The Weekly Meeting · August 19, 2026 · A five-minute read

Tavisan Ramesh Best Speech

Tavisan, back at GGTM after time away, opened with an inventory: several books, two paintings, a half-cleaned closet, a half-furnished apartment, architectural licensing exams, another Pathways level, a handful of plant projects — all genuinely in progress, none of them finished. The question he built the whole speech around: does he lose interest quickly, or does he keep this many things unfinished on purpose, so he's never bored?

He borrowed a framework from philosopher Martin Heidegger to answer it — three kinds of boredom. Situational: waiting ninety minutes for a delayed Amtrak train. Social: being fully occupied and realizing afterward the whole thing felt hollow. Profound: when nothing in particular is wrong, but everything starts to feel insignificant anyway. He turned the lens on his own licensing exams — finishing them would officially make him an architect, a title his current job doesn't actually require. Which raised the harder question underneath the first one: are the unfinished projects really about boredom, or about a reward that quietly stopped being there? His closing thought: until we stop frantically filling every second with half-finished activities, we may never find out which one genuinely matters.

Evaluator Juan Basulto opened his evaluation by calling it the best speech of the night — praising how a genuinely abstract philosophical idea landed as something personal and understandable, and closing with a fitting verdict: Tavisan is "halfway to" an area-contest-winning speech. His one ask: trust the material enough to look up from the notes, and land the ending harder.

"Being a Tall Girl" — Irene Suwarno, redelivering her Ice Breaker
Irene went back to fourth grade in Indonesia, age nine, appointed head of the class — responsible, among other things, for keeping about sixty classmates quiet whenever the teacher stepped out. She started writing down names of anyone talking, then realized that list was about to become the whole class. She slammed her desk instead. When the noise came back anyway, she wrote one loud boy's name on the board — and he called her "giraffe." Others joined in: "skyscraper," "power tower." She carried that self-consciousness for years, not helped by a grandmother who once told her, gently but plainly, that if there were a way to make her shorter, she should consider it. Toastmasters, she said, is where she started finding her own voice instead of the ones she'd been carrying. Evaluator Albert Yan built his feedback around the same idea in reverse: Irene already knows how to stand tall — his challenge was to stand wider too, opening her gestures to match the size of the story.

Table Topics Master Luzee Bautista reimagined the usual Table Topics format. Borrowing a framework from a Rhino Toastmasters workshop (with facilitator Michael Sheehan's permission), she taught the room four ways into a conversation with a stranger — Cliché (weather, commute: low-risk and easy), Compliment (specific beats generic — "I like your haircut," not "you look good"), Commiserate (bond over something mildly annoying, context permitting), and Curious (ask a real question, then actually follow the answer) — then paired the room off for two-minute improvised scenarios to test them live.

Shubham and Chris, cast as two people who'd joined the same Zoom call early, riffed on cameras-off etiquette and always running late — and took Best Table Topics Pair. Agasthian and Miwa played a business-networking scenario that Miwa detonated early with a plot twist: "I'm actually AI." Catherine and Riga, playing two people arriving at a Toastmasters meeting, delivered what Luzee called perhaps the most realistic scene of the night — for the obvious reason.

Also paired up: Carlos & Michelle, Jack & Kush, Juan & Tim, Jorge & Albert, Charmaine & Kat, and Irene & Tavisan (an imaginary bar, maple syrup in cocktails, and a volunteer wing-person arrangement). Curious, the room agreed afterward, did the most work of all four techniques — compliment, the least.

BEST TABLE TOPICS
Shubham & Chris

BEST EVALUATOR
Albert Yan

BEST SPEAKER
Tavisan Ramesh