Obligatory Youth to Youth update

Six youth summits. Four Youth to Youth summits. You would have thought that I would have become a moderator at one as I eventually gained — and lost — such respect at the Pokémon Community and other sites. This time, you're right: All through this conference, people have asked me to enlist in the conference administration. Apparently I can go straight in and then do Adult Staff duty the following year, or so they tell me. That I'll have to check on in March, when they say applications are going out.

This year, so much has happened that I now have to break it into segments. Unfortunately, there are no pictures; I didn't remember the camera. If you're new to this blog and are a little confused, you may want to read the accounts of 2006 and 2005.

Day one: Fe fi fo fum, we're kicking I-95's bum

On Thursday, I had to be up at 4.00am and hail a taxi since my parents couldn't wake up. A few kids — the ones I normally went with had gone to Costa Rica earlier in the month — were in the van, and the father of one of them was driving as the pastor had to be present for a summer bazaar. The father turned out to be very critical of New Jersey as far as laws go, and he was like me in the mind that more roads were needed if the Garden State Parkway was clogged up at 7.00am (although much of it was due to an accident in which the police cut traffic off to push a car across the carriageway). We managed to get to campus at 11.00am, an hour ahead of registration, and when the rush finally came I made sure to be one of the first to register for courses — a writing course, a class about foreign students trying to learn the native language, and a workshop on Internet safety.

This year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Youth to Youth's operations, so the theme this time around was 'I Love The 80s', meaning that the opening ceremony would often be interrupted (as scripted) by Melissa, who was reprising her role in the Youth Staff, with blurbs about what happened in the year — 1982 — that Youth to Youth came into being. Once that finished, we had a small session in the Rotunda of Bryant University in which we tried to identify whose picture was posted on one of the huge screens (I was in the flicking roster but it never stopped on me).

Then came the first family group session. Once again, I was in Family Group 9, and I had the same Adult Staff representative. The group was also led by Ashley (whom I recognised as the one who did slam poetry the previous year) and included a military man who had been sent to evaluate the programme by some sort of youth agency, a girl who aspired to be a model, a Nigerian girl who taught us our little buzzword 'Amonge' (an Ibo greeting) and whom I believe also wanted to be a model, a guy born in Japan to Sri Lankan parents who was advised against flirting, and four others. We didn't play as many games as before, rather discussing the events that passed as well as our lives, yet when we did, it would be Indian Chief, Mafia, and two attempts at Ha, the first being in a circle when some objected to being laid down on during the first session and the second — producing worse success at going down the line — being held on the final day.

Then dinner came. While I admit I've been eating less these days, I helped myself to decently-sized meals all through the conference. I also was approached by a few people in Adult Staff to recommend applying for Administrative Staff, or the 'A-Team'. It turned out that in order to be on Adult Staff, I would either have to return once as an adult plebeian or go to the administrative level. (I heard a variety of stories, some saying I could join Adult Staff right away.) When the day comes — sometime in March, they tell me — I'll find the application to do so; I'm also guessing that it'll require driving.

As lunch was going on, so did some old favourite round games such as Ride That Pony. There was another game, Jigaloo, which I finally figured out: You stand in a circle and shake and clap, singing 'Jig-a-looo, jig-jig-a-loooo, hey [name]!' before the person they call from the circle steps forward and creates a jive for the others to repeat before the process starts over. Now, I had thought for a while that it would be silly of me to join such games, but the following presentation, led by Bill Cordes, challenged that. He came on-stage with an easel on which an arrangement of letters, YOGOWYPI, was written. He told the conference that it stood for 'You Only Get Out What You Put In' before leading them in a gibberish chant, which I came to realise meant that anyone not joining the mass in following obviously wasn't putting in what they expected to enjoy in it (I'll have more on that later):

Fe, fe fi, fe fi fo, fe fi fo fum! Kumalacha kumalacha kumala vista, no no no nacho vista, vista, vista! Isalini disalini oo ah ah malini acha kacha acha lacha oo ah ah....

