I'm the Secretary/Webmaster of Freely Speaking Toastmasters, a club whose membership is primarily LGBT, but is open to all. We were chartered in September 1988. I joined in 2004, after I left Microsoft and hence Microsoft Toastmasters.

We're so proud of being 20 years old that we've celebrated twice! We had a brunch for the current membership back in September, and tonight we had a party for current, former, and would-be members.

Not a huge turnout, but a lot of fun. Many of us spoke about what had drawn us to FSTM and what set it apart from other clubs for us.

I've been a member (and officer) of three Toastmasters clubs, FSTM, Microsoft Toastmasters, and Atlas Impressions—a club that I helped found last year, before I left Atlas. The two work clubs are fine in their own right, but each of them allots only an hour for the meeting, which is only barely enough. FSTM meets 7:00–8:30pm on Monday evenings at Group Health on Capitol Hill, and the extra half hour allows for a more relaxed pace. In particular, not only does each prepared speech get a formal evaluation, it also gets five minutes of open evaluation from the audience. The open evaluation is unusual in Toastmasters clubs. I feel that it engages the audience and it invariably gives rise to several suggestions and criticisms that the evaluator overlooked. FSTM is much more social than the two work clubs, and the membership is rather more diverse than high-tech workers.

I gave a speech at Freely Speaking Toastmasters this evening, on Mind Mapping. You can see a shrunken version of the mind map for the speech above. Clicking on it will lead to the full-sized image.

I created the mind map with Freemind. Here's the speech mindmap as a Freemind document.

I thought the speech went quite well. It was speech #8, working with visual aids. I drew a partial version of my speech's mind map on a white board ahead of time, and drew a couple of mind maps on a flip chart during the speech. The second one was a two-minute brainstorming session on increasing club membership.

I had intended to record the speech and turn it into a podcast, but I forgot.

Usually, I write out the words of the speech ahead of time, rehearse it several times, fine-tuning the words, and then deliver the speech from a handful of notes.

This time, I never wrote down anything except the mind map itself. I did have a printout of the map in front of me, though I didn't refer to it often.

(Originally posted to Toastmasters at EraBlog on Tue, 07 Oct 2003 06:53:32 GMT)

I gave the following speech to Toastmasters on October 1st, 2003, as Speech #5, "Vocal Variety".

SPOLIN GAMES

Spolin Games. That sounds like it could be a new set of titles for the Xbox.

Far from it.

The Spolin Games are a set of improv theater games invented by Viola Spolin in the nineteen-thirties, and refined by her for the next six decades. These games are used in improvisational work, to help bring out creativity and spontaneity. Viola's son, Paul Sills, founded the Second City improv theater company in Chicago back in the nineteen-fifties.

I was first introduced to the Spolin Games last year. Two friends of mine are actors. They had both become involved with a local improv troupe, the Spolin Players, who have occasional runs at the Northwest Actors Studio, at 11th and Pike, in Seattle.

I got interested enough that I later took an improv class from the troupe's director, Gary Schwartz.

I've been to several shows put on by the Spolin Players. Each one is quite different. During a show, they'll play a dozen or so games, from their repertoire. Usually, there are six-to-eight actors from the troupe.

The show often opens with a game called Emotional Symphony. Each player is assigned an emotion by the audience, such as fear (oh no! I'm terrified! I just want to hide!); lust (ooh, baby! You're hot!); anger (I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!); or confusion (but, but, but, I don't understand). The director acts like a conductor, pushing the players through an overture, bringing them in louder and softer, growing in a crescendo to a climax!

This energizes the players and wakes up the audience.

The Gibberish Relay is another game that's usually played early on. Three players sit on chairs at the front of the stage. The one on the left speaks one dialect of gibberish, the one on the right speaks a different variety, the one in the middle interprets.

Left (tapping wrist): Herk, koffa picku? Akno bigu karpak! Interpreter: Say, what's the time? My watch has stopped! Right (rubbing tummy): Maru plenio seletto bulioni. Molto chiani. Interpreter: It must be lunchtime. I'm hungry. Left: Plokka kaloka, ragutz ni globbak. Interpreter: In my country, we never eat lunch. And so on.

