Speech Practice

 We had a debate tournament coming up a few weeks after my dinner-not-date with my friend and when I was writing my speech she asked if I wanted to come over and have dinner with her family and practice on them after we ate. I am so arrogant that I thought I would be giving them a little treat to hear my after dinner speech. I took her up on the offer and it was pleasant evening. Until I got to give my speech. Her mom and dad sat on the couch to listen to me hold forth in my hubris laden self-important teenage wisdom. They were super polite and made their faces to look like they were really interested. I was riding high based on a misreading of the effect of my performance on them. When I was done they asked if I wanted some feed back I said yes and they ran down a mental list of errors, omissions, and grammatical errors that I had made and told me that they also did not agree with my premiss. I recall specifically that there was a line at the end where I mentioned several dictators, a list I had supplied off the top of my head. I listed Lenin, Pol Pot, Pinochet and Karl Marx. If you spotted my error then shut up your face, I know where I went wrong now. I remember them correcting me and feeling humiliated because I had always fancied my self the smartest person I knew and it was becoming demonstrably evident that I was not even forth smartest in this group of five. That took me down a peg or two and I did make several of the changes that they suggested but I think it made me prefer preforming for people who were just confused by my convoluted ramblings and not an audience that by all appearances was quite a bit smarter than me and cleverly tactful so as to throw me off the trail.