I figured nothing could show the impact of actually being at the conference like a video, so I'm sharing some YouTube clips. You don't have to watch all of them, but they're all guaranteed awesome.
My dad made that one, and there's a lot of goofy pictures of Emily in it. :P Silly Emily.
The above video gives a good sense of the sheer number of people that were there, plus, you get to see how we started every evening.
There were SO MANY PEOPLE. So it was really cool to get a letter from President Obama. Everybody loved it, in part because the ELCA is pretty left-leaning, in part because we got a letter from the friggin' president.
We Will Love You!
I wish I could have posted some legit recordings from the ELCA itself, but apparently they're too busy promoting their new women's Bibly study to post videos of speakers, so there you go.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Misconceptions
Mom wanted me to post this, because she thought I might have given the wrong message in the post about cleaning up the school. She says there's an opinion among some people that there's no point in helping people--well, let's be brutally honest, there's an opinion among some people that there's no point in helping poor people--because they Can't Be Helped. You have to Want To Be Helped before the proceeds from the Women of the Church Auxiliary Bake Sale will do you any good. 'Wanting To Be Helped' usually entails renouncing all ties to your former culture, friends, family, and former way of life--just like emigrants at Ellis Island in the 1800's! It is the Only Way For Them To Become Good Christian Men And Women!!
That's crap.
I don't know if anybody with that opinion has read their Bible lately, but in case you didn't know, Jesus was a poor kid from the ghetto, too.
So, if writing about seeing graffiti on the bathroom walls of the elementary school made anybody think, "what's the point of painting the school if those kids are already delinquent" or whatever, that is not what I meant to say. In fact, I think seeing all the graffiti was what made me realize that the kids who go to that school need a nice building more than anything.
I know a little about child psychology, and from that I know that kids in elementary school grades are basically a reflection of what they see around them. If they see a lot of bad language on TV and hear it from their parents and older siblings, of course they're going to repeat it. To me, it was just a sign that the kids in that school needed more love than anybody.
When you really think about it, who will get more out of walking into a beautifully-painted new classroom (one that looks like a home, not a mental hospital or a prison), a rich kid or a poor kid? Probably a poor kid.
So the next time you're tempted to refuse aid to a "bad" person, take a leaf out of the Good Book:
That's crap.
I don't know if anybody with that opinion has read their Bible lately, but in case you didn't know, Jesus was a poor kid from the ghetto, too.
So, if writing about seeing graffiti on the bathroom walls of the elementary school made anybody think, "what's the point of painting the school if those kids are already delinquent" or whatever, that is not what I meant to say. In fact, I think seeing all the graffiti was what made me realize that the kids who go to that school need a nice building more than anything.
I know a little about child psychology, and from that I know that kids in elementary school grades are basically a reflection of what they see around them. If they see a lot of bad language on TV and hear it from their parents and older siblings, of course they're going to repeat it. To me, it was just a sign that the kids in that school needed more love than anybody.
When you really think about it, who will get more out of walking into a beautifully-painted new classroom (one that looks like a home, not a mental hospital or a prison), a rich kid or a poor kid? Probably a poor kid.
So the next time you're tempted to refuse aid to a "bad" person, take a leaf out of the Good Book:
9As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.10While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. 11When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"
12On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."
the Gospel of Matthew, 9:9-13
Day Six--New Orleans State Of Mind
We got up early and packed--a long and painful endeavor-- and headed downstairs--another long and painful endeavor. We loaded everything into the Subaru, which took about twenty minutes, considering that we also had to bungee a mattress to the roof of the car (long story). Then we had to get ourselves in the car. A Subaru Forester fits four people comfortably, and have five seatbelts on the off-chance that you have three small people or children sitting in the back row. We had six people, and none of us would qualify as small, especially not after a week of Louisiana cooking. Emily and Mom shared the passenger's seat, and I was sandwiched between Justin and Jimmy. It was not a fun way to travel, although we got used to it as the week progressed.
We parked at the Superdome and managed to get floor seats for the first time. I looked around the stadium. We were in one end of it. Jimmy commented that seven Superbowls had been held in the Superdome. I looked around again. We were in the end of the stadium, on the floor. We were in the endzone. We were sitting where a Superbowl-winning touchdown was made.
If that's not reason enough to go to New Orleans, I don't know what is.
