Fortunately, that room is stocked. For a chubby kid, it's heaven. Sugary comfort foods are everywhere -- cookies, brownies, the whole nine yards. But I'll be honest: When I lost, I felt relieved. For about five years, every year, every summer, I'd gone through a lot of preparation in my attempts to get to the National Spelling Bee. It almost felt futile, because each year it seemed that no matter how much prep I had done, I always ended up losing. Only one kid is going to emerge victorious at the end (well, usually); the other ten million or so competitors hear the dreaded bell of failure.

When I left the stage, I was like Tom Hanks at the end of Castaway. I had no idea what I was going to do next. But instead of joining my sobbing, brokenhearted compatriots, I was simply trying to soak in as much of the experience as I could.

One of the weirdest things? It's the fact that ...

Well, some of the demonstrators have their hearts in the right places, and are protesting on behalf of the dyslexic population. Apparently, our nation's fascination with proper spelling has resulted in discriminatory hiring practices towards dyslexics, which I guess makes sense.

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The rest of the protesters, as far as I can tell, are veering off the deep end. They range from English "purists" who want us to spell like we still fly the Union Jack, to groups who want us to have Cyrillic-style phonetic pronunciation (read: like the Russians), to groups who straight-up don't want anyone speaking English. Each category of protester can consist of anything between a lone person who wasn't hugged enough as a child to around 50 people. That may not seem like a ton, but get them all in one place, and it can get almost overwhelming -- especially if you're an elementary school child frantically trying to remember whether or not "iridociclitis" has one R or two. You'll see enough signs to have a miniature panic attack as you wonder if you really have been accidentally spelling the word "love" wrong your entire life.

Spelling Society

But at least I didn't have to wear a bee costume.

If you watch the broadcasts, you probably don't assume you're watching kids who were dragged there against their will, like tributes forced to compete in the Hunger Games. But that was the case for me, and for lots of the other contestants I met along the way.

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Growing up in an Indian household, there's a certain pressure to succeed in academics, even outside of the classroom. So in the summer of 1999, my dad enrolled me in the spelling bee at a local Indian-American academic showcase -- without telling me first. When I found out I was participating, I started bawling. I thought we were just there to watch the damn thing.

It was a double elimination bee, and I misspelled my first word, "arduous." I remember seeing my dad in the audience, sort of looking down at the ground. He would later tell me that at that point, he wasn't sure spelling bees would be my "thing." But, surprise surprise, I won the damn thing. Despite waltzing home with a trophy in hand, my mom didn't believe it. My grades weren't at the top of the class, so this was the first positive validation of my brains. From that point on, I won the local competition every time I entered, until I turned 14 and couldn't compete anymore. As I'd later learn, these local competitions are huge, especially among immigrant families who want their children to be able to read and write well. And they work -- since 1999, 14 of the national winners have been Indian-American.

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At the hotel where the National Bee puts you up (one of the nicest in D.C.), there are areas where spellers meet up to have fun away from their parents. Kids say they're going to go study on their own, but that's a lie. It was a break where we could meet and hang out with each other. When we were with our parents, we were vicious competitors that needed solitude and concentration. But away from them, well, we were kids. We played Scrabble, because of course we did, and helped each other out. I'm pretty sure some of us learned more in those few hours with each other in the hotel than under our parents' tutelage.

And you need all the help you can get, because ...

But even that is harder than it sounds. Remember that, moreso than any other language, English has a long history of borrowing from others. German, French, Latin, Greek, even Native American and Russian -- nearly every language has left its stamp. The result is a confusing mess of contradictory spelling and pronunciation rules. We've got homophones, homographs, and an alarming number of people who don't know the difference.

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My father actually coded a computer program to help me study. But remember that any word or type of word you skim over could be the one that sinks you in the competition, so you're obsessively trying to make sure you don't miss anything. So let me repeat: My Ivy League university was easier.