Everything or nothing.

I felt so terribly old when I walked out of the school building on Friday, last week. Old and tired, like a grumpy old fart. Tired and empty, because I had failed. I had failed in a way more distinct and more defined, more clear cut, than I am used to failing. I can shrug failures off as, if at worst only in part, indirect consequences of outstanding circumstances of which I had no control, or too little control, but this time…

During the winter vacation, we were all given a little notebook with problems for us to solve during our vacation — that’s to be expected from the school I’m attending as they’re quite strict in general. One of the problems was to “write a speech”. We’d done that in the past, but those were restricted to 1 minute only, so there wasn’t a lot of room to get elaborate or advanced or indepth. This one had no such restrictions, which resulted in me not doing the homework at all. Too much freedom confuses me.

When I got back to school after the vacation I was pleased to note that those around me, every single one, had not finished the winter vacation homework. I was not alone. Praise be $deity. The teachers, however, took this in a stride and repeatedly stated for the next following days that we should write the speech and hand that in – if only the speech. So ultimately, I sat down and started writing a speech entitled “少子化” (“Shoushika”), which translates to something like “The low childbirth ratio in some countries which is resulting in a population growing older and older, and few children”. I don’t think there’s a one-word-word for it in English, but feel free to correct me if there is. In any regard, I wrote about this, as I had some thoughts on the subject of my own (namely, briefly, “why the fuck would you want people to have children when we’re on a planet that is already overpopulated galore?” and the surrounding circumstances around why one would want that, and why one shouldn’t want that). Luckily for me, everyone else had written about their first time seeing snow, or how they loved sushi, so I ended up being picked out of my class together with one other guy, whose speech also had “content” (nothing against first-snow-experiences, but it doesn’t make for a very good speech, if you ask me).

Thenceforth, I and my fellow class-mate were now placed with the task of brushing up our speeches, with the assistance of the teachers, after which we were supposed to hold said speeches before the entire school of two-hundred something odd people, including some professor from the Kyoto University, and a few other select teachers and like-minded folks.

In short, it’s one of those occasions where your normal average Joe will get a tiny bit anxious, at the least, and spaz completely out of control, at the worst. I, on the other hand, have this bad habit of simply not feeling anything in particular about getting up in front of a crowd of several hundred people. Which was, partially, my doom this time around.

In any regard, I started tweaking my speech, but wasn’t sure what should go where, and one of the teachers at school did some heavy revising for me, which I am grateful for. It however resulted in me sitting down, finally, to try to memorize a speech which I hadn’t really written myself. Misunderstand me incorrectly though – I did write the content, and the teachers were all emphasizing that the content would be as I had imagined it, but the problem was that what I originally thought about as I sat down writing, and what came out in the end, was something else.

The name of the speech in fact changed as well, to “地球人” (“Chikyuujin” — “earthling”), and its, well, main point was that we, as people of this earth, should stop thinking of ourselves as “whatever-an/-ese/-e” (e.g. American, Japanese, Swede) and start thinking of ourselves as “earthlings”. In short order, some heavy revision had taken place, but it was still “my piece”. Well. It was two days before the speech contest, when I finally sat down to learn the speech by heart.

I had trouble. Sentences which looked similar tended to jump in at the wrong places. Sentences which ended a certain way tended to end in ways they shouldn’t. Sentences simply refused to appear in my head, at the cue of the sentence lined up before them. I tried to learn in my usual way when it comes to speeches — I start at the very bottom, work sentence-by-sentence up until the last paragraph is covered, by reading the speech from where I am and until the end. If I fail to reach the end due to not remembering etc, I wash, rinse, repeat, until it sits. I do this for every paragraph, until I’ve reached the top paragraph of the speech. At that point I start doing the same but for the paragraphs. I read the last paragraph in full. If I succeed, I start reading the last two paragraphs, then the last three, until I am basically reading the entire speech from start to finish without failing a single syllable.

