“Had four brothers once upon a time He said they toured the country far away from the Rio Grande But the road just wore them down So they bought a house beside a lake Outside of New Orleans And stared…
Category: The Agony of the Wait is the Agony of Debate
For the Love of the Game
I like competing. I like games. I like situations that produce winners and losers with high regularity. I like this stuff a lot. But why? After I posted about my first-ever tournament win of a large poker tournament on Facebook…
Marching to New Orleans
You may have noticed a burst of color around here. If you haven’t noticed said burst of color, hit the “refresh” button on your browser. Ah, there we go. I’m moving to New Orleans in a little over a month.…
Let’s Talk About Class, Baby
Yesterday, I tried to tell a story about what I saw on the last APDA weekend of the year, a story about debaters and debate and ideas and personal struggles and hopes and dreams and triumphs and disappointments. It was…
The Battle of Hoff Theater: My Thoughts on APDA Nationals Finals 2013
Whenever I talk about APDA to prospective debaters, I almost always lead with how free-form and open our form of American Parliamentary debate is. I contrast it with debate styles like policy and even the big three of contemporary high…
Alma Mater
It’s hard to believe that I’m about to wrap up my fourth year of coaching debate, matching the length and breadth of my APDA career when I actually debated the rounds myself. I have spent as many years teaching, supporting,…
Requiem for an Apartment
I lived there for 30 months. It was my 17th residence, if you don’t count hotels. It saw me turn my debate gig into a full-time job, the shavings of the worst year of my life into something livable, the…
One Year Later
This blog still exists, by the way. This isn’t a conscious decision to never blog again, but the combined product of possibly the busiest year of my life and some factors therein that haven’t seemed to lend themselves to public…
Feasting and Dancing in Jerusalem Next Year
One of the few things I forgot to post about the Weakerthans concert set in New York last month was how good the warmup music was. I don’t mean the opening bands, which were hit-and-miss, though Said the Whale the…
Indeterminate
It’s been a week. I realize, increasingly, that this space is a good inverse litmus test of some combination of how overtly busy I am combined with how ruminative I’m feeling about my life in general. While ideas and thoughts…