The sending ceremony was really good--great music, a reprise of 'We Will Love You,' and the largest wave in the 500-year history of Lutheranism. It was awesome. Have you ever done the wave with 38,000 Lutherans? I think not. (If you don't know what the wave is, go ahead and find out.) After that, though, we pretty much just packed up and got in the RV.
We thought it would be better for the engine to just drive the Subaru over the mountains, rather than towing it, so I went with Mom in the car and we had a nice, long conversation. When we got to the campground (the same campground we stopped at before, where all the lanes are named after figures from Southern Civil War mythology), Jimmy, Emily and I headed to the bathhouse. Last time while I was waiting for everybody else to finish up in the shower, I noticed last time that there was a door next to the showers with a light on and a radio playing. I had tried the doorknob before (urged on by a combination of boredom, curiosity, and the feeling that I was in a movie and "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz was the theme song), to no avail. When we went to the bathhouse, the lights were on again and the music was still playing. I tried the handle again. It opened.
Not wanting to go in on my own, I enlisted Jimmy's help to go in with me. It was nothing but a storage shed with nobody in it. There was a radio playing--a cool, vintage radio--but that was about it. Because you can't just trespass on private property and not mess with what you find within before you go, we took a little plastic item from the shelf and put it on the curb outside, just so they'd know we'd been there. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.
We parked at the Superdome and managed to get floor seats for the first time. I looked around the stadium. We were in one end of it. Jimmy commented that seven Superbowls had been held in the Superdome. I looked around again. We were in the end of the stadium, on the floor. We were in the endzone. We were sitting where a Superbowl-winning touchdown was made.
If that's not reason enough to go to New Orleans, I don't know what is.
The sending ceremony was really good--great music, a reprise of 'We Will Love You,' and the largest wave in the 500-year history of Lutheranism. It was awesome. Have you ever done the wave with 38,000 Lutherans? I think not. (If you don't know what the wave is, go ahead and find out.) After that, though, we pretty much just packed up and got in the RV.
We thought it would be better for the engine to just drive the Subaru over the mountains, rather than towing it, so I went with Mom in the car and we had a nice, long conversation. When we got to the campground (the same campground we stopped at before, where all the lanes are named after figures from Southern Civil War mythology), Jimmy, Emily and I headed to the bathhouse. Last time while I was waiting for everybody else to finish up in the shower, I noticed last time that there was a door next to the showers with a light on and a radio playing. I had tried the doorknob before (urged on by a combination of boredom, curiosity, and the feeling that I was in a movie and "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz was the theme song), to no avail. When we went to the bathhouse, the lights were on again and the music was still playing. I tried the handle again. It opened.
Not wanting to go in on my own, I enlisted Jimmy's help to go in with me. It was nothing but a storage shed with nobody in it. There was a radio playing--a cool, vintage radio--but that was about it. Because you can't just trespass on private property and not mess with what you find within before you go, we took a little plastic item from the shelf and put it on the curb outside, just so they'd know we'd been there. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Day Five--Mad Season
Mom, Dad and I got up early to go to something called Hip-Hop Worship. It was in a hotel down the street, so we grabbed breakfast and headed down. It was in their grand ballroom, and it was packed. I got a seat (on the floor, and I had to fight even for that), then spotted six or seven people wearing Save Darfur t-shirts. For those of you who don't know, I've been pretty seriously involved in the Genocide Intervention Network, 1-800-GENOCIDE and Save Darfur for about a year. I call my senators and representatives just about every week to ask them to vote for anti-genocide legislation, I donate, I sign petitions, that kind of thing. For my sweet 16, I had a Darfur-themed party and raised money instead of getting presents. So I went over and talked to them.
As it turns out, it was a youth group and their pastor from somewhere in the Midwest, but about 40% of their congregation (including the kids at the conference) are refugees from Darfur. I talked to their pastor a little and shook hands with a girl named Christina, who was from Darfur. She seemed really cool. Their pastor told me her father was shot in front of her at age five. In light of that, dedicating my silly little birthday party to the cause didn't seem as impressive as I'd always thought it was. That realization was definitely a much-needed lesson in humility.
Feeling that very weird feeling you get when something has just happened that can only be the work of God in your life, I went to go back to my seat. Then their pastor came after me and asked me to sit with them--they had saved a seat for a kid who decided to sleep in. (It was 7:30 AM, I don't blame him.) So I got the opportunity to worship with three kids from Darfur. I stepped on Christina's foot during one of the songs and spent a good part of the rest of the service berating myself for my clumsiness. The service was really cool, though, I bought the CD when it was over.
