Everything is bigger in Texas, as the saying goes*, but I ate an incredibly tiny apple today at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hell really did freeze over.

I’m here with Lafayette College’s Speech and Debate team, competing in two back-to-back tournaments over two days named collectively “Hell Froze Over” – for what reason, I’m not sure. All the Speech and Debate names and faces are out here, and it’s good to see some of them again, including an old friend who graduated last year. I’m not too good at the competition (I don’t practice as much as I should), but it’s entertaining seeing some of the better speeches – for example, I saw a Program Oral Interpretation (POI) today from a very well-known competitor named Kaby Brown. In POI, a single speaker gives one 10 minute performance integrating any number of sources from prose, poetry, drama, articles, or other written material. Kaby spoke about the catharsis of giving voice to your inner turmoils through art . . . which is, surprisingly enough, an unusually complex topic for POI (and forensics in general), which have an unfortunate tendency to hit you over the head with their topics.

Texas is pleasant. It’s warm, at the very least, and there’s great, authentic-ish Mexican food to be had here. I’ve had more avocado over the past two days than the previous month. The outskirts of Austin are diffuse, separated by huge tracts of green. I passed a man wearing a cowboy hat and spurs yesterday. A woman in the airport said y’all to me while I was busy knocking over all the luggage while trying to get to mine. It was cloudy yesterday, but today the clouds parted and the sun actually shone on my skin and it was warm. I spent an hour or so standing on a bridge which overlooked the highway, feeling the light breeze and considering how strange it would be to jump off. And interspersed into my tender moments with this environment were my speeches, which came every two-hours or so, and I shook hands with people and learned their names and how long their flights took and how cold it is where they are. The warmth really does make people more polite.

And I’m gonna do it all again tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about more individual speeches. Goodnight!

*I believe this saying is from Spongebob.