the speech

Well, would you look at that? It's summer. 

As you probably know, I took quite a long break from blogging. So for the next few posts I'll mostly be recalling what's been happening from mid-April to now. For this post, I'll be writing about the student council speech and election that I had already mentioned a while back. 

The time limit was 2 minutes or less. Before recording, I had already revised and changed my script countless times. Also, I made sure to memorize the whole thing so there's a natural flow when I'm talking. It was pretty long, here it is:

As the Father of American literature, Mark Twain once said, “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed in the things you didn’t do than the ones you did.” 

We know that we won’t be in highschool forever. Then why do we still leave behind regrets? This question doesn’t have a definite answer, but the time is always right for improving. And I believe that it’s time to improve. You and me and all of us. 

We are 72 students. 72 different scenarios. All of them will play out differently. There has to be a bridge between people and thoughts and ideas, and I’m willing to be your bridge. Surely, a bridge has no purpose if no people walk upon it so I’ll be relying on all of you to not hesitate to pitch any idea that you might have. One that I’m suggesting, to give you lots of methods so you can improve in your own way. How will this work?

We give talks on how to improve in areas that will drastically change your life for the better. Couple topics I’m thinking of are the ability to jump out of your comfort zone, the willingness to try new things, and the skill to be able to lift others up. In addition, if you wish to speak about a certain topic, I’ll be the one to coordinate and provide you with a platform. And hey, if you’re interested, give me a call and as long as it’s not 3 AM, we can talk it over to see how it’ll go. And lastly, Even if you only take away one thing from this speech, simply remember:

Don’t leave behind any regrets. Vota por Jerry.

Since it was memorized, I freeze up a ton of times trying to remember the next line or sometimes I mess up the order of the words and other times everything goes perfect but I go over the time limit. At one point, I even cut out a part of the speech to try to shorten it and make it good instead of packing too much info and rushing it. In the end, I got the perfect take on the 49th try. The bloopers were really funny to watch later on though. 

Now, I don't remember if I mentioned this before but I actually did have an adversary who was also running for president. It was my good old friend, Pen! So, if you don't remember super well, Pen is my MUN partner in competitions. Basically it was going to be a close vote. Or at least that's what I thought. Ostensibly, I still don't know precisely how close the vote was because it was never publicized, only the victor was announced in the end. 

At the start, I was thinking, what's the best way to advertise this? In the end, I went for the telemarketing approach. Which usually doesn't work out that well... but it's different in this case since they know who it is. Of course, I have no clear way of knowing whether or not the people I called actually did vote or not but from another perspective, it also gives me a better idea of what exactly it is that people want. 

Oh, that's right. I WON!! The smell of victory was a lot fresher at the time though. It feels almost distant now, the scent washed away as the waves of time continuously crash against the coast, our memory. Honestly, I'm going to get back to my blogging every day habit. 

Not only can I leave behind old memories by writing them here, while I was researching for one of my talks I learned that one of the best ways to feel better about EVERYTHING is by writing out everything you're thinking. Both positive and negative emotions alike, when written out, it feels like one less burden to carry. Frankly speaking, it's pretty much the same reasoning as to why people say you should talk to someone about your problems if you're feeling down and it'll release some of that stress that's been building up. However, writing it out yourself works just as well in comparison, especially if you don't have anyone or don't want to talk to anyone about it. 

From the speech, you can see that I didn't make any promises that I wasn't sure I could accomplish. The only one I did give was that I would be giving talks on improvement. I guess you could think of it as a sort of motivation speech, slightly leaning towards the informational side though. I've already conducted a few research sessions for my first talk and I'm planning on finalizing all the research for the first three talks throughout summer and also the presentation itself for the first two at least.  

So far, about the student council, there haven't been any activities yet since it's summer and the new school year hasn't started. Planning potential activities is also on my to-do list for this summer. Oh wait, I forgot to tell you. Dino and Rama both got elected too! Rama is treasurer and Dino would be VP while Dex is secretary and a new girl who just joined this year will be representative. Pretty sweet line-up. 

That's it for this post. Cya in the next one.