So many schools were closed Friday that there was no question that the Gem made the right choice in postponing the start. We hardly lost a soul by moving to Saturday if we had started on Friday, we would have been much more soulless. People were able to scrape together contingency plans that they would simply have scrapped if things had started as planned: no one wants to start a tournament with two forfeits under the old forensic belt, after all. I took the train down myself after lunch on Friday and found it surprisingly simple to negotiate all my traveling tab paraphernalia without a
I had expected that Kaz and I would work together but the inherent logic of the novices all in one building, and one of us there to keep an eye on them, was too overwhelming. Of course, this meant that the poor woman ended up in a utility closet (don’t ask about that room list, but then again, rooms have always been a Gem issue), but she got the job done. We both had judges up the wazoo, which allowed us a little single-flighting, although I gather that some poor people were debating dangling from the fire escapes down there in noviceland during this period. Where I was I spent a lot of time carefully explaining how big rooms could be carefully subdivided, but I felt like God explaining to Moses how to part the Red Sea and then I turn around for two minutes and Moses has all the Israelites over at Nile instead because, well, he didn’t acquiesce to sterling wisdom**.
Having enough judges and the illusion of enough rooms, we single-flighted novice first and then varsity, and got all our rounds in, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. We told everybody in novice that we’d post down there and to wait for said postings, and all the novices who paid attention did wait, and all the novices who would never pass my (asterisked) admission qualifications to my imaginary ivy didn’t wait, leading to calls in the wee hours asking why they weren’t posted on line from, no doubt, the professors not getting tenure at my imaginary ivy. I always love when there’s hundreds of people who get the message and two that don’t, the two that don’t insist that there wasn’t any message and that they were right there and there was no way there was any message, etc., etc., etc.***
Somehow or other we had the rounds, and the whole thing ended, and no doubt from the outside it looked pretty efficient. All I know is that Saturday from about 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. I don’t think I took a breath and never even ran out to the Starbucks across the street for more caffeine. I did do a sushi run, also across the street (but not to Starbucks, obviously) and I got a paper and I did do the puzzle, so there was that, but otherwise… I fell asleep once in my chair but Brother K almost immediately walked behind me and knocked over enough of my stuff via my extension cord to get me back to consciousness again.
It was that kind of weekend.
* I ask that you don’t misread that statement. I actually wanted to strangle numerous of them, with a couple of exceptions. Note to other people who might ask me to help them run things: if you have never done this before, that is fine, but I have done this before, as have my tabbing colleagues, and while I will entertain your ideas with serious attention, when I prefer some other way, the idea is not that you continue to argue with me but that you simply acquiesce to my sterling wisdom gracefully. A lot of times I got the feeling that the Traveling Tabroom and the Harlemaniacs were simply not speaking the same language. But little blood was shed, at least on my part. A late text I received on the bus going home suggested that a few young Harlemaniac psyches were sent into a state of permanent withdrawal by someone else, but I’ll leave that to your imagination. Suffice it to say that, if I ever open an Ivy League school, the first requirement for admittance will be a firm understanding of the alphabet and its intended order.
** The second requirement for my Ivy will be, when I draw you a map, you follow it. I think I’ll draw a map to the admissions office. If you’re not there in five minutes, it turns into a Cosmetician School.
*** The third requirement: when we are all gathered in the admissions office I will announce on the loudspeaker that everyone should sit down. I will wait a minute, and take all the people still standing up and escort them out of the admissions office. If they tell me there was no announcement, I will send them back to judge novices. Forever. PF novices!
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