Speech

Public speaking.

Face facts, I just scared most of you more than any horror movie or piece on the news. Many people are terrified by the concept of speaking in public, moreso that the fear of auto accidents or vampire attack or giant robots stepping on your house. Sure vampires are scary but they'll never get you. No one believes it'll happen to them. However, it is much more likely that you'll get called upon to get up in front of a group of workmates and explain your plan for a new phone system. Therefore it's much scarier.

Part of it is the standing. Sitting in your chair is less of a problem. It's much easier to sit around a table expressing your opinion than it is to stand up to do so. I think standing draws more attention to yourself and makes you more self conscious. It's as if you are going 'look at me and dissect every word coming from my mouth as you mock the fact that my hair is standing up oddly'. For some reason this kicks in even when it's a small group of people you know well. They're staring at you, trying to pay attention to what you're saying, hopefully wanting you to succeed, and you just get more nervous.

I've been a public speaker many times in life, not regularly but often. It's been enough times that I don't mind doing it but still don't enjoy doing it. I know most of the basic rules and worry about following them as I do it: stand up straight so that you can breath properly, keep your hands out of your pockets or off the podium should there be one, don't shift your weight from one foot to the other repeatedly, know your material, things like these. Just because I'm experienced doesn't mean that I don't agonize over it, going over speeches in my head as I try to sleep, rewriting things in my head as I drive. It's still nerve wracking.

Cuthbold knows I worry about speech making more than I should. That's why he decided to help me out. To reduce my tension, so he said, he didn't tell me until today that I had a speech to give... today! It was all written out for me so it was more of a reading than anything else but still!

It's not that easy to go up in front of a group of people and read something, even if the group knows you're just reading it. You need to be familiar with the text so that you don't continually stumble over the words and irritate your audience. You need to know it well enough to bring life to it so as to engage the audience's attention. If you can get them on your side, being comfortable enough to be friendly and energetic, they'll stay with you when you do fumble or stumble.

I had two hours to become familiar with about a half-hour's worth of speech. Thank you Cuthbold!

Clearly I survived the experience. The anticipation is generally worse than the event. No one started snoring. No one threw rotten fruit at me, or unrotten fruit for that matter. No one mocked me. I got up, did my words, got a chuckle at my witty comments, and sat back down again. In the end, no big deal.

I coasted through the afternoon though. Some days you earn your salary early in the day. This was one of them.

Static in the System

“At least it's not a restaurant.”

Sarah Jean's words came through the purple air thick and heavy. There was a feeling of ebb and flow, as if being affected by waves of water, yet there was no water. “You can't say I never take you anywhere.”

“This may count as nowhere,” she observed. “Was that a giraffe?”

“Where?”

“It's gone now, whatever it was.” Sarah Jean sighed. “I'm not sure I like floating here like this. Try focusing us to somewhere.”

“The changing colors aren't soothing to you at all?” I checked.

“They are nice,” she reassured, “but they're not what I'm in the mood for right now.” Focusing brought us a man speaking nonsense seated upon a red cow. “That's not much help. Who is that?”

“I think it's my Uncle Gene,” I answered. “I haven't seen him since I was about ten.”

“Any reason you'd be thinking about him now?”

I shook my head and quickly regretted the action. It felt like it took a day to move my head from one side to the next and the process left me nauseated. “I was trying to put us in a sunny field.”

“That might explain the cow,” she observed. “It doesn't explain why it's red.”

“Strawberry milk?” I offered.

“Do you often drink strawberry milk?” she checked.

“No. I probably haven't had that since... I was about ten.”

“Flashback time. You weren't on LSD as a child, were you?”

“No,” I answered. “Why?”

She grinned. “It would explain the colors. Very psychedelic.” My Uncle Gene's babbling was replaced by a blaring guitar, a well played guitar but loud. “Well, that worked!” she shouted over the noise. There was some shouting back and forth as I sought to communicate to Sarah Jean that she should say something else, to see if that would trigger another change in our surroundings. Once this message was received, she fought to have me hear her response. Finally I heard “I am hungry!”

Immediately we were elsewhere. The colors were replaced by walls, the guitar by hustle and bustle, and Uncle Gene became a number of similarly faced police officers. We were in a police station. “That was unexpected,” Sarah Jean stated. “I thought we would go back to the restaurant.”

“I suppose that we're here to 'arrest' your hunger,” I observed. She groaned and slugged me on the arm. And that was that.