IN BRIEF

✦ Theme: What Doesn't Kill You. Word of the Day: Resilience.
✦ Michelle Wen's Two-Minute Special, "Survivor," traced the San Francisco buildings — including the old Chronicle Building — that outlasted the 1906 earthquake and fire.
✦ Two Ice Breakers: Kevin Gumba on fixing his sleep one data point at a time, Chris Edwards on why he went back to hockey.
✦ With only two prepared speeches on the agenda, Table Topics ran long — more members and guests got the floor than usual.
✦ Award winners weren't recorded this week — we'll confirm them in the next issue.

Michelle Wen's two minutes were about buildings, not speeches. In 1906, she told the room, a fire swept through San Francisco behind a line drawn roughly along Van Ness Avenue, and when it finally burned out, a handful of structures were still standing in the ash — among them, fittingly, the old Chronicle Building. She closed by inviting everyone to go look for the rest: walk through downtown San Francisco, she said, and the survivors are still there, holding their ground among the buildings that replaced everything around them. It was the Two-Minute Special, officially. Unofficially, it previewed everything that followed.

Toastmaster Albert Yan had already built the night around the same idea before Michelle reached the podium: a theme he called "What Doesn't Kill You," and a word of the day — resilience — that got used so often the Grammarian felt compelled to flag it. His own framing came from a college dance team story: an acquaintance who auditioned again and again despite repeated rejection, simply because she wasn't going to let it stop her. "The ability to stand back up after setbacks," Albert told the room, "is still your choice and your power."

The guest question Wednesday doubled as its own informal survey: what's a setback you faced, but tried again anyway? Sunny found GGTM through a Google search, then nearly talked himself out of his first meeting after Bay Bridge traffic left him half an hour late — he came in anyway. Yuju admitted to being, by her own account, not a good cook, and keeps practicing regardless. Julia, who found the club through ChatGPT, described being let go from a job and later landing a better one. Ruby, newly arrived in San Francisco from New York, traced her own resilience further back — to watching people recover after typhoons while she was growing up in the Philippines. They were joined by Arush.

Kevin Gumba's Ice Breaker was about sleep — tracked obsessively on an Oura Ring, starting in the 60s on its 100-point scale and dragged down by a case of mild sleep apnea a doctor eventually diagnosed, fitting him with an oral device for it. Kevin cut nighttime phone use, switched to an e-book before bed, experimented with melatonin, magnesium, and room temperature, and nudged his score into the 70s — a process he was careful to call ongoing, not finished. His point: even careful preparation for an important day gets undone by a bad night's sleep. Evaluator John Ekedum called it a strong debut and pushed Kevin to back medical claims with data next time, and to stand a little taller while giving advice.

Chris Edwards's Ice Breaker went back further: a childhood spent playing hockey, a stretch where he stopped, and what he said he learned from missing it — that returning to something you value is really a way of being fully present. Evaluator Derick Le liked the pacing and the storytelling, and offered a list of ways to push the speech from good to great that the night's notes didn't fully capture.

Table Topics Master Sheila Vida built the round on individual resilience prompts — one per speaker, not a single shared question — and with only two prepared speeches on the night's agenda, more people than usual got a turn at the mic. Asked about sacrificing for a dream, Omar Sinada talked about overcommitting to sports in high school and the injuries that followed. Sunny, handed a question about competing against someone out of his league, talked through how he now decides which challenges are worth taking on in the first place. Asked about a goal that wears you down, Sharmaine Rodrigues spoke about finding new inspiration, sometimes by trying something else entirely. And Agasthian Ponnambalam(middle upper, shaking hand with TTM Sheila), doing double duty as General Evaluator, was asked about getting through a hard time emotionally — and argued for sharing it out loud rather than carrying it alone.

Also at the mic: Miwa (lower right corner), on a friend who keeps taking advantage of her kindness (disqualified on time); Shubham Saloni(lower middle), on a speech he isn't ready to give; Yuju, on a serious mistake at work; Kat(lower left corner), on handling a public insult; Ruby, on losing an argument; Arushi, on surviving a major failure; Albert Yan, on a disruptive family member asking for help; and Julia, who fielded two rounds — an unwanted promotion, and unfair criticism from a boss.

BEST TABLE TOPICS
Kat (Right)

BEST EVALUATOR
John (Left)

BEST SPEAKER
Chris