Then, there was 'The Big Show'. Instead of it being a talent show, it was a game show that involved the whole congregation: We started by filling out and submitting a quiz with eight questions, and the one who got the most right won an iPod and those whose sheets were drawn before got conference memorabilia (I got another pouch). Eventually one was called up to face the presenter in a 'Let's Make a Deal' session: He offered her a box or five one-dollar banknotes. The audience at first urged her to choose the box, yet as the number of banknotes increased, she leant toward the banknotes — and ultimately accepted them over the box, which turned out to have a dollar's worth of pennies.

At the end of the day, we all returned to one dormitory hall. Since construction was taking place and some of the dorms were out of commission, we all had to take up residence in one hall, the boys on the lower two floors and girls on the upper floors. I ended up with the very same room as last year, yet my room-mate was an East Greenwich envoy (the vast majority this year were East Greenwich envoys; none lived outside the north-eastern Untied States and Bermuda).

Day two: Lost in numbers

With the morning came the next speaker, David Mahan, who had not much more to say than his experiences as a young father and a screed on how abstinence was the only sure way to keep oneself clean of any infection or pregnancy (I'll have more on what I think when I write my piece on televangelists tomorrow — I just heard tonight that Tammy Faye has copped it) as a result of what he went through with having a baby and scraping to get by. Once that finished, we went off to the athletic centre for the team-building games, in which we had to rotate around stations that put us in a game of Hot Potato, cryptograms, and bridge walk in a theme similar to that of Survivor. The one I didn't like much was the cryptogram: We were handed a novel and were told to decipher a code using sequences that relied on a page number, line number, and letter. The codes, which were touted as escape codes, turned out to be Youth to Youth operation numbers, disheartening when the trouble people went through to understand the instructions was accounted for.

Then, we had lunch, a Family Group session, and our workshops. The first workshop I attended was 'A Day in the Life of an ESL Student', led by a staff member who himself had for a while struggled with language after moving in. He led the class off with sheets numbered by level of language mastery; those with the number 1 were written entirely in Spanish, and the amount of English increased as the number went up. The workshop ended wit lists of suggestions to accommodate those arriving from other countries with little or no English. The second, 'The Write Stuff', was initially a course in writing when other people tell you what to include, having us write any sort of work as she announced words for us to include in the order in which she announced them. Soon, though, it became a session in which we gathered in a circle and one or two people would come in and act out a scenario, and one in the circle would yell 'Freeze!' if he or she had an idea of a scenario that fit the positions the people inside were in, causing them to hold their positions and leave if the person who called tapped them out and assumed their position before continuing. Soon enough, we were all doubled over in laughter; one they found more hilarious was my intervention on a parent discipling an emotional child to turn it into me being a healer and the other girl confessing her 'sins'.

Then we had dinner, and the Youth Staff had a presentation that did away with projector idents that gave a glimpse of what the skit would cover and, rather, had staff members come out with flash cards with years written on them. The funniest of them all was a director's cut scene, in which a director had to do two takes on a scene in which a sister found her brother to be a drug addict and near death, whereupon she called her mother, who then hailed an ambulance. Two takes, one with pouting on the part on all cast members and another in which crying was induced, passed before the director announced that there were two many emotions to describe the disaster of such news.

Once that and another group session cleared, we went out to the athletic centre for racing games, food, and a movie. The pool was closed this year, so there went my chances to clean my toe up. The time would be spent with a girl I met during the writing workshop and her boyfriend, both from Connecticut and coming to conference for the first time.

Days three and four: Water and tears

Since the day began with a youth action planning session, I feel obligated to explain the group I came with and have been a part of for four years or so. We are a church group, responsible for many events occurring on the island for the enjoyment of kids and teenagers and for the benefit of the church. However, the group has been falling into disrepair; some of the senior members have ended up smoking, drinking, and causing other mayhem; indeed, as I stated in the 2005 report, one had been caught with marijuana at the conference. As Mike, the member of our youth group who was working as a Youth Staff member, explained in the morning, the previous leaders had been lenient on the other members, requiring that no drugs be done 'at the meetings'. Since laws prohibited it anyway, this had no effect. Mike decided, along with the rowdy bunch we came up with, that a drug-free style outside meetings would be compulsory. However, he warned of opposition from the girls who didn't come because of their involvement in the Costa Rica trip — indeed, according to him, many of them had been caught drinking vodka on the trip. The discussion dragged on into the following morning's discussion session, and we finally agreed on a bill to be voted on at the next meeting.

