomon knew the stuff. There were a lot of current eventish politics questions, which is definitely not my area and will never be my area. I'm fine with that. I basically tuned out after every "In -month- 2003, this country..." lead-in. No offense to Guinea-Bisseau, Oman, Laos, Bhutan, etc. I'd just rather keep other things in my head. Like...the address of the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix. And the fact that Nabokov (Lolita author) studied butterflies as a hobby. Hehe, I think three words ("This lepidopterist wrote") is the soonest I've ever buzzed in on a question since I started playing.

Another item of note was when I was traumatized by finding out that Snuffleupagus was Big Bird's imaginary friend. As in, I did not try to answer the question at all because I was thinking "This sounds like Snuffleupagus, but he's real." I found out later that he stopped being imaginary in like, 1986, which is why I never knew him as anything but Big Bird's very real friend.

Um...learning military ranks paid off, since there was a bonus on them. Waking up with the poem "Annabel Lee" stuck in my head could be a sign of psychic abilities, since there was a bonus on it. Spending time at homestarrunner.com paid off, since there was a bonus on it. That is all.

I'm sleepy now.

Aerobics final. Don't laugh, they actually expect us to know stuff. Last night was memorizing the perceived hunger scale, recommended daily allowances for all these stupid nutrients, equations for caloric expenditure, resting metabolic rate...blah. Oh well, it's over, and all that stuff has fallen completely out of my head.

I finally started my last lab report! The one that was due Monday, not counting the 5 extension days. Needless to say, I'm gonna use them all. I would not have even started it, if it weren't for Kathryn. We're gonna go to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols Saturday night...so we went to pick up the tickets. Then she decided she wanted Starbucks, and I was like, "Aight."

Starbucks: Hot Chocolate (almost went for Gingerbread Latte), Cranberry Bliss bar

While at Starbucks, Kathryn noticed that her Orgo Lab final started in about 3 minutes. She obviously couldn't come back to Woodruff, and I wasn't about to walk back in the cold rain. Ao I just tagged along to the chem building, and started my report. Yay.

Happy birthday, Tara! Too bad about the sucky, sucky weather.

And a big woot for Avi, Academic Team member, who got the call from JEOPARDY! today. He'll make us proud...we just have to teach that boy some lit between now and January.

Ooh, I almost forgot. The comment cards Danielle and I left at the DUC were up today, with a response:

The tag-team comment card thing was very comical. Sorry about the mooing! -ManagerGuy

A sorry, but no promise to actually cook the meat from now on. But we didn't think we'd even be acknowledged, so we're happy.

On the ride back, we tried to come up with the longest before-and-after EVER. It may not be the longest ever, but it links like...a bazillion things. Hmm. I think I will try to post it here.

Mike Judge Dread Scott v. Sanford and Sons of Thunder Rolling Down Mountain Dew The Right Things Fall Apart-ition of Poland of opportunity Knoxville-a Rotundag HammerskjOld Man and The Sea-bola vi-Ruskin of our teething ring of Firebirds in Space Age of InnoSense and Sensibli- Teapot Dome of the Rock of Gibral-turn of the screw..ge McDuck Hunt for Red October Revolutionary War of Jenkin's Eerie Pennsylvania Dutch Treat Williams Sono-Marie Curie-ous George Eliot Nest-Li Pope Julius the Second Defenestration of Prague Spring Symphony-matode on a Grecian Urn-est Hemingway of the World Trade Organization of American States' rights of Man for all seasons of love is a battlefield of dream songs my mother taught Mishima.

I love being a dork. If part of it doesn't make sense, I will be happy to explain.

Just got back from Knoxville! Wheeeee!

The trip itself was okay, considering how nervous a passenger I am. I had the song "Timberwolves at New Jersey" stuck in my head THE WHOLE WAY, so everybody in the car got to listen to it. Hee. Then, when we got to the hotel and flip on ESPN, and the basketball game on was the Minnesota Timberwolves at the New Jersey Nets. Weird!! Well...I thought so, anyway.

