quotidians | is that a point, delegate?

I spent my weekend at one of those Model United Nations simulations for high schoolers, presenting hastily-written speeches and resolution papers and fighting to stay awake during our morning crisis. Between roughly 16 hours of in-session debate and partying with strangers until my legs started to ache I was entirely out of it by 4pm on Sunday. My brain felt like a freshly printed document with ink still wet on the pages, if the contents were written by a monkey on a typewriter. It went like this: session and session of raising placards and furtively writing notes and directives for failed and successful blocs alike. The first day a friend of mine (who had scored an assistant director position at the conference) started a conversation with a delegate from California, who was frantically pacing around practising his speech with a Bible in his hand (either he was in the 30 Years War committee, or just real devout). The guy from California told us the whole banging on tables and "shocked and appalled" call and response thing was exclusive to Canadian MUN. I still don't know if he was fucking with us. My friend the assistant director then up and vanished for the next day and a half for the noble mission of moderating caucuses and trying to get girls' numbers, only to reappear at the party for a game of UNO. Here's the thing: when you're hosting an event with over a thousand teenagers it's pretty much a given that about half of them are attending with the express purpose of bagging each other, no matter how "academic" it looks. It's like aiming for awards: many try, but few succeed.

On night two I went out for sushi with some fellow delegates from my committee and unwittingly sat right next to Leah Jeffries, the actress playing Annabeth in the Percy Jackson TV adaptation. Percy Jackson was my favourite book series in elementary school, but I've never seen the TV show. Luckily, the girls I was eating with recognized her and asked for a picture once she'd finished her meal. The morning after I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 to attend the morning crisis, in which:

- A whistleblowing engineer was shot and killed by a Nerf blaster
- New Zealand got nuked twice. First by North Korea after an explicit threat that everyone assumed was a bluff. Then by the Russian Federation, who was aiming for China with a directive written so hastily that a miscalculation had their nukes jettisoning above Wellington.
- The whole damn committee got dissolved for its failures
- Our director breakdanced for us and was subsequently swarmed by anonymous notes asking for his hand in marriage

So whenever you're feeling disillusioned at the state of the world, remember things could always be worse. You could be living in a high school Model UN simulation.

Postscript: how crazy is it that container shipping only became widely adopted after WWII!? Yeah, it makes sense with the isolationist streak of the 1920s-30s but it's still weird to think about...