We got the rest of the group and headed over to the convention center. The Interaction Day is what we had been looking forward to for most of the week, and we weren't disappointed. We got into this huge hall--and when I say huge, I mean the size of an aircraft hangar--and it was packed with all these different things you could do. I didn't really see enough of it, because I kind of hunkered down in one place when I found something fun, so there's a ton of stuff that was there that I'm leaving out, but trust me, it was awesome.
So we all went our separate ways with instructions to meet back at the FEMA trailer (the room was so large that they could fit a FEMA trailer in there without batting an eyelash... then again, that's not saying much as FEMA trailers are tiny). I eschewed the climbable attractions and the ziplines in favor of the more subdued activities. There was a cool thing that Habitat for Humanity was doing where kids could help build walls and framework for a house that would be transported and given to a family. I kept going until I found what I was really looking for--arts and crafts. Yes, in the middle of a hall of wonders that the ELCA must have poured tens of thousands into, I spent at least an hour and a half sitting on the floor and making bracelets out of hemp. Whatever, they were really cool-looking and I got to talk to some cool people.
After I had made enough jewelry to bedeck the whole family, I headed down to see a big portion of the space dedicated to a store called The Old Lutheran that was selling all these cute Lutheran t-shirts. (Example: You Might Be A Lutheran If... and 'I Dig Organ Music.') I headed down further to see a place with a bunch of tents sent up. The tents had light lines drawn on them in chalk, creating a grid. We were supposed to paint cool stuff on them, and it'd be sent to Darfur for refugees. I spent a good twenty minutes painting little inspirational messages on the tents, even though I knew full well not many of the recipients would be able to read English very well. I was also a little amused by the number of people who painted crosses on their squares, seeing as something like 95% of the population of Sudan (the country of which Darfur is a province) is Muslim. Imagine if you were in a refugee camp and you got a bunch of tents that had crescents all over them. You'd probably appreciate the gesture, but think it a little misguided all the same. Well, I hope the paint job will brighten the camps they go to all the same.
I walked by a bunch of other cool things (one example--a display of how much water on the face of the earth is salt water, and how much is frozen, and how much is unavailable, and how very little is available for human use in the form of 100 gallons. So there was a huge tub of the salt water, three buckets of the frozen water, another bucket of the unavailable water, and a Dixie cup of the available-for-consumption water. Scary.) Then I checked out the FEMA trailer--about half the size of our RV, I can't imagine how people could live in one of a year--and found Mom and Dad. Apparently, I was a good half hour late. Whoops.
The speakers were Donald Miller (yay!), a lady who helped prostitutes get off the streets (yay, but she talked really slow), and another lady who talked about the Earth and how awesome God's imagination is. She was really cool. I thought from her little bio-thing in the guidebook that I wouldn't like her, but I guess you never know.
The Flying Karmozov Brothers performed--the guys who make Jerry's jacked 'disappear' on Seinfeld!--and so did the fiddle-playing girl from Hurricane on the Bayou. She was amazing. She made me want to play fiddle. (I am going to learn how to play mandolin next year, though. I've got it all worked out. Watch your back, Chris Thile.)
We went to an event called Gathering Idol at the Hilton and hung out for a while, then realized that this was the last night we'd have in the city and all felt a little depressed. But then we had a very meaningful Final 15 devotional and went to bed feeling a lot better. For once, I managed to sleep through the night.
As it turns out, it was a youth group and their pastor from somewhere in the Midwest, but about 40% of their congregation (including the kids at the conference) are refugees from Darfur. I talked to their pastor a little and shook hands with a girl named Christina, who was from Darfur. She seemed really cool. Their pastor told me her father was shot in front of her at age five. In light of that, dedicating my silly little birthday party to the cause didn't seem as impressive as I'd always thought it was. That realization was definitely a much-needed lesson in humility.
Feeling that very weird feeling you get when something has just happened that can only be the work of God in your life, I went to go back to my seat. Then their pastor came after me and asked me to sit with them--they had saved a seat for a kid who decided to sleep in. (It was 7:30 AM, I don't blame him.) So I got the opportunity to worship with three kids from Darfur. I stepped on Christina's foot during one of the songs and spent a good part of the rest of the service berating myself for my clumsiness. The service was really cool, though, I bought the CD when it was over.
