smiling for the camera...and a long introduction to my true love: mock trial.

alright...here's a photograph of me. :) it's the best face shot i have up online right now, at least until i can get on a computer to cut some other pictures down to just my face. it's a little old, but i still look pretty much the same. (sad, i know. i'm seventeen in this picture...seventeen!) there's a more recent picture of me up on my blog, from last weekend, but it's me being silly with my boyfriend. anyway...me!



should probably stop blogging now, i guess...it's almost ten o'clock, and i have an hour to go back to my hotel room, iron my clothes, and get all dressed. i'm currently in the urban metropolis of dubuque, iowa...we have a mock trial tournament here this weekend. i'll probably be talking about, or at least alluding to, mock trial a whole lot. basically, mock trial is an academic competition where all the participating colleges get a case that they work on all year, and students act as lawyers and witnesses. they put together plaintiff and defense cases, and then go against other teams, one team playing plaintiff and the other defense.

i did it for three years in college, and now that i've graduated but i'm still living near campus, i'm coaching the team this year. most of my close friends do mock trial or coach it here at university of chicago, and my boyfriend did its, and now coaches it, for the university of kansas. i have every intention of staying involved in mock trial next year when i'm in law school...although if i have my druthers and get into wash u, i'll be coaching it there. that'll be interesting for two reasons...first of all, our team doesn't much like wash u because they have a tendency to play a little dirty. that, i feel, i can help change if i coach there. the second hindrance might be a little tougher, though...their head coach can't stand me. my boyfriend and i judged a round of theirs back in october, and they broke a cardinal rule--the wash u team talked to their coach in the middle of a round. it's explicitly written in the rules that you can't do that, so we each docked the wash u team several points and wrote it on the ballots, in addition to telling the person who ran the tournament. at another tournament a few weeks later, their head coach saw us again (he had been assigned to co-judge a round with my best friend, so he was walking over with him, me, and my boyfriend), and treated me and my boyfriend so coldly. so...who knows what'll happen if he's too mad at me for laying down the law to let me coach. i guess if that happens, i'll coach chicago in absentia. i really don't want to do the coach-in-absentia thing, though, it won't be enough contact with the activity just to get speeches and examinations to read through on email.

alright...enough with the intro-to-mock-trial. i really need to get ready.