Crouching Pirates Hidden Sausage of the Mississippi group, National Youth Leadership State Conference (NYLSC) of December 2006. Literally. That was my support group's name.
The conferece began at noon on Thursday and ended the same time on Sunday. How should I say it...last year, Intro to Drawing and Design was what I called the best six weeks of my life, a description that would be duplicated by TIC.
But...
This conference was the best four days of my life. Maybe the best four days I'll ever have.
Pre-conference:
I was...so nervous. The name of the conference itself scared the crap out of me. National Youth Leadership State Conference, San Jose. It sounded intimidating. The only conforting thought was that other people had fun going to the conference. And besides, Dorothy, Sita, and Heidi would all be there. Even if I didn't make any new friends, I'd have old ones.
Oh, and I found out why the conference was so expensive. DoubleTree Hotel, 5-star, reserved from Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning. Like, 300 bucks a night?
Day 1: 12-14-2006 - Setting Sail: A Personal Journey
I was supposed to be there between 10:30 and 12, so I set my alarm for 7:30. What do you know, I get out of bed, cross the room and turn of the alarm, then automatically go back to sleep for another three hours. My dad woke me up at 10:30 and I ran out of the house without breakfast. Me in a nutshell.
When I got there, I was already panicking. Strangely, when I panic I'm relaxed. One of my group's Faculty Advisors told me that's a strange but convenient reaction, but that was later on. Anyways, on top of that, all scholars (as they referred to the students who attended the conference) were required to wear relaxed professional clothing on the first day, and I'm really not comfortable in formal. And we were almost late, but lucky for us the highway we took wasn't jammed. Arrived 11:40 and checked in on time.
I got my notebook, met Joy, one of my Faculty Advisors, and went into the ballroom that would be serving as our dining room for the conference. I filled out two evaluations that we would be using later on, at the same time watching icebreaker games played by people who had arrived early and already finished. The person leading the games would later turn out to be Keko, my group's other FA.
All of my classmates and I were split up into the four different groups [Atlantic, Salt and Pepper Lake, Gulf of Mexico, and Missisippi <3], no doubt on purpose. Each group had it's own what you could call a conference room. We went to ours in the Santa Clara room and went off into icebreakers right away - Name Game, in which we all attached adjectives with our name's first letter to our name. For example, Kangaroo Keith, Krazy Karli, Radical Rob, and mine, Absent Alina, which was fun to act out because I just hid behind my chair. We also played Train Wreck, in which the person in the middle of a circle of seated people states something like "I like pie," and whoever that applies to must jump up and find another seat at least two seats away from their starting point.
Goal Setting: I think next we studied SMART and SPORT charts - I'm not going to spell them out, but goal setting, if you will. That lasted for about two hours and fifteen minutes, and then all the groups left their classroom to have a break. Our FA's assigned us roommates, gave us keys, and let us go upstairs to change into casual clothes.
Roommate: My roommate's name was Karli. We hit it off right away in the hall, even on the way to the room. She's awesome. Anyways, we dragged our bags up to the sixth floor and down the hall to room 663. She had some trouble trying to open the door with her key, so I opened it first. The inside has more space to run around than my living room, many thanks to Tansen's paintballs.
We changed and spent the rest of breaktime trying to wrestle the patio door open. A piece of rubber seemed to have come out of place and looked like it was jamming the door. Even our combined strength couldn't get the thing to budge. We ran out of time, but the next break we got I called the front desk, and they sent someone up - only to tell us that we'd locked the door. Stupid lever. [Later the FA's told us we couldn't even go out onto the patios.]
Support Groups: Now in comfortable casual clothing, we went back down to the Santa Clara room. Our first directions were to do the following: without speaking, look around the room and judge all the other scholars. Decide on three people who you believe to be the least like you, get into a group, and go to a part of the room. Those groups would turn out to be our support groups for the rest of the conference. Emily B., Veronica, Nicolas and I ended up in a group and we claimed a little back corner. Then we each got worksheets that asked us to look at a person and decide an answer for a question - for example, without asking, I had to look at EmB and decide what she wanted to be when she grew up. Nick said my favorite movie was Beauty and the Beast.
After we'd decided support group names [Crouching Pirates Hidden Sausage], we came up with skits to show how our group came to be. Fictional, of course. Ours involved a poster of a pig and a thrown pen, as well as a banana-shaped sausage and a deleted scene.