We got the rest of the group and headed over to the convention center. The Interaction Day is what we had been looking forward to for most of the week, and we weren't disappointed. We got into this huge hall--and when I say huge, I mean the size of an aircraft hangar--and it was packed with all these different things you could do. I didn't really see enough of it, because I kind of hunkered down in one place when I found something fun, so there's a ton of stuff that was there that I'm leaving out, but trust me, it was awesome.
So we all went our separate ways with instructions to meet back at the FEMA trailer (the room was so large that they could fit a FEMA trailer in there without batting an eyelash... then again, that's not saying much as FEMA trailers are tiny). I eschewed the climbable attractions and the ziplines in favor of the more subdued activities. There was a cool thing that Habitat for Humanity was doing where kids could help build walls and framework for a house that would be transported and given to a family. I kept going until I found what I was really looking for--arts and crafts. Yes, in the middle of a hall of wonders that the ELCA must have poured tens of thousands into, I spent at least an hour and a half sitting on the floor and making bracelets out of hemp. Whatever, they were really cool-looking and I got to talk to some cool people.
After I had made enough jewelry to bedeck the whole family, I headed down to see a big portion of the space dedicated to a store called The Old Lutheran that was selling all these cute Lutheran t-shirts. (Example: You Might Be A Lutheran If... and 'I Dig Organ Music.') I headed down further to see a place with a bunch of tents sent up. The tents had light lines drawn on them in chalk, creating a grid. We were supposed to paint cool stuff on them, and it'd be sent to Darfur for refugees. I spent a good twenty minutes painting little inspirational messages on the tents, even though I knew full well not many of the recipients would be able to read English very well. I was also a little amused by the number of people who painted crosses on their squares, seeing as something like 95% of the population of Sudan (the country of which Darfur is a province) is Muslim. Imagine if you were in a refugee camp and you got a bunch of tents that had crescents all over them. You'd probably appreciate the gesture, but think it a little misguided all the same. Well, I hope the paint job will brighten the camps they go to all the same.
I walked by a bunch of other cool things (one example--a display of how much water on the face of the earth is salt water, and how much is frozen, and how much is unavailable, and how very little is available for human use in the form of 100 gallons. So there was a huge tub of the salt water, three buckets of the frozen water, another bucket of the unavailable water, and a Dixie cup of the available-for-consumption water. Scary.) Then I checked out the FEMA trailer--about half the size of our RV, I can't imagine how people could live in one of a year--and found Mom and Dad. Apparently, I was a good half hour late. Whoops.
The speakers were Donald Miller (yay!), a lady who helped prostitutes get off the streets (yay, but she talked really slow), and another lady who talked about the Earth and how awesome God's imagination is. She was really cool. I thought from her little bio-thing in the guidebook that I wouldn't like her, but I guess you never know.
The Flying Karmozov Brothers performed--the guys who make Jerry's jacked 'disappear' on Seinfeld!--and so did the fiddle-playing girl from Hurricane on the Bayou. She was amazing. She made me want to play fiddle. (I am going to learn how to play mandolin next year, though. I've got it all worked out. Watch your back, Chris Thile.)
We went to an event called Gathering Idol at the Hilton and hung out for a while, then realized that this was the last night we'd have in the city and all felt a little depressed. But then we had a very meaningful Final 15 devotional and went to bed feeling a lot better. For once, I managed to sleep through the night.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Day Four—Rock You Like A Hurricane
We got a late start and went to the convention center for Learning Day. And, no offense to Learning Day, but it was kind of boring. We made some postcards, did a workshop about our aspirations and made plegdes to do some sort of good deed, and then went to a forum about how to be a Christian in a non-Christian world. That actually was pretty cool. I met a cool kid form Minnesota named Nicole and we prayed about situations in our life where we need courage. She is a lot braver than I am, I’ll say that much.
Because we got stamps from all three sections of our activies, we were entitled to a bandana from the ELCA. We trekked across half the convention center to get them and then took a picture with them to show how ganster we were.
