I've got a stop light in my office. It doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the local Toastmasters club, a club I joined earlier this year and promptly stole their stop light. Not really. It's actually broken and I brought it home several months ago to fix it. Haven't done so. Instead I've let everything else get in the way. Well… I say let. It's more like I shove everything in the way. I'm like Mel Gibson running from a bunch of homeless Jews in a hospital turning over every thing I can to get away…. carts, bedpans, gurneys with patients and then having to stop and wait for the elevator while they catch me. Or was that my dream last night?
The thing should be easy to fix, it's only three lights and two switches and they use it to time speeches. But that's the problem: I don't have time to do speeches. I was doing speeches and they were timing them with a stopwatch and a bell. Which is kind of jarring when you're just getting warmed up to your subject and 'ding', time's nearly up so then you get rolling again and 'Ding!', and times really almost up and you go on to the earth shattering conclusion and DING! So… the stop light is definitely better. I should get it back to them before someone winds up dead. That or the bell winds up in someone's backside.
They (the other club members) said my speeches were really good. My secret? I wrote them out and memorized them. I once took a journalism class and accidentally read the book and found out that the secret to timing speeches, soliloquies, and the like is to write it out, triple space all lines, and write in 12 point courier (typewriter) font. Each page will last one minute. If I needed a five to seven minute speech (the usual length) I wrote seven or eight pages read it over and over until I had memorized most of it. Of course I ended up forgetting some of it but that was okay, the point was to know what I was going to say before I got to the meeting and having enough material to fill the alloted time. (Why is my delete key so small? I was trying to delete something and had to hunt for the key. I used to have a nice big delete key on my last keyboard that I could just pound on with my right pinkie because, in writing, taking stuff out is far more important than putting stuff in. In fact, they should allow a negative word count because it makes for better writing.) But writing a speech is a lot of work. How am I supposed to do all of this and write here and spend time with the wife and kids and go to church and waste time on the Internet (why is Internet capitalized? It's been over fifteen minutes, haven't we had time to get over the whole proper name thing?) posting things no one reads to facebook. So I've had to quit going. Not resign or anything, just quit.
I pray about this kind of stuff. I mean the writing thing. I came in the office this morning wondering what I was going to write. No, that's not accurate. I came in this morning feeling too tired and too filled with dark thoughts which puts one in no frame of mind to write well. You don't have to be HAPPY!!!! to write well but it helps if your mood isn't mired in darkness. So I prayed. I asked that His spirit would move in me. I told someone a while back that I don't know where I end and the Spirit begins. By that I mean that I don't know how it happens but when I pray, things happen. So let's just say that all of the bad stuff in this post–is mine.
Red Light, Green Light
I've got a stop light in my office. It doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the local Toastmasters club, a club I joined earlier this year and promptly stole their stop light. Not really. It's actually broken and I brought it home several months ago to fix it. Haven't done so. Instead I've let everything else get in the way. Well… I say let. It's more like I shove everything in the way. I'm like Mel Gibson running from a bunch of homeless Jews in a hospital turning over every thing I can to get away…. carts, bedpans, gurneys with patients and then having to stop and wait for the elevator while they catch me. Or was that my dream last night?
The thing should be easy to fix, it's only three lights and two switches and they use it to time speeches. But that's the problem: I don't have time to do speeches. I was doing speeches and they were timing them with a stopwatch and a bell. Which is kind of jarring when you're just getting warmed up to your subject and 'ding', time's nearly up so then you get rolling again and 'Ding!', and times really almost up and you go on to the earth shattering conclusion and DING! So… the stop light is definitely better. I should get it back to them before someone winds up dead. That or the bell winds up in someone's backside.
They (the other club members) said my speeches were really good. My secret? I wrote them out and memorized them. I once took a journalism class and accidentally read the book and found out that the secret to timing speeches, soliloquies, and the like is to write it out, triple space all lines, and write in 12 point courier (typewriter) font. Each page will last one minute. If I needed a five to seven minute speech (the usual length) I wrote seven or eight pages read it over and over until I had memorized most of it. Of course I ended up forgetting some of it but that was okay, the point was to know what I was going to say before I got to the meeting and having enough material to fill the alloted time. (Why is my delete key so small? I was trying to delete something and had to hunt for the key. I used to have a nice big delete key on my last keyboard that I could just pound on with my right pinkie because, in writing, taking stuff out is far more important than putting stuff in. In fact, they should allow a negative word count because it makes for better writing.) But writing a speech is a lot of work. How am I supposed to do all of this and write here and spend time with the wife and kids and go to church and waste time on the Internet (why is Internet capitalized? It's been over fifteen minutes, haven't we had time to get over the whole proper name thing?) posting things no one reads to facebook. So I've had to quit going. Not resign or anything, just quit.
I pray about this kind of stuff. I mean the writing thing. I came in the office this morning wondering what I was going to write. No, that's not accurate. I came in this morning feeling too tired and too filled with dark thoughts which puts one in no frame of mind to write well. You don't have to be HAPPY!!!! to write well but it helps if your mood isn't mired in darkness. So I prayed. I asked that His spirit would move in me. I told someone a while back that I don't know where I end and the Spirit begins. By that I mean that I don't know how it happens but when I pray, things happen. So let's just say that all of the bad stuff in this post–is mine.