Letter XIX: Busy Busy Week and Some Things throughout the Week

Hello, Tim!

This week…

I barely had time to relax. There are tons of things I want to talk about, but with the given time so short, I don’t think I would be able to cover most of the details. Hopefully, I can cover all the topics within thirty seconds- I mean minutes.

Contents of the Week

-Why I was so Busy
-German Reading Out Competition: Number One!
-Reading Wonder with the Morsels of Time
-Volleyball Competition
-Forty Minutes

Why I was so Busy

Last week I had no choice but to end the letter that I planned to talk about what I did over the weekend. Let’s just get to the reasons.

I did talk about needing to type out the whole script of The Pillowman, but that no longer mattered, for we had decided to change the play. I really want to wail on the fifteen thousand words I typed out, but I am a bit short on time now.

We proceeded to the play we ultimately chose.

The Flying Doctor by Moliere.

It is a funny comedy that involves evading forced marriage and impersonating a doctor. I liked the story and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine this would be a drama that can draw laughter from the audience.

Being too behind schedule, I got the help from Angela, Candy, Patrick, and William when we were typing out the script into the computer.

We talked and talked and talked about the script and how we could adapt it into a play with more characters throughout the school days, but there are still a lot of details that are to be added.

Until today, I still have a deadline pressure, and this is the main reason why I cannot linger too long on this week’s letter.

The whole story of my week was way more extenuating, but I have no time left for those whiney parts this week.

How unfortunate.

German Reading Out Competition: Number One!

Tuesday I went to Jingmai Girl’s High School for the competition, and just a few days prior to that, I found out that Melvyn was also going to participate in the competition, though he would be competing with the others with Spanish.

As I thought, we were given with five articles to practice with, but with the lucky draw, we would only be reading one.

In my case, it really WAS a lucky draw, for I got the most expressive essay in which the driving habits of Germans is explained. It was so dramatic that it was incredibly easy to push out the performance mode.

Still, I thought I made some mistakes. People from miles away could see that I was shivering (Eighteen competitors I had, by the way). I stuttered. I read the wrong word. That was when I believed I would make it as far as the fourth or fifth place. When the fifth and the fourth place was announced and to my dismay, they weren’t for me. I was about to tell myself to cheer up for not getting even the fifth place, I heard the name of the first place announced.

It indeed was me.

Maybe with another less expressive article, I wouldn’t even get a fifth place.

However, sometimes luck like this is always on my side.

I had to thank Eric, who helped me with about 80% of the practice, and it was surely something I should always be grateful for.

After the competition, it was barely noon, which means I could still go to school.

It was our speech teacher’s class, and I didn’t want to miss out on it. Therefore, I went to a bookstore near our school and picked out a book as a reward for myself, and went to school, making it before the speech class.

Reading Wonder with the Morsels of Time

Wonder is a book written by R.J. Palacio, a novel about a boy who was born with a rare combination of heredity defect going to school after having been homeschooled for five years. This book was adapted into a movie with the same name, which Sabrina said was a nice movie.

I like how this book manages to focus on the kid with the birth defect while still give the other characters a voice to speak with. I was astounded when the perspective of Auggie Pullman, the protagonist, shifted to his sister Olivia, where she said that her family was like a solar system and how everyone in it revolved around Auggie because he needs the most attention. When she said such, it suddenly dawned on me that we all did forget about how the other kid will feel when your brother has a birth defect and sometimes overlooked his/her needs.

It all turned well as Auggie made it through the first year, and Olivia got herself a boyfriend who is very considerate as well as her best friend.

This is a book with the voices of a range of kids to teenagers, and the wording they used wasn’t so difficult. I would recommend the book to all my friends in high school if they want to improve their English through reading.

Volleyball Competition

It’s next week we will be able to see how much we have improved through the early training at school almost every day! We only have six boys in the class, so all of us are sure to be competing, and though we don’t have much confidence, I am sure we would all enjoy ourselves.

Forty Minutes

It took me this long to finish this week’s letter, and I don’t know why I still managed to go with around a thousand words. I made sure that I had tried to keep it as brief as possible by leaving out a detail here and a detail there…

The following weeks would probably also be like this, I don’t know.

Ugh, annual performances are so tiring.

Sincerely,

Hugo