After a minute, one of the players leaves, the other two shift over, and a new player joins them, until the entire cast has cycled through each role.

One crucial element was missing from the demonstration that I just gave you. Spontaneity! In a real game of Gibberish Relay, none of the three players know what's going to happen next. They're feeding off each other, creating a scene out of whole cloth. They're off-balance and they're fully engaged. It's like going to a sports game. You don't know what's going to happen next or who's going to win. The not-knowing keeps you interested and in the moment. There's give-and-take at play. Each player is following the other's lead. Surprise is the gift that playing produces.

Magic Music is another game that's often played. One of the players is sent offstage, out of earshot. The audience decides a complex task that the player must accomplish on a prop-laden stage, such as climbing onto a chair, turning counterclockwise, and putting a flowerpot on their head. When the player returns, the audience are singing a simple song, such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." The audience sings louder as the player grows "warm" and softer as the player gets "cold", until the player figures out what to do. Often, the game is repeated with a volunteer from the audience.

The game of Camera involves focus. The audience decides upon a scene for two of the players, such as a teacher and a parent, or two people in line for a concert, or a mugger and a vigilante. As the two players work through the scene, the director calls out "Camera!", alternating between the two players, "Both camera!", and "No camera!". For "George Camera!", I would look intently at the other player, as if I were a TV camera, tracking her every move. For "Mary Camera!", Mary would look intently at me, while I would play the scene naturally as if there were no camera at all. The act of focussing heightens the scene.

Now, let's demonstrate one game, Last-Letter Expert, with the help of Phil here.

In Last-Letter Expert, I am a genius who can expound on any topic of your choosing. The only catch is that my brain is so overpowered that it seizes up occasionally in mid-sentence. My assistant Phil will interject a word to help me out. I have to use the LAST letter of his word as the FIRST letter of my next word. So if I were to say, "There are many varieties of ice cream that ..." and Phil says "suddenly", then I have to pick a word that starts with the letter "Y" and continue from there, like "Yelp loudly" or "Yet delightfully".

Please, give me a topic, such as volcanoes, shoelaces, ice cream, walking on your hands, daffodil farming, the color yellow, ...

[Reconstructed from a recording. Phil hadn't quite got the idea of Last-Letter Expert. The interjected word should make some kind of sense in the context of the preceding sentences. "Tempest" was the Word of the Day.]

Audience: Chairs!

George: Chairs. Fellow members of the audience, chairs have been used since time immemorial. They are extremely...

Phil: Repairman

George: Nowadays, we. Repairman? Nowadays, we sit on them. In times past, chairs were used to elevate people above the common level of ...

Phil: Soda machines

George: so that you could do something extremely silly like this. And...

Phil: Tempest

George: To begin again, without such useful help, I would like to say that chairs are...

Phil: Flat

George: Therefore, they are very easy to sit upon.

But enough of that. We're running out of time.

Viola Spolin's work is used by many actors and directors to help increase their creativity. There are many other games, but I don't have time to describe them here. Go to spolin.com if you're interested in learning more. S-P-O-L-I-N. Spolin.

I was also the Table Topics Master for that meeting. We played Last-Letter Expert. It took a while for people to get the hang of the game, but it was a big hit.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Mon, 07 Jul 2003 15:34:22 GMT)

I gave the following speech to Toastmasters on June 25th, 2003, as Speech #4, "Show What You Mean". Clearly, I've reused some material from my earlier post about Bloomsday. I'm also finding that I take longer to deliver a speech to an audience than I do when rehearsing, so I cut some of the material on the day to fit the seven-minute limit.

I've uploaded some photos of the reading to one of my other websites.

BLOOMSDAY

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather..."

So begins James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the most famous, and famously difficult, novels of the Twentieth Century. The book is by turns funny, obscure, insightful, and irritating.

