Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

So I've been alone at home for the past few weeks. Well, not alone, my grandmother's still here. Leaving me alone in a house for longer than a few hours essentially means that you'll come home to a smoldering pile of rubble and the majority of your city's fire department. But alone in the sense that there's really no one walking in at 7:30 in the evening and demanding that I do my chores. I don't have to fetch a glass of juice for anyone but myself, I don't have to worry about keeping the living room tidy, nothing. I just have to turn on the alarm at night and supervise the occasional repair man, and in return, I get to do exactly what I want to during the day. Since my parents left, there have been some modifications to my daily routine. It used to be that I'd get home, go out and get some exercise, get some studying done and then, once my parents got home, be at their constant beck and call. It's not that they gave me much to do, of course -...

I want to begin this post by saying that I don't volunteer to speak. I'm not one of those guys who's always MCing this or giving a speech about that. I speak in public only if I have no other choice, and those situations come by rarely enough that I've had very little experience actually being on stage and talking. Last week, though, I was at an NCC camp, and the PI (Permanent Instructor, for you non-NCC folk) staff decided that I should host an event on account of I spoke decent English. Normally, I would refuse, but in the NCC, if they ask you to jump over a cliff, you need to have been over that cliff five minutes ago. You don't get to ask why you're jumping off of a cliff, you just jump. So it was that three days into the camp, I found myself on stage with a co-MC I didn't really know, in a uniform that I had lost the knack of wearing and holding a mic that caught, oh, about 50% of the words you spoke into it. At first, I was incredibly nervous. ...