Back to day three. Once the planning session finished, we returned to the auditorium for another speaker, Harriet Turk. She led off with a story of a cashier who at first refused to talk to her until she gave her an ultimatum: stay put until a word was said. The next day, she came back, and the cashier announced to the whole store what was being rung up. As it turned out, this girl had a problem with the job and her social life that reflected in how she went about work. This led her to introduce a chant — one she would transmit to her daughter whenever she was out — that was supposed to make us assure ourselves that our social situation was within reach of rectification.

Lunch passed, and we had our third workshops. I attended a seminar on Internet safety, in which the officers led off with a few videos, one in which a kid fell off his bike down a concrete stairwell. The message, he said, was that anything could float around on the Internet. Indeed, he showed us a few things about social networking sites and friends on the Internet that shocked me. The first was a MySpace page of a person who legally possessed marijuana but ended up sharing it with teens he met through the page; the second was a story of a kid whose parents were technologically literate but was depressed much of the time, turning to the Internet for comfort before a 'friend' turned on him a week before he committed suicide.

Then, we headed back to the athletic centre for a round of water fights. I was not involved in any of the games in particular, yet I did often hang around people who ended up getting splashed in many places. One of the staff did eventually toss water at me, although it quickly cleared up. Yet I would have another source of water to worry about soon enough: tears. During the games, I chose to tail a pack of students from the snow cone machine. They all eventually were drenched as I followed them, but soon enough, one girl began to cry over a guy rejecting her based on an abortion belief (again, look for my televangelism piece tomorrow). Eventually one of her friends, a staff member, and I cheered her up, and all was bright and rosy again.

We cleaned off, had dinner, and we had the dance. Like last time, the dance was being held in the Rotunda rather than the park, but this was as planned (perhaps since there had been thunderstorms in the area as of recent). Yes, I did have a map or two, but this time, I would not — by my own choice! — be working on it whilst everyone else was having a good time. Time would be spent alongside two staff members, one of whom had, like me, obtained a great deal of college credits in her senior year. (This person I did eventually give a few old maps to.) I ended up dancing with them, and I enjoyed it. I'm not sure if it's due to a crush — if this were the case, it occurred really, really late this year — but when I was around these people or even on the floor, nothing seemed to matter other than how I looked to the people I was actually dancing with. (I might write a little more on that.)

On the final day, the family groups organised and we had a mass picnic outside the athletic centre. Then, we went into our room and made an attempt at Ha, which collapsed as people just couldn't stop giggling. The closing ceremonies followed, in which we were all given fortune cookies to crack at the same time, and I was actually able to get AIM contact lists for once!

So, youth staff?

Yes, administrative staff. Everyone has been telling me to apply, and it's time I gave back to the programme after feeding off it for four years. I can't wait until March.

Nobody tell James.

Youth summit #4

Yes, I know, I promised you all another youth summit summary, so here I am. The thing I want to address now is that my throat is not in the best of conditions first due to congestions and then karaoke singing and some speech I had to make for the rest of the table. (It's called laryngitis. Gah.)

The first thing I did on Friday was sweep right out the door without telling anyone; I'd reserved the day for it and notified work and school, and it was nearing 7.30am, when I would have to appear at the church for transport. This time we were headed to another Elks conference, so that meant I was rearing to get my iPod going via a transceiver, but since we could not find one to purchase on the island, I had to crank it to full volume whilst the girls in the van found their iTrip and blasted rap and punk rock the whole way. (Even worse, the pastor was in a separate car, so he had no iPod of his own to counter with.)

Normally the summit would be held at a hotel in New Brunswick, but since it was closed for renovation we were shunted into one in Princeton, where, unfortunately, pilots were sleeping before their next flight and could not be disturbed. This did not stop the conference from becoming its noisy and cluttered self; on the first day my room was one of a few that received silence orders, which my room-mates continued to flout. When we got there, we put our luggage away as usual, but it was in a partition that was removed later as the day wore on; I put my coat on a rack provided in a room, but once the partition was removed and I had collected my luggage, the rack disappeared; the coat was never announced during lost-and-found claim calls. As a result, I now have no winter coat other than two fleece layers.