It seems to me that the third day of a convention is the day when you start losing energy, and that was definitely true of our trip. I started freaking out because Mom and Dad wanted to eat in the convention center and I really wanted to go outside and get out of the freezing air conditioning. I think my hysteria was excacerbated the fact that I hadn’t really eaten a full meal in two days and I had woken up four or five time that night due to being cold. Mom, Dad, and everyone else pretty much ignored my freaking out and ate inside anyway. I got a hold of myself and maintained my composure until we got to Riverwalk and started looking at masks and other Mardi Gras stuff. Then I started to fall to pieces because I couldn’t see the point of us wasting our time in tourist traps when there was so much cool stuff to do.Then Dad said we were going to get some Hadgen Dazs, nevermind that we had just eaten less then twenty minutes ago and the ice cream line was at least 25 people deep. I sat down on the sidewalk and tried, ineffectively, to calm down. It didn’t help that Justin came over next to me and started telling me everything I never wanted to know about Resident Evil 4. I turned my face to the wall and feigned sleep to try to get a few minutes to myself, to limited success. I realized that I’d have to take it up a notch if I really wanted to be left alone, and pulled my hat over my face. I don’t know what it was, but then I just completely broke down and started crying in the middle of the Riverwalk mall.
After a few minutes, I felt a little better and was ready to rejoin the world at large. I took my hat off and asked the group if anybody really wanted to go to the Garden District, which was our plan for later that day. Nobody wanted to, so we went back to the hotel to hang out until it was time to go to the Superdome. Jimmy and I sat in the lobby and played a few hands of poker, but it was kind of boring because it was just the two of us. (Emily wasn’t playing because she was on the computer and Justin was swimming.) We decided to ask the bartender if he wanted to play a hand, seeing as he had absolutely nothing to do. He played quite a few hands with us and got us a bunch of waters and stuff.
The speakers that evening at the Superdome were awesome. The first was a guy named Spencer West who had his legs amputated at age five due to a muscle disease. He talked about how important it was to take your challenges as they come and the value of standing up for what you believe in. Then he asked us to stand up if we believed that we could make a difference in the world. Everybody stood up, and he jumped out of his wheelchair and stood on his hands. Then he said, “This is 38,000 people standing up for what they believe” and everybody cheered like crazy. He jumped back into his wheelchair (though it looked more like he was flying than jumping, his arms were that strong) and wheeled off the stage.
The next speaker was a former child soldier named Michel Chikwaine. He was pretty cool, although his story was very brutal. Then he said that when he first visited New Orleans right after Katrina, he was reminded of the refugee camps he had lived in as a child and how we needed to spread the wealth and take care of each other more.
Then this band Skillet started playing. Apparantly, they’re some big deal, and Justin loved them, but I wasn’t really impressed, so I left before the second set, along with Jimmy, Emily, and Dad.
Once we got back to the hotel (after a quick, desperately-needed bathroom break at the Holiday Inn), we went upstairs for the dance. We hung out for a little while, but the people there were dancing kind of… how can I say this…un-Christianly and we couldn’t really talk because the music was so freakin’ loud, so we went downstairs and Jimmy bought everybody nightcaps from our friend Eric the Bartender. (Jimmy cannot hold on to money. It burns a hole in his pocket. He’s bought Emily and I more gum, Chapstick, and Vitamin Waters in the past week than our parents have in a month. He is incredibly generous.) The kids got virgin Hurricanes, Dad got a scotch, and Mom got a beer. (Oh no, Lutherans drinking!) Jimmy then took a sip of water and made a face, commenting that the water tasted like mud after the Hurricane. We thought about that for a second. “The water tastes like mud after the hurricane,” he said. “Wow, that is really tragic when you think about it.”
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Day Four--School's Out For Summer
We woke up at five-thirty on our ServantLife day. Since we slept on the ground, I had woken up three or four five times during the night. We pulled on our fluorescent-orange ServantLife t-shirts (I don't know what yahoo decided to make the shirts a color nobody looks good in) and rolled out to the convention center. We waited a long time, then got on the buses and waited some more. We struck up a conversation with the bus driver, Jack from Wyoming. He took us a mile or two out of town and dropped us off. All six busloads of orange-clad Lutherans got off and started swarming around the elementary school we were supposed to be painting. There was no one there to meet us or tell us what to do. The front doors were locked. I found a way in the back and Dad went in and looked around. There was no one in there either, but he said it was pretty rough, the worst school he'd seen, even. Finally a guy named Troy found us and took us to the playground (or, more accurately, the asphalt lot with a playplace sticking out of it) and gave us a motivational pep talk. We grabbed our brushes and went into our assigned classroom.
