This past Friday and Saturday, I attended the annual Alabama Scholastic Press Association convention at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Just like I did last year, I'm going to subject you to my trauma. Let's imagine that you paid around $90 to attend a convention for school. It was sort of required, and you couldn't get out of it even if you wanted to, which you did.

Anyway, this convention thingy starts at some indeterminate time, but it doesn't really matter because everyone thinks they want to eat breakfast once they get there and it's a few hours away, which means you have to leave early. Like 5 a.m. Ouch. I don't know if you've ever gotten up at 4 a.m., but it's not a pleasant experience, especially when it is really, really cold outside.

The group attending the convention is smaller this year, taking up only one charter bus. There is no Porno Bus this year. The bus this year is far less interesting. Whereas the Porno Bus had character, this bus totally doesn't. Sure, the seats are small and cramped, the TVs don't work, it smells like armpit, and everywhere you look people are drowning the silence with their Discmen. Plus, the bus driver wasn't old enough to be a bus driver.

Upon your arrival in Tuscaloosa, the Bus with No Character pulls into the parking lot of a Burger King. Having eaten Burger King for lunch three times in the past two weeks, you are in no mood to suffer through another traumatic fast food experience. However, you end up getting the CinniMinis anyway.

Anyway, after the Burger King experience, you go to the university and slog through the same boring administrative crap from last year: door prizes, nametag, and orientation.

You get a clue this year and do on-site design rather than writing. You smirk at the bogus picture included in the packet to throw you off. After about twenty minutes, you get bored with on-site design and phone in the rest of your front page design. Then you head downstairs to the game room, where you lose two games of pool before deciding that pool is not your game.

You skip the afternoon workshops because they are useless to you since you're a senior and won't be back next year. Instead, you update your website and mill around looking for food.

Later, at the district caucus (don't ask), you make snide comments about the ugly, ugly people from other schools. You watch idiocy in action and marvel at the fact that people are ugly. Did I mention that already? Because there were some ugly people this year.

After the election mess is over, you get mass-bitched out by Mrs. Hitler, who needs to sit down and shut up since she doesn't even oversee a publication and is just there for...no reason, apparently.

You have dinner at Applebee's in the mall. You note that this particular Applebee's has an extrememly loose definition of 'movie memorabilia,' one that includes nailing Minnie Mouse dolls to the wall, and not even in any sort of cool, impaling way.

You go to the preliminary awards and get your third place - column editorial award for the only column you submitted. You feel pretty good about that.

You go to the karaoke 'party,' which was held in the aforementioned game room. You note that they should have held it in a bigger space and that they should have given us actual food instead of greasy, greasy pizza and nothing to drink. You want the madness to end.

It doesn't, but you do run into someone who was on the government team last year. You talk with her for awhile about all the disadvantages of government team and she promises to come to the next simulation.

You get on the bus and go back to the hotel. You flip through the basic cable channels more times than you can count. You call Daphne G. You complain that Mrs. Hitler is ruining the trip with her rigidity. You stare at an infomercial for twenty minutes while debating the virtues of a shower.

You get up and take a shower. You go to bed. You wake up at 5:20 shivering because someone else in the room turned the air conditioning on. You get about forty more minutes of sleep before people start banging on the door. They refuse to go away, so no one gets any sleep, really, between 6:00 and 7:30.

No one gets out of bed or anything, but no one sleeps, either. Finally, at 7:25, five minutes before the bus is supposed to leave, you get up, get dressed, put all your crap in a pile and hike down to the bus.

Back at the university, you eat a crap-ass continental breakfast and bemoan the lack of sleep on the trip. You skip a few more workshops and make it to the final awards. You watch as your principal, your adviser and your editor win Administrator of the Year, Adviser of the Year and Journalist of the Year, respectively.

Then comes the moment where your paper is robbed of its title. The paper doesn't receive the All-Alabama award it deserved. Instead, the paper is ranked 'Superior.' An eerie silence fills the auditorium. Then the bitching and moaning begin.

Of course, the torture isn't over yet. You have to eat at Burger King one more time before leaving town. Then you have to endure a painfully long bus ride (because the driver of the Bus with No Character drives really slow) before finally making it home.

You vow never to return to the convention, a foregone conclusion since you'll be away at college next year. You go to sleep.

***

Yeah, do you see how much this entry sucked? That's how much this weekend sucked. I was trying to be as realisitic as possible, see? The moral of the story, in the words of Homer Simpson, is don't try, because you'll inevitably fail.

Also, don't lie and tell your parents you get back a day later than you actually do, because they'll be pretty mad when they find out and it won't have been worth it.

The one advantage of my grounding is that it's resulted in the longest stretch of time I've been awake and at my house in, like, months. Plus, I actually did my homework last night.