First, we had our luncheon and opening. When I sat at my group's table, I found it hard to concentrate on a new map I was drawing (an area I called Rana'l, a collection of cities on a ragged seashore) since the others (we know who they are) were throwing ice cubes, napkin bits, and crumbs across the table. This continued for the next three meals I had with the group before I finally sat with another group, one from East Plainfield. One of their number had come across my map and told the rest of the group; since they turned out to be a happy bunch I basically stuck with them for the remainder of the conference.

After lunch, we had the first of our workshops. Again, we never stuck with our workshops; there were no schedules and everyone just flooded to wherever space was free. I ended up in a tobacco seminar that revolved around a hidden code of ethics in RJ Reynolds' corporate policy that, needless to say, was never heeded (the header even said VOLUNTARY CODE OF ADVERTISING ETHICS). Before the seminar, however, we had an icebreaker round, which many of you will know to be some sort of jive or game that helped you identify other members. This round, though, devolved into factional madness, with one party representing 'Kool-Aid' and turning out to be extremely obnoxious and the meek other representing 'Sunny D'. The first was 'If You Love Me You Smile': we had to get a member of the opposing team to smile by saying 'Honey, I love you, will you smile for me?'; the other will either smile and join the proposing team or hold it back and turn the proposing member down to force him or her to defect to the opposing team. Then, we played a human 'Guess Who' followed by a tournament of rock-paper-scissors, which all devolved into confusion and bickering. Needless to say, it ended rather quickly.

Then there was the first of our speakers, 'Dr Mike'. Although his message ('good choice, bad choice, my choice) applied well to the mass, especially the poor chap who was handed a toy car, radio, phone, and banknote to denote freedoms and then drawn back with a fishing line for each represented shortfall, his matter was quite juvenile; this was reflected in a wrap-up session.

Then there was dinner, and a hypnotist (I could have sworn that I'd seen him at the first or second Youth-to-Youth summit) came on-stage and selected a handful to subject to hypnosis. One of our members arose. Once he'd gathered his few, he put them in chairs and coerced them to sleep, and then he proceeded to force them to imagine a variety of scenarios. Some were tapped out when the hypnosis failed; some that remained slumped on each other. At the end, they all got up, evidently dazed at reality.

That ended, and we were down in the conference rooms at the base of the hotel for any of a few sessions of films and karaoke. I chose to go to the karaoke and, despite my nagging throat, registered to sing. I was called up to the surprise of many, especially those that had seen the map. One member in my travelling group responded with what people at PC call a 'glomp'; one wanted to dance. I shook them away and took the microphone, singing to emulate Garth Brooks as best I could without cracking. Although I got through with it and received a large ovation, it was nonetheless the first step to a nasty throat.

The following morning, we were in the ballroom for breakfast and a speaker — Josh Shipp. I'd seen him at my first Youth-to-Youth conference and expected him to carry on with his story of the exploding lasagne and the ensuing reaction from his mother: 'Bless your heart!' In other words, he was later told, he was supposedly stupid. That he was not, as I'd known; he did have attention deficit disorder, but he nevertheless carried out a witty and intelligent session with the mass. (I asked him during a recess whether he had actually appeared at the Youth-to-Youth conference; I was right.) Then came a 'town meeting', in which selected students would come up and share stories that explained why they were there. While plenty others were standing up, no-one at my table seemed willing to say anything. Then I had an idea come into my head as I wondered why the hell I was there. My idea was that everyone was unique and not fit to follow a mould (okay, I took the idea from another speaker in the mass), so I gathered up what to say about that and, trembling, got up to motion that I wanted a say. 'We are here because we are all unique!' I managed to proclaim. 'We are here as we choose to embrace our identity and thus use it to become leaders!' I nearly fainted, and the destruction of my voice was complete. Still, it was the largest ovation of any for the town meeting.

