People are weird. A couple of nights ago I was in the dorm bathroom. Someone came in and went into one of the stalls. He used one of those sanitary toilet seat covers. A clean guy, right? But after he dumps and wipes, he leaves without washing his hands. How consistent is that? All I ask for is a little bit of regularity. Dammit.

Speaking of incongruities, I was recently thrust back into a world that I once belonged to, but which is now alien to me: High school debate. Over the past couple of days, I judged a few rounds of Lincoln-Douglas debate, and boy oh boy did I get a power trip off being a judge. But other than that, and getting paid, let me just say that it was weird to get back into this world of egomaniacal, Sunday-suit-wearing, logic-toting, jargon-tossing little kids. It’s not that I can’t keep up. It’s the strangeness of the whole situation.

A little background. I wasn’t exactly the class phenom when it came to debating, but I did well enough to get a few minor awards. My first year, that is. In my second year my award-earning dropped off precipitously, in part because I realized how ridiculous it all was. And since I didn’t really believe in what I was doing, I only put half-hearted efforts into winning. That’s what debate is all about: winning.

The topic was whether or not, as a matter of policy, violent juvenile offenders should be treated as adults instead of juveniles (for you California residents who care, this is Proposition 21, former governor Pete Wilson’s baby). Now I just happened to know a lot about the topic because I’d finished a 15-page research paper (with 18 sources) on prisons for my seminar on aggression. The truth: Prisons overall are terrible, the only thing that happens is inmates get raped and beaten by other inmates and guards don’t do much to help. That’s what’s typical, not the exception. (Write your congressman now.) Now, the debate: Was all about who could pull the most evidence out of their magic hat and who could make the most convincing arguments in a limited span of time. It’s about what arguments are dropped, what impacts are extended, etc. It’s not about who’s right. It’s about who’s faster.

Words as weapons to twist the truth. I support debate as a satisfying intellectual exercise, and as a means to an end. But when it becomes an end in itself, that’s when it’s bullshit. Socrates criticized the sophists of twisting language to their own ends, but I don’t see how he was any different himself.

This morning I had an utterly different experience. I went out with some friends and other members of the local tracking club, waded through thigh-high waters, and ran around in the cold rain and wind on the beach for five hours examining tracks. Mostly deer, today. The weather had obliterated other tracks but we were fortunate enough to find some recent tracks, made by at least two deer of different sizes. When the rain let up the songbirds starting singing again and we saw a northern harrier and talked about some of the vegetation and the geological history of the area. There was an elephant seal on the beach, and we found the skull and bones of a bird that we determined to be a western grebe.

Was I cold and tired? Hell yes. I couldn’t wait to get warm and dry again and fill my belly and empty my bladder. But, I also had fun. I’m stretching my comfort zone. I’m doing something that’s genuine, in a way that debate is fundamentally not. Let the people who like to bat around ideas without substance do the debating and criticizing. Give me the real, the physical sensations and emotions and raw churning and power and the subtle, sensitive feelings. If I write or speak, I hope I do so from the heart and not from some desire to feed the ego.

Then again, what am I doing now? Hmm …