Self-Awareness Assessment: We laughed our faces off at each other's skits, then the FA's pulled us back into a circle formation and passed out the results of our pre-conference assignments, which were to find 5 mentors and have them fill out a survey in which they ranked several aspects of the scholar from 1, the highest, to 8, the lowest. I got 6 people because I wasn't sure Trev would see the email in time, but he did. Other than that I had 2 sixth grade teachers, Kass, Lloyd, and my Leadership supervisor. There was almost unanimous agreement that presentation and leadership skills were my lowest and appreciating diversity was my highest. We compared our mentors' ratings to our own. Needless to say I was surprised at the differences.
We spent the rest of the time until dinner discussing why mentors like teachers would have different results than coaches, etc. It was pretty eye-opening for a lot of us. After that we decided what parts of ourselves we would try to improve on during the conference.
Dinner: Dinner was awesome. Pasta. Day 1's meals followed a Italian theme. Karli and I finished early and returned upstairs. That was when we called the front desk. Aiya. :P The desserts were...so...good...I don't even remember what we had, but all the desserts at that hotel were delicious.
Active Listening: The FA's split us up into two groups. One of stayed inside, and the other half went outside with Keko to the chairs next to the pools. The activity was to pick four people who would play a version of telephone. I think it was Jaclyn first, then Benny, Karli, and then me. Benny, Karli and I went inside to wait in the halls, and Keko would read Jaclyn a bunch of information on President Lincoln and she would relate how much of it she remembered to Benny, and so on until me. A fire alarm went off while Karli and I were inside. Thankfully no blaring siren, but the flashing light caught everyone's attention right away. Someone told us to go outside and get Keko and the other scholars to go to the front of the hotel. Keko determined that it was a false alarm, and we stayed outside by the pool.
Anyways, when Karli had told me as much as she could remember, we went back to the Santa Clara room, where I presented what I remembered to the rest of the group. I forgot one thing. Then the last person from Joy's half presented as much as she remembered. We discussed the results for a few minutes, then Joy and Keko taught us about Active Listening - what to do and what not to do, basically.
PLP - Personal Leadership Plan: To make a long story short, what we were trying to accomplish by coming to this conference and what we would be heading towards when we left it. I'll write more about this on Day 4 when I decided this.
Teambuilder: We played Assassin! Everyone stood in a circle and closed their eyes. Keko and Joy picked a killer each, me being one of them. The idea of Assassin is that when everyone opens their eyes they shake hands with those around them. The killer can choose to kill or not to kill someone. To kill them all they had to do was lightly scratch the person's wrist when shaking hands. That person would immediately transfer to the killer's side in the sense that they couldn't accuse that person of being the killer. About 15 seconds later they would 'die' dramatically on the floor. People had to watch each other and accuse someone if they thought they saw the killer in the act of scratching someone else's wrist. Wrong, and the accuser died. Right, and the killer died. A killer couldn't be killed by another killer.
There were some pretty awesome deaths, I must say. At the end only Rob, Nick and I were left. No one had made accusations, so I just shook both their hands. Rob died. I'd already figured Nick must have been a killer, because I'd shaken his hand and scratched his wrist at least two or three times, with the unchanging result that he refused to die. Playing Assassin for the first time would be one of the memories I would remember the most clearly at the end of the conference - just the two killers, me and Nick, unaccused and totally having owned that round. Our groupmates would get better at it though.
Trivia Night: Yup. After Assassin, we marched back over to the ballroom we'd had our meals in and played trivia. Unbelievable, how many questions were related to TV shows. It was like I was being punished for not watching TV, not that my support group really cared that much. It would have been a lot more fun if this one girl from the group sitting across from us hadn't been so bitchy about it. It was like she thought she owned the place or something. Several times during the conference, I'd be forced to wonder how the hell some of the people ended up there.
Bedtime - NOT: Security check was at 10 pm, so after that we weren't allowed to leave our rooms until the next morning. Karli and I talked for a while. We didn't watch any TV. We like and read a lot of the same stuff. She's really great, and she has such a beautiful voice. She was practicing for the talent show while I was taking a shower.
I went to bed after doing some of my math homework. End of Day 1.