Sweaters.
Recently I got a sweater at this thrift store I had never been in before. It is blue, gold, and white.
My ladyfriend disagrees me with me. She insists that it is in fact VIOLET, gold and white.
Before I go any further, let me just state that she is, without a shadow of a doubt, wrong.
I don’t want to post a photo, since that would interrupt the nice wall-of-text vibe I have going on here. But if you want a visualization of the sweater, Google the Swedish flag and take a look. Each image seems to have its own shade of blue for the flag, but no matter. My sweater looks like that (except it has white.) My ladyfriend, again, argues that the color of the sweater is in fact violet. What she is essentially arguing then is that Sweden’s flag is violet, since my sweater and Sweden’s flag look extremely similar. Sweden’s flag is not violet. It is blue. Wikipedia confirms this.
The debate raged on for a while, until I met her at a local café. I was wearing my sweater, so she instructed me to take off my coat. Once that happened, she asked a nearby stranger to perform the duty of impartial arbiter to decide for once and for all the color of my sweater. He stated that it was a shade of light blue. This came as no surprise to me, because… I was right. Nonetheless, I partook in a small celebration, reveling in my distinction as rightful winner of this dispute.
___
I am a competitive person. Extremely competitive, some might say. (My ladyfriend says this.) I might dispute this somewhat, as I believe I am competitive in certain matters. If I perceive myself as having no chance at winning in a situation, I will take the matter much less seriously, and might not even try at all. If I am heads and above the best in a competitive situation… well, I’ll still try to win, because no one likes to finally prevail over someone who is letting them win. But I won’t get too broken up about the loss, because I know I’ll most likely win again.
However, when I’m in a situation where the victor is much more split down the middle, I will get ultra competitive and fight tooth and nail to emerge victorious. An example includes a holiday game of Trivial Pursuit with my ladyfriend and her family. She and I were racing towards the finish, when her mother read her a question. I think the question had to do with naming the only NFL team to be named after a poem. The answer was the Baltimore Ravens. My ladyfriend deliberated for an extremely long time, and somewhere in the middle her mother GAVE HER A CLUE. I don’t remember what the clue was, but I think she stated a word that featured the sound of “Poe,” complete with extreme emphasis. Oh, I was so mad. She didn’t pick up on the clue (or so she would have me believe,) but after a while she eventually got the answer, and would then go on to win. So essentially, I lost because of a clue. You can’t give clues in Trivial Pursuit. That’s an unspoken rule. The fact I remember any of this months later, given my terrible memory, should prove the extent of my competitiveness.
My ladyfriend is not competitive.
In fact, she insinuated recently that the reason that she is not competitive is because I am TOO competitive, meaning that she most likely resists her competitive urges in order to balance me out.
Am I OK with this? I have ruined what must be a small part of herself just by being too overzealous. I don’t know if I am OK with this. Her competitive spirit might be an integral part of her being that she is completely suppressing because of me. I am definitely not OK with this. But I’m not sure how to fix it.
Which brings me back to the sweater disagreement. Did I handle this completely wrong? Of course, I couldn’t admit that it is violet, since I honestly believed it was blue. But maybe she could have won the argument? Then she could have felt the competitive juices firing up once more, and if I reigned in any reaction that might come out of me. It could be a step in the right direction.
The problem is I already won the argument via a non-biased arbiter. I had no idea she was going to introduce that component, so I couldn’t enact any backup plan. Maybe I could dispute the ruling. But why would I do that? He ruled in my favor. Perhaps we could find second and third opinions, and we could get enough arbiters to deem the sweater’s color as violet. I wouldn’t want to pay anyone off to rule in violet’s favor, because that would obviously be ridiculous. But what if we just kept introducing arbiters until enough of them gave the edge to violet? Best of nine, best of one hundred and thirty three… however long it takes. Maybe there’s a violet fan club that meets every week and we could just randomly ask them to determine the color. But no! That would be skewing the results! We need this to be a clear but honest victory for violet! But that’s probably not possible, because the sweater is obviously blue!
Maybe I can just convince myself it is indeed violet. Maybe if I stare at it long enough, the color will turn magically violet. That can happen, right? The mind does all sorts of strange things, right? Changing one’s own perception of color has to be doable, right? Maybe I will take all the purple-ish things I own, throw it into a big pile, and toss the sweater on top. Then it will look like violet by association. This is doable. I own a bunch of Vikings things. I can gather them together right now. One second.
…
Still blue.
FUDGE.