The whole book takes place in Dublin on June 16th, 1904 and tells of the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Irish Jew, and of Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who is Joyce's alter ego.

Nowadays, there is a thriving Joycean industry in Ireland, that re-enacts portions of the book on Bloomsday, June 16th, the anniversary of Ulysses.

Next year is the centenary and you can be sure that the Joycean industry will make the most of the occasion. Ireland loves Joyce now: he helps bring in the tourist dollars.

This wasn't always true. Ulysses was banned in Ireland until the 1960s. It was considered obscene, pornographic, and profane. It's true that Joyce was an apostate Catholic who mocked the Church and that he was unusually frank about lust, sex, and excretion, but the novel is undoubtedly a work of literature, not mere base titillation.

Ulysses was also banned in the United States when it was first published in 1922 because it was considered pornographic. That ban was overturned in 1933.

Bloomsday is celebrated outside Ireland too. In many cities around the world, you will find groups of Joyce fans celebrating on June 16th. In Seattle, the Wild Geese Players have been staging readings of Ulysses for the last few years. This year, I joined them.

We staged readings from Chapters 8 and 9 at the Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music at the University of Washington. We had a cast of about fifteen readers who read aloud from scripts, acting the parts of various characters. We were watched by about forty people, only half of whom were related to the cast.

Ulysses is very loosely modeled on Homer's Odyssey, the classic Greek epic, which tells of the wanderings of Odysseus, who took ten years to return home from the siege of Troy. (Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus.) Each chapter of Ulysses roughly corresponds to a book of the Odyssey. Each chapter is written in a very different style. Leopold Bloom represents Odysseus the wanderer, while Stephen Dedalus represents Telemachus, Odysseus's son, and Molly Bloom represents Penelope, Odysseus's wife.

Chapter 8 of Ulysses is The Lestrygonians. In the Odyssey, the Lestrygonians are foul cannibals who threaten Odysseus's crew. In Ulysses, Bloom wanders southwards through the center of Dublin, encountering sights, smells, food, and drink as he goes. He enters one pub in search of lunch, but is repulsed by the gorging and gluttony of the customers. He moves to Davy Byrne's pub, where he eats a calm lunch. Bloom's interior monologue takes up most of the chapter, as he observes people and places on his walk. There are a number of encounters along the way.

This chapter was difficult to stage. Bloom moves from one encounter to another. We had perhaps twenty scenes in ninety minutes. I myself played four minor characters.

I came on first as Denis Breen, the half-mad husband of Mrs. Breen, whom Bloom has spent the last five minutes talking to in the street. I shuffle unseeing across the stage, muttering to myself, clutching an enormous tome to my chest. A real stretch!

A few minutes later, when Bloom is recalling a pro-Boer student riot at Trinity College Dublin, I return, playing the part of one of those students. Wrapped in my old Trinity scarf, I stride onto the stage bellowing such slogans as "Up the Boers!" and "We'll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree!" It wakes the audience up nicely.

For my third part, I play the barman in the first pub that Bloom enters, the one that soon repels him. I get to utter in my best working-class Dublin accent such memorable lines as "Roast beef and cabbage", "One stew", and "Pint of stout", while serving some of the customers.

My final role in this chapter was slightly meatier. I played Tom Rochford, one of a trio who enter Davy Byrne's pub as Bloom is eating his lunch. We stand around, ordering drinks and arguing about horse racing.

Chapter 9 of Ulysses is Scylla and Charybdis. In the Odyssey, Scylla is a six-headed monster, while Charybdis is a whirlpool. In Ulysses, these dangers are metaphorical, as the journey becomes becalmed in the literary debate between Stephen Dedalus and other writers of the day, We are subjected to torrents of language, in lyric, in dramatic, in verse, and in prose form, as well as Stephen's interior monologue. The debate wanders through the life of Shakespeare, especially his relationship with Ann Hathaway; Shakespeare's work, particularly Hamlet; and the nature of father/son relationships.

