All right guys. Here's the scoop on the Spanish Convention/Prom weekend extravaganza (April 26-27, 2003), straight from The Man, Tito "The Mack Attack" Crack, himself. It's a pretty long one, but that's because there was a bunch of awesome stuff that happened that weekend. I would also like to note that this starts one of the first sections to actually appear shortly after being promised. Hope you enjoy it!
Dear Fans,
This has been one wacko week. To start out, I get to Monday the week before, and I haven't studied the 100-some-odd verbs that I have to know for the Spanish Convention test nearly enough. The whole week I'm flipping through a stack of notecards filled with verbs, English translations, and irregular forms to remember, frantically trying to learn what I should have been learning all month. So anyway, I'm dissing this Japexican (that's Japanese-Mexican, for those of you who aren't enlightened) who's going up against me in the competition from our school all week, and frantically studying, and getting ready for this weekend to rock.
Meanwhile, on the prom side of things I was fighting to get the marching uniform idea lined up, since I was stupid enough not to make the arrangements well in advance. Instead, I had to run around seeing if I could actually do the thing without getting in trouble from my parents, the band directors, and the prom honchos. Unfortunately, things did not go so well on that front. I got the permission of one band mom to wear the marching uniform to prom, but unfortunately when she went to the band directors they gave an affirmative no. (Well, more like a negative no, but you get the picture.) Too bad she told me on Thursday night, when it was nearly too late to do anything about it since I was leaving the next morning for Spanish Convention. Then I called up Daniel.
(ring ring ring)
Tito: "Hey Daniel?"
Daniel: "Hey Tito. What's up?"
Tito: "Errr...the marching uniform idea is out."
After all that, we finally decided on a new set of clothes that would make the best of prom, since the marching uniform idea seemed out of the question now. Still, I wanted to make sure it was dead, so I went to the band directors' office the next morning before I skeddadled over to the Spanish hall. They said people would think I was "making fun of the marching uniform" or some such nonsense. Well, heck, I thought. Forget that. I'll just do the best that I can.
Then I hop onto a bus full of high school kids (including one of the city schools that couldn't get their own bus; moochers...) and hightail it to the evil University of Alabama (yech). The Japexican kid tried to study on the way, but to no avail, for he was being sucked into conversations with girls the whole time. Not to say that Tito wouldn't have liked some of that action...
When we got to the hotel, we dumped all of our stuff in rooms (since some of the rooms were being cleaned) and headed to the university for the competitions. We all met in a little auditorium, went through the opening ceremony riffraff, and finally dispersed to our seperate events. It was about 1:30 now, and at this point I had been getting so pumped up over the verb test that I was ready to kick some serious, serious Japexican tail. Oh yeah, and there was a $1 bet on the test between me and that Japexican kid. Man, that kid.
We got into the test room and had 30 minutes to answer 58 questions. Man, I was whacking out. I'd figured on at least an hour to take the test. Man, I was flying through those questions like nobody's business. Some of the questions were seemingly unanswerable, since they didn't give you the person or tense of the verb, and the correct verb was conjugated correctly in four different tenses. Needless to say, many of my answers were guesses. Then came the oral double-elimination round...
Once a guy finally got back with the test results, one guy had to leave, since only the top ten competitors made the oral round, and eleven people had taken the test. Well, by now my leg was shaking. I was very nervous because of all the pumped energy, and I felt like all my incredibly wise verb knowledge was oozing out of my ear like a bunch of banana pudding. It was getting pretty tense, but then people started missing obvious irregulars. I mean, the people in the room clearly hadn't studied, besides me and the Japexican.
The Japexican eventually had to leave to perform in a group dancing competition, which meant that I pretty much had the first place trophy already. So I just waited it out until I was the last one standing (everybody else had two incorrects). Turns out that I made a 40 out of 58 on the test, which was the best out of the whole eleven competitors. I was pretty psyched about that, so I went back down the auditorium or whatnot.
We went back to the hotel for a little while after some more stuffy stuff, then came back later for a banquet-type thing. It was pretty bad, except that the sanguino tasted like Eucharist grape juice, and we made a bunch of Catholic jokes. Plus we stole another table's sanguino and tried to get some more pastries from the chick at the table next to us who asked for our salt; she was pretty good-looking, too.
After the banquet, we watched my new homeslice Robert show off his mad, rad skills on Ms. Pacman. He must have spent five dollars total by the time we left the next day. Then after Pacman came a really stupid dance that was mostly just people booty-dancing. The cool kids like me opted out and instead stood around outside making fun of two middle school girls who kept walking in circles.
Then, the next morning, Robert, a short kid and I all walked from the hotel to IHOP at some unfriendly hour to our health. But our waitress, named Teleka (I checked her nametag when she first said her name), was crazy go nuts; she gave the other two guys a senior discount when they asked for it! The food was excellent and we actually took the time to fill out these little customer response forms at our table. We all gave our waitress great reviews in the customer response forms, then left promptly, but not before Robert popped a half-and-half and acted like his eye was spewing. I was full from the silver dollar pancakes for nearly the entire day.
We got back to the convention after yet another bus ride, and, after many bad theatrical productions (excluding one about Castro's private life, which, though on the menu, somehow didn't show up), we finally headed back for our good ol' hometown. It was about 5 o'clock when I got back home, happy to be back but ready to kick out some serious action and mack at the local high school promenade.