Crash landing

As most of you know, I've been involved with Toastmasters since September. Last night our club had its open house, and I volunteered a few weeks ago to be one of the night's speakers. The Open House was a smashing success -- although nothing was actually smashed, we had about 15 prospective members show up and most of them were YOUNG! which is exciting because...well, let's just say that I'm fairly outnumbered by the folks in their retirement years.

In the words of Dave Barry, I am absolutely not making this up. My speech, which I'd written about a week ago, was about airline safety. It was basically a manifesto on how SAFE it is to fly, how IRRATIONAL it is to be scared of flying, and how commercial jets NEVER EVER crash. EVER. I learned that to be involved in a commercial jet crash you'd have to fly every single day for 7 million years and was excited to share that statistic. I practiced the speech all of Wednesday night and Thursday morning and basically memorized every airline safety fact word-for-word.

I'd been obsessing over airline safety for two days. Then, only hours before I was scheduled to speak, a U.S. Air flight went down in the Hudson River. OK, I know, coincidences happen every day. But it's too ironic not to wonder. Did my jedi mind tricks cause yesterday's plane crash?

In case you're wondering, I gave the speech anyway. Had everyone died in the crash, I would have had to scrap it and pull a last-minute speech out of my ass. Or at least pull out all the not-funny-anymore jokes (like how you don't need to pay attention during the pre-flight briefing because you'll never need to use those seat cushions anyway. Ha ha ha I'm so funny. And SOOO classy too!). But luckily, everyone survived. I mean, it was lucky for them -- not for me. But it definitely worked in my favor, too. I was even able to open with a good joke about how I would definitely win the award for the most ironic speech of the evening.

The speech went well. I got some good laughs and great feedback. I was really nervous speaking in front of a group that's three times as big as a normal Toastmasters meeting, but as always, the nervousness went away after the first 30 seconds.

But I can tell you one thing: I'm never, ever writing a speech about airline safety again. Trust me, it's for your own good!