The tournament itself was much fun. The most challenging one of the year, so far. I definitely helped on bonuses, and I beat my goal of 10 total tossups by 21. And we got second place! I was nowhere near placing individually, of course, but that doesn't really matter.

Best round: Our first match against Kentucky A (the team we ended up losing to in the final match). The quiz bowl gods decided that was going to be the round of stuff LaKedra knows, and it couldn't have come at a better time. I got six tossups that round, which is quite the feat when on the same team as Gerry, who knows all there is to know about everything in the world. My best buzz was in a different round, four words into a tossup, "A single lit candle..", I buzzed with the Arnolfini Wedding, to the surprise of EVERYONE in the room, including myself. Yay for Art History 101 and their obsession with that one candle. There was also Druze, which I expect to get early because I wrote a paper on it. Yay Religion 211.

I really doubt that my lovely readers want me to go through the stats of each match, so I'll save that for the team board.

I think I should sleep now. Gooooodnight.

We brought three teams to the tournament today. I was on the C team, with Chi and Solomon. It was a lot of fun, as most tournaments are. And I got to captain!

Solomon did amazingly well, considering it was his first tournament. He missed the best rookie award by ten points (one question). Chi also kicked butt on random history that I didn't have a clue on.

My favorite tossup of the day was definitely the one on Steve Bartman. He's already a quiz bowl question! I was all over that one. And there was a bonus on the muses, which I specifically studied. Actually knowing which muse is which gets more points than guessing Achaean forest spirits.

We went undefeated in the prelims, but then lost one in the semifinals. We ended up playing for third place against Furman. It was a really really close, really tense match. The lead seemed to switch after every question. We were leading by twenty going into the last tossup, but they got it, and then got ten points on the bonus to tie the score. So that meant one question, sudden death.

"Its eleventh chapter defines faith..." Fifth word of the question, I buzz. The book of Hebrews, game over, Emory wins the match, let's go home. I was shaking for about five minutes after that! But it was a good shaking! Getting that question was a delightful feeling. Wheeee!

It was a good, good time.

Got up at 6:30, and we (Kaniksha, Chi, and I…we are a diverse team) left at 7. Went to McDonalds for breakfast…and when we were about to leave a clown pulled up next to us. He said, “Which way to Decatur?” We said, “That way, mister Clown.” The clown thanked us, and left. True story.

The drive to Athens was pretty good. We didn’t get lost, at least. Kaniksha, however, is a very fast driver, who likes to fiddle with the radio and fiddle with her cell phone and…not pay attention. And I am an extremely nervous passenger. I’m sure Jesus, Mary, and St. Christopher all got tired of listening to me. But we got there in one piece! And on time.

And then there were rounds. We played 10, so it was nice full day. Before lunch, we were 4-1. Our final record ended up being 5-5. Not bad for an undermanned team with a rookie and a first-time captain. Much, much better than I thought we were going to do. But, we lost THREE matches by 10 points! I fully take the blame for all of them, because it was my job to decide what to answer for bonuses. And sometimes I was stupid. For example, having to name a Southern author and not saying Faulkner. Bah.

And, going 1-4 after lunch means we had our trademark post-lunch slump. I’m hereby banning myself from eating anything more filling than Nutri-grain bars (or raisins!) at tournaments. Unless it’s something from Panera, which brings me luck. We showed a nice breadth of knowledge, but our lack of depth hurt us in some places. We got zero on many bonuses because we couldn’t even pull a reasonable guess. On the other hand, we got full points on more bonuses than I thought we would. We got 20 on a bonus about Roman officials, because I learned about them while reading about the emperors. We got nice 30s on current NBA players, Sir Walter Scott, Tennessee Williams plays and rivers named for states.

Um…topics covered. Yay NAQT with all its geography and current events questions. And questions with answers like “cat”, “liquid”, and “panda”. Sometimes, it’s just that easy. Whee. There were powers, which means you got an extra 5 points for answering correctly at a really early point in the question. Chi powered geography and current events, because he’s awesome like that. I powered one question on Malcolm X and 3 on literature, including the Jane Eyre question. There’s always a Jane Eyre question.

