In which we return

Enough of this. Back to business.

Needless to say, things are crazy at the DJ, for various reasons, hence my shutting down for a while (aside from the fact that it's off season). It’s not so much that I’m averse to doing a lot of work, but a lot of the work I do doesn’t expand well. If I’m working on a book, it sucks out a lot of my mental juice, and there’s only so much mental juice there for the sucking. It’s like digging ditches. You can dig as many ditches as you can until your body gives out. By the same token, I can edit as many pages as I can until my mind gives out. I could presumably keep editing after the juices are gone, but it would be crappy editing. Plus there’s all sorts of other things going on, extra tasks that I like to do, but which require their own juices. So, if you see me on the streets looking fairly juiceless, you’ll know why.

The debate world, of course, is my antidote to all of this. The work is so different that it energizes me. It’s nice to be back into it again, as we pass the summer midpoint. A lot of my colleagues do debate in the summer, teaching to the young and the restless at various camps, so they never really get to enjoy a serious hiatus. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the hiatus; when I had a team, it was nice to have a break from the steady need to keep on top of things. But when August would roll around (and I hate to tell you this, but it’s rolling in again any minute), I’d start getting antsy. We’d always start working on the new rez when it was released in the middle of the month. For me now, it’s more working on the new tournaments. The first one, Byram, opens on August first. And there we are.

There will be change this year, as there is change every year. For me, the earliest change is my not doing Yale. I have to admit, that used to suck up my August, managing the waitlists and such. The parting of the ways was not particularly acrimonious, although I would imagine that people will come up with various explanations, given that I was doing it for what seemed like ages. Did they dump me because of my decrepitude? Did I storm out in a huff over some horrible slight? What exactly happened?

The story, simply enough, is that I do have certain requirements for working a highly profitable tournament. I do not ask to be paid (nor, for that matter, have I ever accepted money for anything I’ve done in debate that I can recall; e.g., I donated back my stipend from the Hud back in the day). However, I do ask that a tournament provide a certain level of hospitality for the tab team of which I am a part. Yale did not agree. It is their tournament, and that is their decision, and I am fine with it and I wished them well. From the looks of things they’ve found great people to take over in LD, and more power to all of them. The idea that I will henceforth have September free for vacations and the like, while everyone else is back to school, is extremely attractive. Everybody wins in the end.

After that, things seem to be normal as far as I’m concerned, but for all I know everyone in forensics is trying to figure out ways to get rid of me because of my aforementioned decrepitude, and I just haven’t heard about it yet. Except for Penn, which I’ve already been working with (and which is a long story in itself). We’ll see.

Other changes? They mostly remain to be seen. But it wouldn’t be a new season without them.

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