After lunch, there were two workshops, again subject to availability. I managed to get first into a seminar on prescription abuse; it included a video of a woman who drank Robitussin on a daily basis for a high as well as a teenager who hanged himself in a 'roid rage'. Once that cleared, I ended up in what was probably one of the most interesting sessions I have ever attended: perception. The speaker first sorted us out and had us come up with an answer as to his lowest maths score, manufacturer of his car, and nationality of his mother (97 percent, Nissan, Greek). Then, he presented us with a matrix of nine dots. I knew the trick; you had to connect them all using a certain amount of lines. The trick was that it was oft assumed that they had to be straight and you could not let the pen leave the paper before all dots are connected. However, he assured us that we had to see instructions as to these puzzles for what they literally were; the problem could be solved with one line with a paint roller or with zero straight lines by crumpling it or scribbling. That's something I should have showed my psychology course had this taken place before the senses class.

That finished, and we had two hours to ourselves, in which the East Plainfield students rehearsed a poem to read at dinner. Dinner came and they performed beautifully. Once dinner ended, you guessed it, it was another Motivational Productions feature. This one was called 'freedom', intertwining the tale of a kid whose father was at war and who was coping with a crowd that was notorious for partying.

Since there was no talent show, of course, we had the dance afterwards. The staff had been generous and let us stay out an hour longer than intended; I simply stayed out of the main frame and stayed with some Plainfield students who had a paper game going in the foyer. This did not, to my surprise, come without a few girls demanding rather flatly that I come in and dance with them (the ratio of girls to boys at this conference was 3:1, guaranteeing all the boys a potential partner, which many would see as beneficial to me). I did enter the ballroom a few times and prop the map out, but alas, I didn't have another follower. I decided once again, though, that I was not capable of getting in there and dancing.

The final day was uneventful, save for the loss of the coat and the lack of a map for the return trip, forcing me to call to mind a few interstates to get back home.

You know better, Max. What was this all for?

Again, you've beaten me to the kerb. You'll have noticed in the screed above that I was drawing a map again, and you also should have noticed that many of the gawks were from women.

Okay! I admit it! I used it to pick a few up. No, the decision to go wasn't prurient; I did learn from the conference, and I did increase some of my confidence as demonstrated by the karaoke session and the speech (albeit at the expense of my throat), and I was still without a thing to do but wander around, and I needed a few more ideas for another large map I've been planning. But yes, I caught on to the gawks and tried to run away with them. Sure, I didn't has much interest in the whole scenario this time, but if you go back in time, you'll find that most of the time I've drawn a map and demonstrated it at least one girl would respond. It's happened, first with little motive but to just brag, then with, I admit, a few other things in mind that I later wrote off as they proved to be too whimsical. I caught on to the notion that whatever I could offer would be a decent pick-up line.

I'm such an idiot. But hell, I did do something great. Anyway, now isn't the time to jump into an entry about this, Blue and Natsuki with the Dawson factor, and other things along the line that I can possibly think of. As I said, my throat's trashed, and I'm waiting for it all to set into stone before I can reach a viable conclusion.

Yet another youth summit!

Photographs Refer to the list in the article for descriptions of the above pictures.

Yes, folks, I went to the summit. And I have pictures, which I'll show you once the boring verbal synopsis is out of the way.

The day began with me climbing into the vans — yes, John the reverend was coming with us again! — and volunteering to navigate again. This time, however, the same junior high students that went with me to the camps at Donegal two years ago, the ones that held a mortal grudge against my friend Tom, were coming as well, and they were in the same van as me. When everyone was settled in, we decided that it was time to bypass New York completely and reach the end of the Garden State Parkway before heading east again.

The last time (click the link to see how Youth-to-Youth works; I'm not going through it again) I went up, we took a bus and there was not much leeway for the group due to another faction coming with us and there being no access to the radio. This time, though, it was time for an iPod war. John had his turquoise iPod with oldies in tow as a threat to the company that sat with us all the way up, whilst this company had John's daughter's iPod on them and managed to cram it into the receptor before John went in and as a result got their chance to annoy us with comedian skits, Chamillionaire's 'Ridin'', and a slam song named 'Date Rape'. The war only ceased at the two stops we made along the way, the first at the Asbury Park services to wait up for Elliott and the second on Route 3 in Rhode Island. Of course, waiting for Elliott denied us the opening ceremonies and half of the introductory games and also complicated workshop and dorm registry.