Kaniksha did pretty well, considering it was her first college tournament ever. Plus, she had a blast, which means she will be going to more tournaments. Which means another person has been successfully sucked into the world of quiz bowl. Excellent.

Hands down, my favorite tossup of the day began “This question is never truly answered…”, to which the answer was “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?” Crazy, because that’s an incredibly long answer. And I never found out how little information I could've given and still have been right. Would "Licks Tootsie Roll Pop" have been sufficient? I'll never know.

I got 2nd place in individual stats, with 75.something points per game. In the first round I answered 10 tossups, which was something I’d never done before. And then I answered 11 in another round. Whee. That will probably never happen again, because tournaments with all first/second year players are rare. A lot of the questions I answered, it took me until the giveaway clue.

So after our tenth round, we drove back. The speed demon calmed down a bit. Because she was worried that we’d get lost, since we had no directions back. But it was all good, because lots of signs point the way to Atlanta.

Now, my trophy's sitting on my desk and I'm sitting on my bed, about to take a nap before getting started on all the work I have to do.

Yay.

The 2nd annual Emory Fall classic is actually still going on, but as the field narrows they need fewer readers, so I left.

I was at tournament HQ 5 minutes before I was supposed to be there, and I still arrived after several teams. I forgot that high school teams actually arrive on time. They were supposed to arrive at 9, and by 9:15 every single team had arrived. Our realistic schedule had us starting at 10, so we were ahead of the game!

Reading was fun, as always. It really made me want to play some rounds. There were no major mistakes on my part, just in one round, I called the Walton team "Mauldin" throughout the entire match, and they had to correct me. But I didn't accidentally reveal any answers. No major mispronunciatons. No embarassment. Of course, I have no voice now.

I definitely underestimated the highschooles when I was writing questions. They jumped all over my questions. I think the only one that wasn't answered before the 10th word was the one on Sir Walter Scott. At least, in the matches I was reading for. Next year's tournament, I'm going to really stick it to 'em. Nothing's too hard for the little buggers.

If I were playing instead of reading, I'd now go into a round-by-round breakdown of questions that I answered and boni I found worth noting. Luckily for you all, I didn't have time to take note of anything, really. Ohhh, except the "Trading Spaces" computational math bonus, which will go down in history as the worst bonus ever written. By anyone for any tournament ever. And there was that small incident when our new stats program screwed up the brackets for the playoffs. That was fixed.

Next week, I THINK I'll be playing! Woohoo, that'll be fun.

Ooh! Some of the rounds were held in the Candler Library, which had been renovated and was just opened last month. It is such a nice building! It's like, all 1920's style. I was definitely expecting Daisy Buchanan to walk through the door at any moment. I'm going to have to go do some studying in the reading room at least once this semester.

Oh! And one of the teams had a player named "Dru with a U." That's how he introduced himself. He was really, really smart. That amused me on so many levels.

Quote of the day: "I think there's only the one way out of this building." -some random coach about Callaway, which has 3,782,341,194,247,745,663 entrances.

I am trying to work on college essays, but my writer's block is huge. Every single thing I write sounds so incredibly stupid. I should've started really working on this long ago. I'm never going to finish in time...gah, gah, gah!

Beta district rally was today. Our quiz bowl team won, but it was much too close for comfort. We're going to have to study more. Our team chemistry could also use some working on. Well, today was just for practice, anyway.

Went to the movies with Becca, Sarah M., and Allison. We saw "Riding in Cars with Boys"...it was GOOD.

Ben Glenn, the CHALK MAN, spoke at a school assembly today. He was pretty darn good.

I had a physics test..with 2 minutes left, I figured out that I'd done the biggest problem wrong. I think. If I had it right the first time, I'm going to fling myself from my bedroom window.

I am officially captain of the quiz bowl team. Too bad I can never go to any practices. I'm going to miss the one this weekend because of the funeral. Gah.

Food time.

Beta Quiz Bowl Practice. Today was the informal one. There are supposed to be no definites yet...but they offered me team captain. I don't know if I'll be good at this, though. There are questions that AREN'T related to science. Uh oh.