Wow, I'm totally late on fangirling about this...whoops.

According to the "officials," Boys State is a week of mock government where you learn what it takes to make a democracy function and sit and listen to senators and governors talk about their careers.

According to anyone who goes to Boys State, it is a week of public nudity, assassination attempts, lawsuits, scheming, and vaguely sexual campaign posters.

It's pretty damn sweet.

There are 49 Boys State programs in the United States -- I believe it is Hawaii that is the loner here. Two boys who just completed their junior year are chosen from each high school that attends to "represent" that school at Boys State. In some schools, it is a cut-throat interview process that decides who goes. In my high school, it was all about making sure no one knew when the paperwork was due.

And that's how my best pal and I ended up representing our school at Oregon Boys State.

Frankly, there is way too much to talk about and not enough blogging time in the world to tell all of it. So I'm just gonna hit on a few highlights:

I became an anchorman

Yup, you read that right. This year ORBS tried something new: two competing news teams that would vie for the support of the public. The two big football teams in Oregon are the Beavers and Ducks, so we had the Beaver Broadcasting Company (my team) against the Duck News Network.

So nothing happened the day we arrived, and the news is supposed to be shown before lunch Monday through Friday. Problem was, nothing happened Monday morning either, so both groups didn't expect the news to be aired that day. Then our counselor came rushing into our media room, grabbed myself and a boy I didn't know, and gave us five minutes to prepare an eight-minute broadcast. And one take to get it right.

We nailed it. Mostly. Made some silly mistakes, but my team was the only group to broadcast that day, giving us a HUGE lead over the DNN.

Because of our first day's broadcast, I got my team sued

Five minutes isn't NEARLY enough time to prepare a proper broadcast. As such, we basically improvised most of it. One thing we hit on was how one city, Kalmbach, went around to other cities and basically scammed them (long story short, it involved city cheers). I said that they had a lawsuit against them and that they needed to watch their back because they were "criminals."

Well, their trial hadn't occurred yet, and the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing...basically, we got served. But we settled out of court with a win-win agreement, so I was happy.

Never ask sleep-deprived teenage boys to take a picture at three in the morning

Chances are, they'll demand to take a picture where everyone doesn't have pants on. I'm pretty sure I'm the one who suggested that...I don't remember. You see, the media team had arguably the hardest job, and that meant that we would stay up into the morning working on the broadcast. It was fun, but so tiring.

We had a "terrorist" organization pop up

Ah, FSU. To the American Legion, they were the Federation of Students of the Union (or something like that). To the boys, they were Fuck Shit Up.

FSU was organized by three boys from Portland. They admit that, originally, their goal was to create a group comprised of members from both parties that would be able to push through their own legislation and put the people they wanted into executive positions for next year. However, the group got too big too quickly and they abandoned the idea. FSU remained a mystery throughout the week. The rumor was that they were planning a mass attack on the last day, so anyone who wore the brand of FSU (an 'F' on the back of their nametag) was deemed a traitor to the state.

Oh, I was totally a member. It was great because no one figured out until the last day.

Our governor was almost assassinated by a low-tech winged craft

By "low-tech winged craft," I mean a paper airplane.

Seriously.

About the middle of the week, during a formation, someone threw a tiny airplane at the governor. It narrowly missed and the police and executives called it an assassination attempt. So people everywhere began stockpiling airplanes for both defense and attack...

Until one piece of legislation declared all paper airplanes a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

On the last night/morning, the media teams got together and attacked the governor with about fifty airplanes. We all missed.

I got to do a live, impromptu debate in front of Boys State

On Friday morning we had the executive debates, where boys who wish to run for a position of power in next year's Boys State may stake their claim. Friday afternoon, a special news broadcast was showing announcing the results.

This year, the Legion basically overhauled the media department, as we were trying new things EVERY day. For the results, we had to give them live.

We were set up so two anchormen from each team were positioned on opposing sides of the state, and four of us sat at a round table in the middle and would debate over who we thought would win the election for each position. We just had some facts about each candidate to go off of, but it was a TON of fun.

I'm on YouTube now

All of our broadcasts got put onto YouTube. Just search for Oregon Boys State. I'm actually not happy with a lot of our broadcasts, so I'm not putting the link here.

Anyway, there's a lot that I missed, but these are just a few things that made Boys State awesome. If you are going to be a junior in high school or younger this year, I HIGHLY encourage you to try Boys State. It is so awesome!

- Kolth