This chapter was much easier to stage, if harder to follow. Almost the whole chapter takes place around some tables in the National Library. We sat mostly, although we did stand for the Hamletesque play within the play, and Buck Mulligan wanders around poking into things.

I read the smallest of the main roles in this chapter, that of Mr Best, an inoffensive young man in the mold of Bertie Wooster, who can't quite hold his own in the debate that rages between Stephen and the other writers.

He says such things as "But Hamlet is so personal, isn't it? I mean a kind of private paper, don't you know, of [Shakespeare's] private life. I mean I don't care a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty..."

I enjoyed myself that night. I hope I have conveyed something of the flavor of the evening, if not much of the book itself. That's difficult to do without reading aloud passages from the book, and this speech format doesn't lend itself to that.

Cut due to lack of time

Several times in the last 20 years, I have attempted to read Ulysses. Always before, I gave up in the first half of the book. Some of it is very difficult, especially when Joyce is playing with language.

I'm rereading the book once again. I've not yet finished it but I've gotten further than I ever did before. I've learned two tricks. The first is not to give up if a section doesn't make sense. Just keep going. It'll get more enjoyable. I don't think it all makes sense to anyone on the first reading. The second trick is that sounds are very important. Joyce was a poet. Subvocalize or speak aloud the odder bits and the music will come through.

It is said that Ulysses is the most difficult of the entertaining books and the most entertaining of the difficult books.

(Originally posted to Toastmasters at EraBlog on Fri, 16 May 2003 06:06:39 GMT)

I gave the following speech to Toastmasters on January 29th, 2003, as Speech #2, "Sincerity".

NATURALIZATION

Fellow Toastmasters and Guests, last September, on the first anniversary of 9/11, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life: I decided to apply for American citizenship, to become naturalized.

Like many of you, I am an immigrant. I have spent most of my adult life in this country. Fourteen years ago, I came to the US from Ireland to earn a Masters degree. I moved to Seattle in 1992, the same year that I became a permanent resident. I have made a career here, as well as many ties: those of friends, of family, and of assets. I met my wife here five years ago; together we have bought a lovely house in Seattle.

My two brothers became US citizens last year. Apart from my parents and some friends in Dublin, my ties to Ireland grow weaker every year. I have changed and grown since I came here and Ireland has changed too. It's noticeably different from the country that I left, both better and worse. I am still proud of being Irish, but I expect to spend the rest of my life living in America.

It might seem to you that it should have been an obvious decision for me to become a US citizen. Indeed, you might ask why I didn't do it much sooner. But this was not an easy decision for me. I dithered about it for years. Only my decision to come out of the closet as a bisexual in '91 was harder.

I put this decision off for so long because I have misgivings about America, the swaggering bully of the world, about the outrageous consumption of the planet's resources, about the arrogance and complacency of so many Americans who uncritically believe that America is better than anywhere else.

I am leery of American patriotism because it is so often identified with conformity, blind nationalism, and militarism. America: Love It or Leave It! My Country, Right or Wrong!

I am appalled by a rich country leaving 41 million of its citizens without health insurance. I am troubled by the intolerance and power of the Religious Right. I have no liking for the Bush administration, their war mongering, their unilateralism, their crony capitalism, their disregard for the environment, their abrogation of rights in the name of security.

This litany is so depressing that you must be wondering by now not why it took me so long to apply for citizenship, but why I haven't fled to a more congenial country.

I want to become an American because I believe in the promise of America, in the ideals of the Founding Fathers: the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. I believe in the Bill of Rights, in Freedom of Speech, and in the Separation of Church and State.

I want to become an American because for all of its flaws, America has so much in its favor. This is a beautiful country, full of millions of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. Many of them are working hard to build a better society. America provides great freedoms and opportunities, not just to make money but to remake oneself.

Freedom of speech is taken seriously here: Europe has chilling libel laws instead of the First Amendment. In the US, I have the right to dissent. I can call the Clintons foul fiends from Hell or write that Bush is a dangerous dolt, without fear that the secret police will kick down my door one night and haul me off to the gulag. This is why Operation TIPS and the Pentagon's Office of Total Information Awareness are so unAmerican.

