Bleh. I'm sick.

Yesterday, the JETS got to skip school to attend the regional TEAMS competition. Yay, go us. We had each researched a particular topic (mine was wind chill), and we were all ready to tackle a bunch of terrifying Engineering questions that would make geniuses cringe. We brought a huge stack of textbooks (we held an unofficial, unspoken contest with neighboring tables to see who had the tallest stack) and the traditional baseball bat, which became quite the conversation piece. Anyway, the Hockaday JV team (I was on Varsity) started building up their book stack with random textbooks from their backpacks, such as US History and Huck Finn. I built onto our stack with my sketchbook, American Literature, and Men at Arms. Caroline added Hamlet. Loh came up to our table and asked if we were really planning on using all these textbooks, and Megan responded that we intended to use Hamlet quotes in our essays.

Megan wrote about hurricanes:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Inspired and amused, I took out my copy of The Twelfth Night. Chungy wrote about noxious chemicals and breadmaking.

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
the appetite may sicken, and so die.

Caroline had a really amusing Hamlet quote for earthquakes, but I can't remember it at the moment. Anyway, while the questions were still esoteric as always, we were able to answer a lot more than we had last year. Go us! We ended up getting 3rd place, so it's all good.

However, Thursday, I had a really sore throat. Yesterday, it started getting worse. By the time TEAMS was over and we were waiting for the bus (we ended up waiting over an hour -- gah), it had progressed to my having an incredibly hoarse voice and excessive drowsyness. Of course, I had Twelfth Night rehearsals afterwards, so I asked Mr. Blaydes if I could go easy on my voice for a day. My voice became dramatically lower in pitch, slightly scratchier, and harder to project. Eventually, my voice sounded so mannish that Darius (a huge thespian and amateur playwright; plays Toby Belch, though he was originally cast as Feste) suggested that we keep Fabian as a boy after all. It was hilarious. Twelfth Night is such an amusing play. At one point, someone suggested that Antonio and Sebastian could be homosexual (in fact, they *were* in the Royal Shakespeare performance I saw last summer), so John (Sebastian) and Benjamin (Antonio) started acting all fruity and such. Then Mr. Blaydes vetoed the idea, and the scene went on normally.

After rehearsals, I went to the Dallas Institute to put up my photography show. It opens on the 15th, ::squeals:: so we put everything up early. If any of you loyal readers happen to be in Dallas, you're most certainly invited. Of couse, by 7 in the evening, I was feeling exhausted and dead, so we had a quick dinner, then saw a quick art show by a high man on the totem pole from Cornell. Muah. Then it was home, and sleep. Hurrah for sleep.