competition

on saturday, i helped out with CBC's the amazing race 2 for the high school group. i was stationed at alki, by the statue of liberty, with the task titled "who wants to work for boeing?" once teams arrived, they had to put together a cheap wood [possibly balsa wood] airplane. one person [the boeing employee] had to stand at one marker and fly the glider airplane over their teammates who were lined up single-file about 16 feet away, behind another marker. it was pretty tough since it was raining and a little on the windy side. teams broke their planes and had to wait to scavenge parts from the planes of teams who had already completed the task. after the last team finished and left, my clue buddy and i treated ourselves to pastries and coffee at alki bakery. we were drenched with rain water, plus i had stupidly worn flip-flops so my feet were cold and dirty. gross. the evening ended with a late dinner in chinatown at hing loon with ja-hye, keone, and kristie.

sunday afternoon, i had my weekly volleyball game. this week, we were short two of our regular guy players so we had two subs. i forget how much it throws off the flow of the team when you bring in subs, even if you've played with them before. i guess our team has been in a rhythm the past couple of weeks. anyway, our second game was against the team currently ranked #1. the last time we played them, we won, though it wasn't a pleasant victory since they got kind of mad. so, we were playing and the score was back and forth until the end. we edged them out for a win by a couple of points, so that felt pretty good...for about 5 minutes.

later, as we headed upstairs for our next game, i heard some of my teammates talking about the other team. i guess the other team was complaining about a couple of our touches, like they didn't think they were perfectly clean. i was, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the other teams disgruntled complaints during the game. basically there were two sets (mine) that they thought weren't clean and they were saying things during game play. now, since we don't have refs, we call our own faults. if the one team wants to call something on the opposing team, technically, they can't, but they can mention it to the opposing team, like asking them to be aware or watch for the potential fault in question. this team didn't do that, as far was i know. and being me, when i found out that they were mad or whatever, i felt totally bad and then the win pretty much lost it's luster. they thought we were essentially cheating. i bristle at being accused of cheating. my team thought the ball contacts were legal/good, so that probably should've made me feel vindicated, but it didn't. instead, i was questioning myself and it made me paranoid enough that i went with bump setting for the rest of the evening. i was also told that that other team holds grudges. and they're all crazy intense during game play. lame...and scary.

this brings me to an interesting question that shiv posed earlier today...how do you get people who are competitive, but also gracious when they don't win or get their way? does such a healthy balance exist? i think it's possible. i'm pretty competitive about some things, but if things don't work out, it's not the end of the world, or rather, it's not totally worth flipping out about. in my mind, i'm trying to think of a time when i did flip out...and nothing comes to mind at the moment. shiv thinks it's different for boys and girls. i think this opens up a line of interesting conversation - the nature of competition.