Unfortunately as you might’ve guessed, this proved harder than I had anticipated. By the time it was 1 am in the morning on that day, I hadn’t gotten through the “line-by-line” deal yet. I hadn’t touched the biggest paragraph of the speech yet, and, well, the speech was in two days. I slept. Fitfully.

The next day comes around. I go to school and am requested to hold the speech in front of everyone in class, as a prep for the next day. I fail completely. I reassure myself that “tomorrow it’s everything or nothing,” and the pride I take in my ability to pull things off when I need to… is about to fuck me over.

I get home, and as I return I call my neighbor and ask him for the favor of working as audience as I struggle with the speech. He agrees, so I swing by, give him the speech, and start stumbling my way through it. It goes bad at first, then I actually pull the entire speech off, well, once, but there always seems to be some part where I stumble, or some part where I pause for several seconds to reconsider what sentence comes next. After awhile he decides that I know the speech, which I’m (wisely) a bit hesitant to agree with, but since another neighbor has her birthday this day (Thursday), we go to her place to eat cake. We eat cake, I grab a beer, then I head back to my apartment, study the speech some more, and I feel that, hum, this might work out after all. The speech seems to “be there” in its entirety — no, I know it is there, I just need to lure it out of my head, and fast enough that there are no interruptions. I slept. Unceremoniously.

Everything or nothing. There were 7 people before me holding their speeches. According to the schedule, after the 8th person — me — there would be a short break before the last half of the speeches were held. As I am about to get up, however, waiting for my cue from the announcers, they unexpectedly inform the audience that the break comes now instead. So I walk outside, stare at the sky, and think about nothing in particular for the following 10 minutes. I have this fixed idea about not practicing something “on the day”, unless I absolutely must. I never study for tests the morning of said test. Nor did I this day try to run through the speech in my head. I had confidence in my “everything or nothing” approach, because it has always worked out in my favor. Always.

It was finally my time to hold my speech. Those who’d spoken until that point had been okay — some moreso than others. Some speeches were very interesting while others were rather dull; some people had basically read from the paper, while others had stood there barely glancing down at their speech notes once. I, well, I had no speech notes. I had my speech but that wasn’t really gonna help me if I forgot. I convinced myself that the best thing I could do was to simply leave the speech in my pocket, leave my jacket on my chair, and walk up there with no aid — everything or nothing; everything or nothing.

The start went well enough. I looked at the audience, I got the words out. Then screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I know I need to say something. My brain is absolutely blank. I pick up from some part. I start fumbling with the words. Sentences end the wrong way. I start correcting myself. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I laugh and shake my head, right there, in front of everyone. I hear a teacher whisper one word and I pick it up, because it’s in my speech, to this day unsure if it was the right word at the right place, nor am I sure which teacher whispered that word, but I grabbed it and took it forward, for a while. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I look down to the side at the teachers and go “Eh… nandattake?” (“Uh… what was the next part again?”) and the audience laughs.

That first pause, that first screech, that first time of so many times when my brain simply shut down, I had given up. I knew then and there that I had failed. I had chosen “everything or nothing” and for the first time in so many times where I have made that choice — taken that stance — I chose, and got nothing. Now, a few mere days later, I feel all right about what happened. I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t because that affair was such an important, vital lesson to me. I know now that I can’t pick “everything or nothing”, because I must not let myself win or fail through rolling dice and hoping to get a 6. I must win through effort and through ambition, and from my preparations for this speech, there was a sore lack of both of those.

I not only learn a language at my school.

In any case, despite my fumbling, despite my screwing my whole speech up, that keyword, “地球人” (“chikyuujin” — “earthling”), was used by almost every one of the judges in their final comments after the contest winners were elected (no, I didn’t win! big surprise there!). A teacher giggled and commented on it to me and I realized that although my speech had been an utter failure, my message had still reached someone, and so it wasn’t all for nothing after all.

I’m still considering what to do next year, since I’ll still be here. I might simply refuse to participate, or I might give it my all and try to win that contest next year, through ambition, through endeavor, through effort, rather than through the roll of a die.