In which I defend my silence

I haven’t been able to do a lot of what I want to do lately because of DJ issues, i.e., they’re paying me and you’re not, and there’s only so many hours in the day. The biggest thing I have hanging fire is an analysis of MJP for the NDCA, which I’ve worked in off and on, but which has so many ins and outs that it’s taking forever. As soon as you spot one issue, another pops up, and this has nothing to do with the main issue plaguing MJP at the moment, i.e., exclusion.

Meanwhile, one does have to also absorb a new PF topic every month. No wonder LD so strongly jumps on the January-May topic, so to speak. You get it, you’ve got it, and there you are. The mental turnover on PF topics requires a whole different mindset, both for me and for the debaters (and this is presumably similar to other teams). I’m on it first, parsing it for presentation to the team, which means maybe a week goes by. Then they’re on it, researching it, and maybe two weeks go by, and then they’re writing cases, and another week goes by and all of a sudden the first round debating it is about to start. Plus they’re also doing distracting things like attending high school and navigating adolescence. (Which I guess is somewhat like me working the DJ and navigating senescence). Then there’s the one plebe who is thinking of trying LD again, the prevalence of debilitating diseases among the high school set (we had only half attendance last night), the sun so hot we're freezing to death, wondering if there will ever be enough rooms to even run Dec at the Gem, ordering buses and hotels and the like and then canceling the buses and hotels, trying to figure out Scarswegia’s pairing rules and making sure that all the right buttons are pressed or not pressed for the Bobcat, figuring who’s going to run the brainstorming sessions of Academy, etc. Plus a bunch of other stuff.

Okay, I’m whining. Sorry about that. I was doing much better over Christmas vacation, with all sorts of sleep and relaxing and playing Transportation Tycoon on my new iPad (the best time-suck since RCT, or actually, the time-suck that preceded RCT, written by the same people and recently ported over to IOS, boding well for an eventual port of RCT). Of course, the real problem is that I’ve been doing musicals quizzes with JV on Quiz Up, and he’s killing me. The bastid!