My Fair Team

Team is a weird thing. Instead of doing what you want to do (like get more sleep), you force yourself to go to the team meeting and sleep through one instead. You spend your time with a bunch of people and give up your individuality for team’s greater good. Eventually, your team starts sneaking into your everyday life, it states its presence on your birthdays, it tags along for New Year’s parties in Batumi, it eats your food, sleeps on your couch and drunkenly sobs at your sad love stories. It’s weird.

My team plays the quiz game thingy called “What When Where?” Before I joined it, the game seemed like smart ass people playing on TV. But then I became my hubby’s team’s groupie. Meaning I followed my hubby around to every tournament and team meeting, cooked for his teammates and spent lots of time just hanging with them. They lost one player along the way and hubby forcefully led me into the team (I thought I was not good enough).

My team consists of different weirdos  First, there is the team captain, a person who invests a lot of his emotions in the game and actually expects us to show up on time.  Whenever we write an incorrect answer, he yells and screams like a little girl, sometime circles our table in bewilderment, demoralizes the whole team and finally rests on his chair like a defeated warrior. Touchingly, he writes summary comments after every game and I don’t know whether he is honest or just tries to keep our self-esteem up, but he notes exactly what we need to hear. He knows who said what and why. He feels our heartbeat. He is aware. And, he is a great listener. If he’s calm. 

The second guy is this fucked up journalist who, through this game, through our conversations on the train while going to tournaments, and our talks on the couch while drinking after games, became one of our closest friends in the whole world. He is brave, restless and full of adrenaline, he chases wars all over the globe; like mushrooms after the rain, he pops up in Afganistan, Libia, Egypt… and then he calls from those hellish places and asks hubby stuff like : “I am in a hookah store in Egypt, what flavor tobacco do you want me to buy for you?”. He is a man of infinite positive energy and when you are with him, he charges you with it like a battery.

The third guy is actually a girl.  She’s been with us for a year and a half.  She is one of the most knowledgeable kids I know.  She came and brought a fresh wave of intellect into our team.  She is my ally on the team – I can discuss Benedict Cumberbach with her! She is nerdy and girly and funny and cooks banana bread. Like what I always wanted to be, only better.

We have a new guy this season.  I can’t really tell you much about him, because his is very introverted, quiet and seemingly innocent man, who does not open up despite my best efforts to poke him out of his shell. But there is some infinite coolness lying beneath his defensive interior, like the other day he posted the most adorable picture of his daughter that made me and hubby look at each other and go awwwwww. He is also a journalist and god save us from all these skewed and corrupt media crew overrunning our team! He has a pretty interesting blog. And, as we all know, blogwriters are cool.

In the end, I just have to mention two guys that left the team, but are still part of our team FB page (hence, they will always be our teammates in our hearts of hearts). One is a hilarious, life-loving, fun-loving IT guy and the other is genius pursuing his careers in Stanford, and I swear when he becomes rich and famous, I will tell everyone that once upon a time, we spent a whole night talking about girls.
And the last but not least is my very own hubby who is the smartest person I know, but writing about him takes more than 500 words and he is so much more than a team member. So I will not write about him.

That’s it. These kids are regular kids, but they know stuff that others don’t know because they are not afraid to actually explore life. They do it through traveling, reading, just plain video-game playing, but damn it, they explore life every second of their living and I love them for it. Thanks guys for being my team! And congrats on a great game tonight!

One last thing: our team has two girls! And thus, our team is one of the coolest teams out there!

The pic: our team (minus one and minus me who holds the cam) celebrating the right answer