In Ireland, the Catholic Church had a "special position" written into the Constitution for several decades, though its authority has been much diminished in recent years. In America, the principle of Separation of Church and State means that I am free to be a godless atheist and my wife is free to be a Wiccan. Some people may object to that, but the state does not privilege their religious beliefs over mine, nor mine over theirs.

No other country has come close to the technological ferment of Silicon Valley. Only in America could Microsoft have been such a success. The Internet was born here and still remains deeply American. My early exposure to the Net in the mid-to-late Eighties played a big part in my initial decision to come here.

Millions of people move here every year, making America the most heterogenous society in the world. For all of its flaws, this is a good place to be! There is no perfect country! Every country, every nation has problems.

Permanent residents have all the responsibilities of citizenship, save that of jury duty. I pay taxes, I am subject to the laws of this country. Had I been slightly younger when I got my green card, I would have been required to register for the draft.

As a permanent resident, I also have many rights in the US. But there is one right that I do not have, perhaps the most important right of all: the vote. I have been of voting age for almost 20 years, but I have only once had the opportunity to vote in a national election in Ireland or the U.S, seventeen years ago in 1986.

Even though I have been active in the community for many years, giving time and money to causes that I care about, I diminish myself by forgoing the full experience of being an American.

Like many others, I found the events of 9/11 profoundly disturbing. I was heartened when the country pulled together afterwards, then disappointed when it drifted back to business as usual.

Nevertheless, in honor of 9/11, I chose to apply for American citizenship. I hope to become a citizen within a year.

It was time for me to move past my fears and embrace America wholeheartedly. This is my home now. If there are things that I do not like about it, then I must work harder to change them.

I'm proud of much that is good in America: its fine people, its beautiful lands, its Constitution. I'm proud to be part of a country that gives rise to leaders like Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson. America is the wellspring of modern democracy and it continues to inspire the world.

Naturalization was the right choice for me. I hope American citizenship is also the right choice for you.

I heard from the INS last week. My "initial interview" is scheduled for late July.

(Originally posted to Toastmasters at EraBlog on Thu, 24 Apr 2003 06:08:36 GMT)

I gave the following speech to Toastmasters on March 5th, 2003, as Speech #3, "Organize Your Speech".

SLEEP APNEA

My wife is a cyborg.

That's not to say that she's the Terminator. Nor even that she's the six-million dollar woman, although I do value her greatly. She calls herself a cyborg because she sleeps with a breathing machine. At night, she wears a mask over her nose to force air into her lungs.

When I first met her, she complained of being tired all the time, of not getting a good night's sleep, of feeling stupid. When she drove for any length of time, she'd have to pull over for a short nap every hour. It was that or fall asleep at the wheel.

Once we started spending the night together, I quickly learned that she snores. Loudly. But it was a different kind of snoring than I was used to. In my experience, most people snore steadily, in a seesaw pattern like this: <snore in> <whistle out> <pause> <snore in> <whistle out>

Not so Emma. She would be very quiet for a minute or so, hardly breathing at all. Then she'd breathe in very loudly, almost gasping for air: <SNNNNORKKK!!> She'd go quiet for a minute or so, then snore loudly again. And so the cycle would repeat. All night long.

Naturally, I didn't enjoy this much. Sometimes, it would keep me awake for hours, and I'd have to move to the spare room just to get some sleep.

After one such episode, when I snarled "I can't take this anymore!" at her, she decided to see her doctor about it.

Emma's doctor thought that her symptoms sounded like sleep apnea, even though she didn't fit the stereotype of being an overweight, middle-aged man.

Apnea is Greek for "without breath". Sleep apnea is a breathing disorder, where the sufferer repeatedly stops breathing during sleep. After a minute or two without breathing, which leads to a reduction in blood-oxygen saturation, the brain forces the upper airway muscles to open the airway. Breathing resumes, usually with a loud snoring sound or gasp. These frequent arousals means that the sufferer doesn't get much deep, restorative sleep: the REM sleep that you need to be well-rested.