The school wasn't awful. It was workable, but not much more than that. It was kind of dirty and really old and run-down-looking. Wait, I know exactly how to describe it. My high school is under construction, and there are sections of it that are really old and about to be replaced. Because the kids and teachers know it's about to be destroyed and rebuilt all shiny and wonderful, they don't bother picking anything up, and they don't bother fixing any broken cabinet doors or desks or whatever. They just break everything and get everything dirty and don't bother fixing it up. And it was exactly like that.
We got up to the third floor and got to our room. First, we had to get all the staples and tape off the wall. That was more problematic than it sounds, because there were literally hundreds of staples in the walls and we didn't have any way to get them our other than our fingers. Some of them had been in that wall for decades and were not coming out in a hurry. We finally figured to used the corner of paint scrapers, but we didn't have enough scrapers, a fact that would haunt us for the rest of the day. When we got all the staplers out, we started scraping paint off the walls and doors, a task that took the rest of the morning. It was kind of boring and definitely strenuous work. There were at least six distinct layers of paint. And after it was all scraped, it had to be washed off so we wouldn't be painting dirt onto the walls.
We talked to Troy, the guy who was running the operation. He told us he used to be a ninth-grade science teacher, but he was attacked by a student in class and ended up waking up in the hospital. He decided to get out of teaching and started working on the schools themselves. He said that the painting was really important because the colors and the care taken in the painting made the school seem like a school and not a prison, hospital, or mental asylum like it used to.
We went to get lunch and they didn't have any veggie subs, so Troy's vegetarian friend took pity on me and gave me an extra PB&J she had packed. Then we got back to work.
We finished scraping and broke out the paint. I also went to the bathrooms (I couldn't see how those little girls in elementary school managed to write so high up on the wall, much less know the things they wrote about.) Then when I walked back, I saw no less than six kids scraping paint off one door. It made me want to crack a joke: "How many Lutherans does it take it scrape a door?"
We started painting, which was awesome, because we got to see the fruit of our labors. All the scraping started to seem less laborious when we saw how nice our classroom was. At two, we packed it in and started cleaning the brushes and straightening the rooms. A couple of people started a game of pick-up basketball with one of the volunteers. It was pretty awful--just the way I liked it. That was, I feel like I'm an asset to my team, rather than a liability.
After we got back to the hotel (Jimmy talked the bus driver into dropping us off at our corner), we hung out until dinner, when we went to a pretty nice place. The food was great. It was the first square meal I'd gotten since we've been in New Orleans--this city is really unfriendly to vegetarians.
Because we were running late, we had to take a cab, Jimmy's first-ever cab ride. It was pretty cool. The driver was very talkative. See, we're supposed to talk to people and learn their stories, then take it back home with us. So far, though, not many people have been real chatty.
The speakers that night were really good. There was a guy who had been raised in a hellfire-and-damnation church and started doubting his faith, but really discovered who God was and got ordained as a pastor. Then we heard from a lady from Africa who had started a program called 10,000 Girls, this really cool organization that helps girls get through school. It's doubled the graduation rate of girls in her country. How cool is that? Anyway, I think she was the best speaker so far, but they were all phenomenal.
We left the Superdome after hearing an awesome band called Group1Crew and headed over to what was called "the Fun Room" or something like that. It was at the Hilton (a fact that led to a spirited debate about the relative merits of Paris Hilton and her Disney doppleganger, London Tipton), and there were so many people trying to get to the same place that they shut down the escalators and made people walk.
I listened to the dueling pianos for the first twenty minutes, though the second half of the duel hadn't showed, so it was just piano. Then I went to find Emily and Jimmy. They were standing in line for mechanical bull riding. They were taking bets on bragging rights on how long they could stay on. I didn't want to do it at all, but then Jimmy remarked that it would look really bad if Emily, the dancer and volleyball player, went for it, but I, the black belt and rock climber, chickened out. I won't say they made me do it--I don't really believe people can be made to do anything--but I will say there was peer pressure involved. Anyway, after we saw a bunch of people fall off in what looked like horribly painful fashions, Emily went up and stayed on for 16 seconds, a very respectable score, considering that you were only allowed to hold on with one hand. I went into the ring and stared the plastic bull in the eye. Thanking heavens for my horseback riding experience, I got into the saddle with some measure of grace and gave the ride operator the thumbs-up.
After one close call, I fell off at 20 seconds, although I probably would have worked harder to stay on if I hadn't already beaten Emily's time. I gave my friends high-fives and Jimmy entered the ring. He stayed on for a full three seconds before falling off. It was one of the funniest things I've seen in my life. Sad but true.
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