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Apr. 3rd, 2008 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
commotiocordisRe: Spring Break. I knitted some eggs. And flowers, but the eggs are cooler looking. I stuffed them and everything (except for one of them, which I've yet to get around to sewing up and stuffing). I read a bunch of fic, which I hadn't really been doing much of lately, so that was nice. Mock trial'ed the entire last weekend of it, which was fun but hell.
Re: Mock Trial. Like it says above, Friday/Saturday/Sunday were all that. And as usual, were filled by very little sleep, as you're not home until late on Friday, you've got to cram for the side switching that night and get up early Saturday morning to go back down there and argue the other way. Ditto Saturday night to Sunday. Add to that my weird sleeping schedule (so I was in court when I would normally be asleep) and I calculated it all out and I had something like 260fl oz of Diet Dr. Pepper over Saturday and Sunday (most on Saturday) just to keep me awake, LOL.
We only took 4th this year, which pissed me off more than a little because a) it was only by the judge's ballot (who didn't like one of our lawyers pretty obviously) and one point on one of the jury ballots that we didn't get to move on, and b) the reason we lost the trial that kicked us out was because we'd lost to that team once before this year and we got scared. Twas a snooty rich school that has won state something like 5 out of the last 8 years now, but I don't think that they're actually that much better than we are (they're scripted as hell, so you knock them off script and they're gone).
But I got screwed by a bad call (so says my team’s lawyer coach, who, with several other lawyers, wrote the case) by the judge on an unfair extrapolation, which meant I had to spend most of my cross time fighting the witness on that and had to cut myself way short on the other stuff I wanted to get to so I wouldn't leave our last crosser with only 3.5 minutes for an entire examination (like happened earlier in the series of trials)--which didn't hurt my score because I handled it well, but in the course of the overall trial, it made it harder for them to find for us at the end because it ended up helping the other side's case; as much as they say that it's all about the points and who would actually win the trial doesn't matter, you can't divorce presentation from outcome completely. Idk. I felt that I did decently and my scores reflected that (though they weren't nearly the best I'd ever gotten), though the u.e. thing rattled me pretty badly at the time—you sit down thinking “Oh shit, I just blew that,” because it didn’t come out as strongly case-wise for my side as it should have, but the fighting is where most of the points do come from. And fighting I can do.
Still. Moar things that went wrong on Sunday. We had one lawyer screw up the side switching (or something) during that final trial, and end up crossing one witness with what were essentially the direct examination questions for our side's counter witness, and I had to fight my witness a few times when she got again, methinks nervous, and wasn't following where I was trying to go/tried to fight me like I was her crosser. which were the two big things that I can pick out as what I felt hit us the hardest. Plus, two major points for my closing didn’t come out in trial for various reasons, which means I had to rework the thing to try and make it sound like we’d presented a strong enough case to win if it were a real trial (which we didn’t, due to the fact that it’s a weaker side to begin with and we missed those two points). But I think a lot of my closing points came from being able to do that, however, because the opposing closer very obviously didn’t for her side and was talking all kinds of smack that very severely skewed both the stuff that the witnesses actually said and stuff that they didn’t actually ever say. It was nuts, though; I don’t think I’ve ever heard such skewage from a closer before. She was like “And you heard them say this” and I was all “Ummbutwhat? I’m pretty sure not.”
Saturday’seither first or second trial, they all run together in my head, first trial was unbelievably fun, though, because. . . erm, the other team wasn’t any good. Well, sufficiently good that it wasn’t boring and we got a chance to use some of our objection responses and stuff, but their witnesses weren’t great at fighting on cross, which is always my favorite part anyway, and thus I was able to sort of kill my witness to, erm, death. I wanted video of that one—we never seem to get anybody to video tape ours for whatever reason, which is sad. I always think of it afterwards (only on the good trials—on the bad ones, you want all tapes/cameras/recording devices as far away as possible, LOL) and it never gets done. And the other teams, when they tape it, never manage to get the tape to us like the MT rules say they have to if we ask (I’m looking at one team here in particular that’s done it to us two years in a row, thanks). I had my mp3 player sneakyrecording all or most of the trials over the weekend, though, so I’m going to go back through and listen to them at some point and perhaps pull out bits of things to put up for fun.
We recast throughout the competition again, though, as on Friday night we were freaking out because our opener wasn't there yet when the trial was supposed to start and we had divvied up her parts to just try to do them without real preparation. It's not like we couldn't have, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve had to do that several times over the course of this season, more or less including Sunday, but it's crazy nervewracking to have to try to examine a witness you've never worked with before; even though you know what you need to get out there, it's easy for a witness and a lawyer to trample on each other's toes accidentally if they're not at least a bit familiar with each other's style. She showed up that night maybe 2 minutes before the judge walked in, but there seemed to have been family issues on the way there that nobody ever got the details of that both were the cause of her lateness and had her shaken up enough that she did really poorly, so we ended up absorbing her roles anyway for the next time we went that direction (which was Sunday's, thus also partially explaining the semi-suckage that trial).