I turned out to be in Group 9, the same number I was tied to when I went up in 2004. In it was a violence counselor, a college student bound for California, and a girl that had wrangled through a divorce and crack habits of her mother, among other people. This group, however, was somewhat more vague to me as they tended to keep in small groups themselves, yet we still were capable of laughter, especially when we attempted to create a string of 'ha' and 'yo' sequences but eventually succumbed to natural laughter.

This year was very different than the one before overall. Firstly, there were only two workshops, one led by a youth staff member and one led by a presenter, both held on day three. The ones I selected were 'Connect Fore', a seminar on initating and maintaining a conversation, and 'Root Causes of Sexual Violence', an investigatory seminar on sex crimes and how magazine articles and ads (one FHM article distorted feminists completely) fostered such situations (I was one of only two boys that entered the second seminar, and the other slept it out). Secondly, the dance on night three was commuted to the campus as the park had been closed due to a thunderstorm. And the Warm Fuzzy Board remained (one notice asked whether you 'chuck or husk' corn, and during the conference I received eight fuzzies, five of which were found on day three), yet in my group 'secret fuzzies' were never assigned, although a few girls opted to create circular notes for the rest of the members. We did, however, have a few things remaining intact. Firstly, we had our four presenters:

• Covin Perkins told us stories of a childhood in which his imagination, even when restricted by his mother, was unruly. He was active in the Youth-to-Youth programmes for some time and even led an improvisation workshop.
• Tei Street was evidently proud of her figure of a short and 'voluptuous' woman, as she said her husband liked his women back in her day. She went on to explain her obsession with stunts such as those of Harry Houdini — toss into a pool with arms bound by rope, anyone? — and had it culminate in a story of taking skydiving lessons. She was able to turn this story into a motivational piece of material. As James would say, 'ten out of fantastic'.
  
• Robert Petrocelli is someone you can really call a survivor of tragedy. As explained in one of his books, he was sleeping with his wife Ava when he was thrown out by a drunk driver that had crossed a motorway median and careened into the house, smothering Ava. This, coupled with the emotion he put into his stories of coaching sports teams in Texas and Brooklyn, nearly drove me to tears — again, if someone had told me that this would happen prior to the conference, I would have thrown them from the room as well.
• Javier Sanchez was the liveliest of all. First he started by leading the congregation in a rap assisted by his friend, and then he introduced us to his two children in the forms of pictures, cellphone recordings, and the tale of his son Mateo charing out of the bathroom after a long sojourn to scream 'Introducing, Naked Boy!'.

The sports session was also in place on day two, although this took place during the afternoon. I managed to get a bit of swimming in that time, as the water was not as cold as it was the previous year. Still in place, also, were the jives and group games such as 'Ride that Pony' and 'Shake Your Booty'; I have pictures of the games in action below as well as explanations. And yes, the energiser rounds and the world-famous Dexterity Checks were back, in the same fashion (five claps, five more, three more, three more, then arm cross ('We'), arm extension ('are'), clap ('drug'), fists back ('free'), and three fist thrusts ('unh, unh, UNH!')). And as before, time would be invested in a map that I drew of a town. This time it was called Margaret, situated east of the map of Ilfracombe that I drew the year before. I 'officially' completed it at the end of the dance on night three, had one of the adult staff photograph it for the CD and inal presentation, and, once the closing ceremonies were through, handed it and an old colour relief I had drawn over to a youth staff member named Hayley, one I'd known ever since the 2004 conference.

The trip back was along the same route, and for good reason, too: I learned today that Interstate 95 had been cut off by the collapse of a dummy missile. Still, it took so long that it wasn't until midnight that I finally returned home last night and slept once the rap music and the PC updates were cleared up.

So now that that's out of the way, it's time to show you the photos, as I promised before.

