It's All Pretty Routine

So what’s been up with me as of late? I spent most of the weekend doing homework for my Speech 105 class, Fundamentals of Public Speaking. Homework is now part of my daily routine. Speech is a required class for my degree program and I think it will be very beneficial to me. Monday night was the second class session and we already had to write and give a three minute speech in the form of a toast (ummm toast ahhhh). I wrote mine as a toast to Jenne. They say write what you know and so I did. In other words, I took the path of least resistance. So Monday night I gave my toast in front of the class. It went okay. Not great, but okay.

Turns out the reason for having us write and give a three-minute speech was more for the teacher’s benefit. She got to see where each of us is in our public speaking and gauge what each student needs to work on as an individual. I have some work to do and I need some more experience. Next week we have to give another speech known as a declaration speech! This time around we have to give a speech that someone else wrote, but we have to edit it to five minutes, AND we have to memorize the first thirty and the last fifteen seconds of it. The body of the speech can be more or less read from the podium. I’m going to use Lincoln’s first Inauguration speech. Oh, this is the one and only speech that we will give from behind a podium. She doesn’t want us to become reliant on a podium. I’m for that. We’ll be giving ten speeches in this sixteen-week class and we’re now down to fourteen classes left. The other speech classes are run quite differently. They are taught in a very routine way, mostly from a textbook and they only require 3-4 speeches in the sixteen weeks. Let me ask you this, how do you learn public speaking from a lecture class taught from a textbook? They sound like easier classes, but in the long term I can’t see how they’d help me with my public speaking and all they do is four speeches and sit in their chairs most of the time listening to lecture. Although my class will require much more work and effort I feel that I am in the most beneficial class to me personally and professionally.

I had my routine physical on Monday and blood work done yesterday. There really isn’t much to say about it as it was all pretty… well it was pretty routine. There are two parts of this kind of exam that are the worst. The first worst part is when the doctor stuck his finger up my bumm and wiggled it around for what seemed like five minutes. Why does the doc try to make casual conversation while doing this? You’re bent over, pants around your ankles and a guy you see a few times a year has his finger where it doesn’t belong and he wants to talk about the break in the weather, or that he can’t wait to get his golf game back in swing. Just shut up and get your finger out of my bumm, PLUH-EEEZ! The second worst part is when the lab tech stuck me with a big needle to draw three half-gallon containers full of blood. Okay so it was three middle-finger sized vials of blood, but when you’ve been fasting for fourteen hours it feels like a gallon and a half. After that I rush off to eat lunch and then guess what, I have to go back exactly two hours later to have three more vials of blood drawn! Time for the big needle again. I felt like a vampire buffet. Well all the sticking is over and now I just wait for the results.

I’m still going to the gym once to twice a week to swim. I am trying real hard to make this part of my weekly routine. I am now doing ten laps, or twenty depending on how you personally count them. It’s an Olympic sized pool and I count a half lap as one length down. A full lap is one length down and one back. I do ten down and back. My doctor counts that as twenty and says that is great and to keep it up. He also told me to loose ten pounds. He wants me down to 185 – 190. I don’t have any real good stories about the YMCA either. Not much happening that makes for good blogging material and in a very real way that is a good thing. It means things are smooth at the SLJ… for the moment. I probably just jinxed myself. School is pretty routine, there are less idiots in the stores and on the roads, and in general all is well. So nothing to see here folks. Move along… move along.