But yes. I got a 10 on my closing on the Sunday trial, and that’s what I’m going to stick with. As a team, we didn’t do as well as we could have, but as an individual (especially considering I had to fight the twisted unfair extrapolation thing) I kinda rocked the weekend. I won’t play modest (lol, like you saw any humility in this entire post); I’m good at this shit, so it really feels sucky that this was most likely the last time I’m going to be able to do it.
Re: Mock Trial. Like it says above, Friday/Saturday/Sunday were all that. And as usual, were filled by very little sleep, as you're not home until late on Friday, you've got to cram for the side switching that night and get up early Saturday morning to go back down there and argue the other way. Ditto Saturday night to Sunday. Add to that my weird sleeping schedule (so I was in court when I would normally be asleep) and I calculated it all out and I had something like 260fl oz of Diet Dr. Pepper over Saturday and Sunday (most on Saturday) just to keep me awake, LOL.
We only took 4th this year, which pissed me off more than a little because a) it was only by the judge's ballot (who didn't like one of our lawyers pretty obviously) and one point on one of the jury ballots that we didn't get to move on, and b) the reason we lost the trial that kicked us out was because we'd lost to that team once before this year and we got scared. Twas a snooty rich school that has won state something like 5 out of the last 8 years now, but I don't think that they're actually that much better than we are (they're scripted as hell, so you knock them off script and they're gone).
But I got screwed by a bad call (so says my team’s lawyer coach, who, with several other lawyers, wrote the case) by the judge on an unfair extrapolation, which meant I had to spend most of my cross time fighting the witness on that and had to cut myself way short on the other stuff I wanted to get to so I wouldn't leave our last crosser with only 3.5 minutes for an entire examination (like happened earlier in the series of trials)--which didn't hurt my score because I handled it well, but in the course of the overall trial, it made it harder for them to find for us at the end because it ended up helping the other side's case; as much as they say that it's all about the points and who would actually win the trial doesn't matter, you can't divorce presentation from outcome completely. Idk. I felt that I did decently and my scores reflected that (though they weren't nearly the best I'd ever gotten), though the u.e. thing rattled me pretty badly at the time—you sit down thinking “Oh shit, I just blew that,” because it didn’t come out as strongly case-wise for my side as it should have, but the fighting is where most of the points do come from. And fighting I can do.
Still. Moar things that went wrong on Sunday. We had one lawyer screw up the side switching (or something) during that final trial, and end up crossing one witness with what were essentially the direct examination questions for our side's counter witness, and I had to fight my witness a few times when she got again, methinks nervous, and wasn't following where I was trying to go/tried to fight me like I was her crosser. which were the two big things that I can pick out as what I felt hit us the hardest. Plus, two major points for my closing didn’t come out in trial for various reasons, which means I had to rework the thing to try and make it sound like we’d presented a strong enough case to win if it were a real trial (which we didn’t, due to the fact that it’s a weaker side to begin with and we missed those two points). But I think a lot of my closing points came from being able to do that, however, because the opposing closer very obviously didn’t for her side and was talking all kinds of smack that very severely skewed both the stuff that the witnesses actually said and stuff that they didn’t actually ever say. It was nuts, though; I don’t think I’ve ever heard such skewage from a closer before. She was like “And you heard them say this” and I was all “Ummbutwhat? I’m pretty sure not.”
Saturday’s
We recast throughout the competition again, though, as on Friday night we were freaking out because our opener wasn't there yet when the trial was supposed to start and we had divvied up her parts to just try to do them without real preparation. It's not like we couldn't have, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve had to do that several times over the course of this season, more or less including Sunday, but it's crazy nervewracking to have to try to examine a witness you've never worked with before; even though you know what you need to get out there, it's easy for a witness and a lawyer to trample on each other's toes accidentally if they're not at least a bit familiar with each other's style. She showed up that night maybe 2 minutes before the judge walked in, but there seemed to have been family issues on the way there that nobody ever got the details of that both were the cause of her lateness and had her shaken up enough that she did really poorly, so we ended up absorbing her roles anyway for the next time we went that direction (which was Sunday's, thus also partially explaining the semi-suckage that trial).
But yes. I got a 10 on my closing on the Sunday trial, and that’s what I’m going to stick with. As a team, we didn’t do as well as we could have, but as an individual (especially considering I had to fight the twisted unfair extrapolation thing) I kinda rocked the weekend. I won’t play modest (lol, like you saw any humility in this entire post); I’m good at this shit, so it really feels sucky that this was most likely the last time I’m going to be able to do it.