1. This one is of me, taken by John's daughter.
2. This was of Sara and Tara horseplaying, a result of the usual fights that went on whenever the iPod war was at ceasefire.
3. The audience looks on in the Janikies Auditorium during the staff introduction.
4. Team Rocket make a fool of themselves yet again on a cafeteria television screen.
5. With Hayley. We had met two years before and only spoken once from that point to this conference.
6. Family Group 9. Top row: Amanda, Britney, Katie, Lindsey, Ginny, me. Bottom row: Stephanie, Samantha, Trevor, Alex, Estrella.
7. Talent show, or, simply put, 'The Show'. Mariah Carey has always been a popular pick, mind....
8. 'Ride that Pony'. In this game, you arrange in a circle and send an amount of students into the circle to have them prance around whilst the outer ring claps and chants 'Here we go, ride that pony, ride upon that big fat pony, here we go, ride that pony, this is how we do it'. Once that finishes, the participants in the circle approach members of the outer ring and each pair begins thrusting forward ('front to front to front, my baby'), turning back to each other ('back to back to back, my baby'), then turning side to each other ('side to side to side, my baby') and then taking the partner's place in the circle and sending the latter out to prance within ('this is how you do it').
9. 'Shake Your Booty'. A member calls to another random member, 'Hey [name]!' The target responds, 'What?'. The sender repeats once, the target repeats once, and then the sender yells 'Show us how to get down!', to which the target says 'No way!' and the sender yells the request again but this time around the target yells 'Okay!' and begins rotating and shake-dancing as the congregation yells 'Jump, jump, shake your booty' four times before they either end or call on another member. In the lunch periods it usually ends up with the whole mass shake-dancing.
10. Following the scavenger hunt on day two. Everyone gathers around the clue list and what I have of the map at that point.
11. Mick's 45-second Dance Break, a spoof session that occurs every morning. This time, instead of leading the congregation in dance, he faces off against an aspiring breakdancer.
12. Jigaloo, which I never understood.
13. Another game I neither understood nor knew the very name of.
14. Youth Staff skits. I forget what this particular one was from, but the skits included a man skipping out in an inflatible ring and trunks speaking in an Irish accent and clarifying a cannabis hustler's objectives in one skit and an interracial relationship conflict in another.
15. A view of the dance during Casper's Cha-Cha Slide.
16. Youth moderators in assembly of honour at the closing ceremonies.
17. Admins in assembly.
18. Completed map of Margaret with my certification. Seventeen hours after this photo was taken, I handed it and the colour relief to Hayley for personal records.
19. Another view that didn't include the aforementioned song, thank God!
20. Adult moderators in assembly.
21. Final presentation. I hated how the snapshot of my maps turned out....
22. Construction of Interstate 95 in New Haven, which has persisted ever since 2004. It's evidently interchange works for Interstate 91.
23. The same.
    

Another youth summit

Already I'm dazed from the transition from three days and two nights of fraternisation to the computer once more. Another youth summit has cropped up, and naturally I felt the need to attend this one, this time hosted by the Elks. I had to arise at 5.00am in order to get dressed, prepare a meal, and then head out to the church for the long trip up to New Brunswick. Amid the converted tollbooths (many tolls on the Garden State Parkway have been cut in half, doubling the tolls in one direction and allowing traffic to pass for free on the other side) and faulty directions, we arrived minutes early for reception at the Hyatt Regency.

This summit was slightly like the one held by Youth to Youth in Rhode Island, yet there existed several differences and contrasts. Unlike the Youth to Youth summits, we were never sifted into family groups; rather, we were left to our own devices as to whom to attend workshops with, and many sessions were held in the ballrooms anyway. Between sessions there would be long periods of free time and fraternisation; there were no organised group meetings during those times. It was like the summits, however, in that it was a very large mass of students, albeit all more accessible. There were also a few times when 'Dexterity check!' was called, but the jive ended with just 'Unh, unh, ELKS!' and the check wasn't introduced until lunch on day two. Also in the free periods were group jives, including the Ride That Pony and Bazooka Bubblegum chants that took place at mealtimes up in Rhode Island.

