This weekend was Maryland Youth & Government's annual meeting or summit or something I don't really know what to call it. Basically students from high schools all across Maryland meet in Annapolis, at the state house, and we are basically a mock Maryland legislature. There's a House and a Senate and lobbyists and pages and this year there was a court system too. It's really pretty cool, I mean if government stuff is interesting to you. If not you'd probably find it really boring.

So everyone is assigned into a group, like they're assigned to be a lobbyist or a delegate or press or something else, and then once they get to Annapolis they all do something different. I was a delegate, so I was a member of the House and the Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources. I did write a bill, which would have reformed Maryland's power companies. But it didn't pass committee.   :(

So the schedule of my weekend at least was like this: we spent most of Saturday in committee debating bills, but Saturday night we were in the House debating bills that had passed committee. On Sunday it was mostly debating in the House, but there was an hour in committee in the morning. There was also an ice cream social on Saturday night and a banquet/dance on Sunday night. And then finally on Monday morning/part of Monday afternoon, we finished up debate in the House.

We did spend a lot of time just sitting in the House or in our committee rooms debating bills, which sounds really boring I guess. But actually a lot of the bills were super interesting and it was a lot of fun, although you would have to be into this in the first place to enjoy it. But the chairs in the state house are ridiculously comfortable so that helps when we have to talk about the bills that are like changing the requirements for historic cars (which was an actual bill (I think it passed)). So overall, while you get little to no sleep and there are some moments when five minutes feel like five hours, there were coffee makers in the hotel rooms and those moments happened very few times. And it was just super fun. You should join next year.