The effects of this lack of deep sleep build up over time. The sufferers often feel very sleepy during the day. Their concentration suffers. They lack energy. They become irritable and they have difficulty learning things. They may fall asleep while driving and they are significantly more likely to have accidents. Occasionally, they may even die in their sleep.

Sleep apnea occurs in all age groups and both sexes. It's estimated that four percent of middle-aged men have sleep apnea, and two percent of middle-aged women, with perhaps twelve to eighteen million Americans suffering from it. Most cases go undiagnosed.

The primary kind of sleep apnea is due to an obstruction in breathing. This can be due to a physical abnormality in the nose, throat, or upper airway. Many, but not all, sufferers are overweight and have an excess of soft flesh in the airway. When they sleep, the muscles in the soft palate, at the back of the roof of the mouth, relax, closing the airway. This can make breathing difficult, or it can stop it altogether.

One analogy is that it's like putting your hand over the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. Your hand blocks all air getting in, like the upper airway collapses, even though the vacuum cleaner is still applying suction, just as the body continues to try to breathe. The vacuum cleaner is straining and so is the human body.

Under managed care, Emma's doctor couldn't send her for a sleep study directly. Instead, she was referred to an ear-, nose-, and throat-specialist. He also joked that she didn't fit the stereotype of being fat, fifty, and male. He looked at her small mouth and nose and her undershot jaw, and he agreed that it probably was sleep apnea. He referred her to a sleep specialist. The sleep specialist also trotted out the line about her not fitting the stereotype, but he did schedule her for a sleep study.

She spent a night at the sleep clinic in Swedish Hospital in Ballard. They attached electrodes all over her head and torso, as well as other instruments that made her look like the Bride of Frankenstein. The instruments were hooked up to a plotter that graphed all kinds of body functions continuously. When I came back in the morning to collect her, the plotter had produced a pile of fanfold paper that was a foot thick.

When Emma went back to the sleep specialist for her follow appointment, he told her that she had stopped breathing about twenty-six times an hour. It was no wonder that she had such difficulty in getting a good night's rest.

He told her that she could either have surgery or learn to sleep with the help of a breathing machine. The surgery would have involved removing excess tissue at the back of the throat and moving her jaw further forward. Emma was not keen on that, especially as the success rate of surgery is only about fifty to sixty percent.

She opted for a CPAP sleep machine instead. She straps a nose-mask around her head. This nose-mask is connected by a hose to a continuous positive air-pressure machine. This forces air through her nose and into her lungs.

She had to have a second sleep study to calibrate her CPAP machine for her breathing. It starts out at a low pressure and ramps up to the right pressure over a twenty-minute interval.

It took her a few weeks to get accustomed to the CPAP machine. It's not a very natural feeling to have air forced into your nose continuously. She now sleeps far better with it than she did before. Sometimes, she doesn't bother to put on her mask before taking a nap, and she usually regrets it, because she wakes up feeling less rested.

It took me a while to get used to the CPAP machine too, because it makes white noise all night long, as it's huffing away. It's a little like sleeping beside Darth Vader, and it's not very romantic, but it certainly beats her snoring.

When we travel, we bring the CPAP machine in an overnight case, along with an extension cord and a selection of adapters for foreign electrical outlets. The CPAP machine means that we can't go camping for more than a night or so, or Emma doesn't get enough rest.

In retrospect, Emma probably had sleep apnea for many years before it was diagnosed.

Now, not everyone who snores has sleep apnea. Only if they also have difficulty in breathing and chronically can't get a good night's rest, are they likely to have sleep apnea. Most undiagnosed sleep apnea sufferers are unaware that they repeatedly stop breathing because they don't wake up far enough to realize it.

If you know someone who may have the symptoms of sleep apnea, please, urge them to see their doctor. You could save their life.