Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

I am the captain of a team participating in the Relay For Life of Temple Terrace®, which takes place at Greco Middle School on April 18th and 19th this year. Relay For Life®, the American Cancer Society’s signature event, is a fun-filled overnight experience designed to bring together those who have been touched by cancer. At Relay, people from within the community gather to celebrate survivors, remember those lost to cancer, and to fight back against this disease. Relay participants help raise money and awareness to support the American Cancer Society in its lifesaving mission to eliminate cancer as a major health issue.

We’re calling ourselves ‘Team Daddy-O Alley Katz’ and our theme is retro bowling.

I know, right? Someone actually appointed me to a position of leadership and responsibility, which is about as likely an occurrence as seeing the Hamburglar profiled on America’s Most Wanted.

Well, actually, it’s not like I’m completely unqualified. I am sincerely committed to the cause, which is raising money to find a cure for cancer and eliminating it once and for all. I don’t want to just defeat cancer, I want to defeat it and humiliate it in the process. I want to pull down cancer’s pants and make crude, derisive comments about its genitalia. I want to give cancer a swirly in front of all the other diseases. I want to date cancer’s mom just so I can steal all her money, call her crude names and tell her to go make me sandwiches. So obviously my heart is in the right place.

I’ve taken to my role as team captain and have done my best to motivate my team. I assured them of my sincerity and dedication by telling them that I had already gone so far as to have written “CAPTAIN” on the waistband of all my underwear… in Sharpie.

But working with volunteers is a challenge at times. It’s hard to make demands of busy people who are doing stuff for you in their spare time. I have to remind myself to be patient and encouraging when things aren’t moving quite as quickly as I’d like. And actually, our team is doing pretty well so far. But it takes effort to come up with ways to keep everyone interested and enthusiastic without being completely obnoxious about it.

I have little doubt that many of them will no longer want to speak to me when it’s all over. I’m basing that on the fact I have no doubt that I’ve already been so obnoxious that some of them don’t even want to speak to me right now.

Relay For Life® isn’t really a competition per se, but teams do challenge each other to do a good job as a matter of pride and in the interest of pushing each other to raise as much money as possible. When it’s over, the American Cancer Society recognizes the best teams’ efforts with trophies and prizes. So screw what I said before; it’s totally a competition.

There’s a team in our Relay that’s been at it for years and they win a majority of the awards every year. I’ve decided that I hate them. In my mind, I’ve decided to consider them smug know-it-alls who act like they invented cancer just so they could raise funds to eradicate it and make me feel inadequate in the process as a bonus. Now, you don’t have to tell me what a terrible person I am for feeling this way. I’m already fully aware that resenting a group of people for effectively raising funds to combat a horrible disease is about as reprehensible an act as you can think of. I’m ok with it though, because I want to win trophies and prizes.

Besides, it’s not that I don’t want them to raise a lot of money; I just want my team to raise more than they do. So as I was sitting around thinking of new ways to try to motivate my team, it occurred to me that I should use this totally unjustified and irrational hatred to my advantage and pass it along to the people on my team. I wonder why I haven’t thought of it before; exploiting people’s healthy desire to see their like-minded peers re-cast as hostile opponents is not only completely natural human instinct, but repeatedly proven to be a highly successful tactic! Hmm, I’m beginning to understand why I was selected to be captain…

Anyway, if you’d like to learn more about Relay For Life and contribute to our team’s efforts, I’ve put yet another link to the site right here.

(Cross posted at Ridiculously inconsistent trickle of consciousness)

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