Fun with NatNuts

There's a fine piece by Jeffers on NatNats over at WTF. He makes the tournament sound like... LD. Clear arguments concentrating on the resolution. No sneaky flow tricks. Doing your best to enjoy yourself while engaging in smart discussion of interesting stuff. Presumably to some in the activity that is a capsule summary of hell on earth, but for most of us, I would imagine it's why we got into this line of haberdashery in the first place. As a regular non-attendee at NatNats, I can only speak to the event from hearsay. I do not have a week off from the day job to attend it, and even if I did, the Sailors are usually disinclined to choose it over graduating, or at least their Regents exams. We have launched a few at it over the years, the ones who've been wily enough to figure out ways of making it happen, but as you know, New York is notoriously on the fence regarding NatNats (hence our district's red light status). But what I've heard is much as Doug describes it, a long week, but fun.

Which puts a finger on my focus with this activity. It should be fun. It should also be work, and hard, and educational. It should be illuminating. It should be a fluid in which the specimen adolescent matures admirably, acquiring meaningful lessons on the road to responsible and productive adulthood. It should be an arena to explore important yet unanswerable issues of human existence. It can, over time, bounce around among all of these, but underlying it at all times, as I say, is the idea that it should be fun. You should enjoy it. You should like doing it, regardless of what your position is in it (which sounds sort of like a veil of debate ignorance). One of my biggest beefs is with those who would make it not fun. I have seen, in my day, tournament directors who treat students like, well, crap. How can that be? Why would someone go through all the hell of running a tournament and not appreciate the participation of the students for whom the tournament exists? It's beyond me. When we run tournaments we should do our best to make our guests welcome, and to treat them well. Most of us do, but a few don't. Go figure. Maybe there's a preemptive expectation that some kid is going to do something ill-advised, and the TD is already dishing out the retribution. I don't know.

Then again, I am the rosiest personality I know. I am easy to please, generally optimistic, and always doing my best to enjoy myself. I am kindliness personified. But the VCA already knows that. Next step: inform the Vatican. They will need to know all of this some day, when the miracles start happening.