After a heaping mound of Yogurt Park “Caramel Chocolate Éclair Frozen Yogurt” with Cookie Dough, a couple floor mates and I found ourselves loitering at the Tie-Dye shirt venders bordering Telegraph Ave. Naturally, I moseyed over to Twiggy (a Telegraph vending icon embodying all that is hippy and totally awesome) and picked up a pair of his homemade Juggling Sticks to rehash a hidden talent I’d been cultivating for years.

Today marks almost exactly one year since I first stepped onto the Berkeley campus. In a past life I was a Speech and Debate kid, (I actually competed in the Original Oratory category which was basic speech writing as well as the Improvisational Comedy events) and one year ago I flew out from Colorado and was competing at one of the nation’s largest high-school Forensics (speech) tournaments here at UCB. It was easy to tell that this fateful day had rolled around. The campus was crawling this morning with teenage boys in dashing professional attire and their counterpart females in sharp pant-suits and even as I tossed my Juggling Sticks back and forth there was a lad with his suit jacket getting his hair braided by Twiggy himself.

Just mentioning the glory days on the Forensics team bring back so many ridiculous, epic, slightly awkward, fond experiences. What you have to understand is that Speech and Debate could not be any further from the “nerds-arguing” connotation it seems to bring up in conversation. Forensics represents the most bizarre smorgasbord of hormonal teenagers with solely one thing in common, a love for the spoken word. There were intellectually volatile philosophical debaters prone to strike with hissing poison ridden comments backed with Aristolean philosophy designed for the sole purpose of stripping away at emotional flesh. And in the same exact room you could find lightning-fast wannabe stand up comedians screaming Dane Cook quotes and performing Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” (as if it were a comedy.)

That was the Forensics life. A bunch of high-schoolers with a love to talk, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Being emerged in such a random, high-energy, high-stress, loud, expressive, diverse, passionate, hilarious melting-pot – you couldn’t help but join in. It made me speak, it made me throw myself out there, it made me the person you can talk to today.

There’s actual YouTube video of me on Telegraph back in the day playing with the same Juggling Sticks on the same exact corner between competition rounds. Watching the footage, it really is funny to be the one looking in from the outside now. I seemed to have traced the same steps by accident, but I’m glad. A little bit has changed since then, a little taller (probably not), a new address, a few new snippets of knowledge…

But I’m still the same ridiculous little speech kid, just in a slightly different place and time and for some reason that’s comforting.

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