The first day began with the arrival at the roundabout outside the hotel amid school buses and individual cars. When we got in, we were sent to the ballroom at back for baggage storage and then to the Regency Ballroom for orientation. As soon as the long orientation and the rather interesting talk given by Paul Wichansky, we were brought out to the atrium to conduct breakfast and fraternise before lunch. It was during the first break that I came up with the idea with creating a beta map for Caerdydd, in a region that's supposed to lie to the north of Hoenn. So as I began to lay out the motorways and areas for residential developments, people began to watch. I quickly gained fame in the meeting because of this map. Then came lunch; we were called up by tables in a random order and sent to one of four buffet tables. Then came a break, this time of fifteen minutes. More people would gawk.

That day we attended the first of three workshops to be held during the summit. Unfortunately, the conference papers weren't returned, so there was no registry for attendance at the workshops, which meant people had to clamour for the one they wanted. I chose a session on methamphetamine labs. This session consisted of an extensive slideshow that included two movies that dramatised the effects of meth labs on the neighbourhood: The first movie was a documentary on a kid that had been uprooted from parents that were on meth, only to be left with an aunt and uncle who were even more desperate addicts and later killed with an overdose of meth, landing the foster parents on death row; the second movie was on the workings of a meth lab and an explosion in the home that engulfs the entire property, killing all of the occupants. The images will stay with me forever.

Then began another extended break. At this time we were given the room keys and sent to our respective suites to set up camp (I was in room 478). At this time a scavenger hunt took place, involving many of the participants. Then dinner ended the madness, followed by a longer break in which people wishing to enter the talent show had to register. At 9.00pm the dance took place in the ballroom. I entered with the map and pen in tow, and many of the people seated at the tables surrounding the dance podium looked over to examine it. When the music selection became significantly louder, I left to go outside to the Warm Fuzzy Board (which was just a mesh of Post-It notes compared to Youth-to-Youth's practice of folding papers and separating the boards by surname).

It was when I started for the board to check the notices when a girl that had just exited the dance stopped me. Thus began another infatuation. Kathy, a girl who had come from Jersey City, had said that she had been following me outside after she had heard of the map. My intention was just to discuss the map, as I usually did with people that gawked, but immediately it evolved into a full personal inquiry. The girl was an animé enthusiast and had drawn an animé girl to post on the board (it only stayed up the next day for twelve hours or so). Her school district was the largest that had come to the summit. Like me, she had not danced and had not been instructed as to how. And at dinner the following night, she would become the only recorded contact in my binder and a new person in my Yahoo! Messenger contact list.

The next day played host to two conferences. After breakfast yet another speaker walked up and urged us to stand from our seats in an attempt to defeat the adage of sitting and listening. After that we had our break and then proceeded to the ballrooms below to attend workshops. The first one I attended was a course on drinking, drugs, and driving; the presenter, a former Kentucky state police officer, made his point using the images of a gavel, body bag, and handcuffs to hit home into the heart. The second I attended was a course that attempted to defeat prejudice resulting from diversity; here we teamed up with another that was visually different from ourselves and discussed the concept with them, and then we broke into four and did the same after introducing ourselves using each other as a medium. After that we had our two-hour break before dinner and a presentation by Motivational Productions, followed by a half-hour break, two fuzzies for my map and the talent show, which we left early from when many of us were tired.

Today we were given coloured cards and told to organise in ballrooms with people holding cards of our colour. In these ballrooms we discussed possible improvements to the youth programme, which included emphasis on group activities to cut out the excessive free time and the selection of speakers that cut to the chase and bring in interaction rather than ramble on. I was very sad to leave the hotel this afternoon as I searched for people to commiserate with before the group left for Brigantine once more. Along way I was laughing for the first time other than being with Kathy when Jacob (who was envious over how I seemingly attracted girls) had the audacity to throw food out the window as we sped along the SR18 motorway out of New Brunswick.

For some reason I had the feeling that a particular person there had an account on the Pokémon Community, but that may have been my senses going haywire. It's taking me a bit of effort to get back to my normal routine after being out at this summit. It was a lot easier when I left Youth to Youth....