journal features

my cousin's important speech

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.10.12

I went to the family Thanksgiving dinner, today, out in Oakville. While on our usual after-dinner walk (this time, down to the lake from the Oakvillains new place, where I managed a beautiful 20-metre stone skip), my 19-year-old cousin told me that he had a speech prepared for later on. When he mentioned it later on, I leapt up, turned off the enormous television, and asked for everybody's attention.

This didn't sit too well with my cousin. It turned out that his speech wasn't something prepared for school, as I'd expected, but was about his plans to leave normal daytime school for the last time. It seemed a difficult speech to deliver, but he pulled it off well and gave some articulate, well-argued reasons. He'd clearly given it quite a lot of thought, and had a plan for pursuing his high school diploma in adult daytime classes next semester.

I wish him well.

rand()m quote

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.