Food, Work, Poker

I'm tired of eating the same food all the time. Since I lack culinary talent, my diet is limited to Foremanized (trademark) frozen chicken breasts and ninety second wild rice smothered in Worcestershire sauce. I also eat a lot of sandwiches. The meat and bread variety. Occasionally cheese or mayonnaise, usually just meat and bread. I know how to make a few things (eg: enchiladas) but I have zero energy during the week because of the following cycle: have to open so I only get roughly four hours of sleep, work ten hours, come home, try not to fall asleep on the couch by occupying myself with some activity (usually video games, occasionally exercise), activity wakes me up, then I only get four hours of sleep again. All of this drainedness (trademark) breeds negativity which makes me feel like a catapulted myself out of one rut and landed in another. I know that probably just a schedule shift is in order, wherein I must pretend like I'm ninety-seven and go to bed at 9pm and wake up at 5am, but I really don't want to be that person. I think cocaine is a much better sounding solution. Mountains of blow. My apartment will look like a sugar factory except my workers will be skinnier and more productive. Hollow eyes will abound. For entertainment I will occasionally partake in a cymbal crash using one of the many pairs of cymbals that I have hidden around my coke complex. The junkies will wet themselves in their over-amped state.

These are the things I think about while I try not to fall asleep at work.

A quick work note: My boss is a self-proclaimed punctuality freak. I am habitually late. This ends poorly.

I played three HU matches tonight. I went 1-2, but I played well. On the very first hand of the first match I flopped a Q high straight flush with Q8cc on a JT9ccc board. I thought this was a sign. It was not. The guy I was playing was a pretty easy read, but he ran magma hot. At one point, he made straights in four of six hands. In three of those I had two pair. He also flopped three boats, one with 46o vs my QQ. He would hammer me down to 2-3k, I would grind back up to 8kish and then my two pair would go down to a straight again. I did play well though and even ran over his luck in the third one, but my brain is too tired for more poker. Also, I biffed and missed a lot of the tourneys in the Bugsy's Championship as it started this week and not next week. I'm still going to try to play an event or two, likely only the 10k Guaranteed Main Event unless I can rock out some HUs in the next two days. Ok bed time. Yep, it's 9:47pm.

Reading/Listening, McDonald's, Work, Poker

Reading: White Noise by Don DeLillo. Actual links this time. I'm about one hundred pages in, and the shit hits the fan very shortly from what I understand, so I'm curious to see where things go. DeLillo has some brilliant lines in the first part of the book, none of which I'm going to look up and put here now because I have to be to work in about seven hours. I'll likely post them tomorrow.

Listening: Still Going Back to Cali by Notorious BIG. I'm not sure why this song has such power over me, but it does. Hopefully I will break from its clutches this week.

As Jeff and I were driving by a McDonald's on Monday night, I had the strange urge to yell "McDonald's makes their burgers from children!" at the line of cars in the drive-thru. I was barely able to restrain myself to the point that Jeff asked what was wrong with me. I told him. We laughed heartily.

I thought this work week was going to be easy. I was wrong. While I did have today (Tuesday) off, I work 7:15-5:30 tomorrow and 7:15-5:00 on Thursday. I close Friday and then work 8:45-1:15 on Saturday. I do have a training class from 1-4:30 on Thursday that should break things up, but I think it will suck because I'll spend the entire time trying to stay awake. I'm starting to hate the phrase "Banker's Hours" because only the boss has good hours. My "Banker's Hours" are pretty much open to close for four weekdays and then Saturday mornings. I'm willing to trade for another occupation's hours.

I haven't played any poker yet, but I'm starting to digest some things from my recent losses. Also, as lame as it sounds and as much as I hate to say it, I'm learning a lot from Poker After Dark. I'm not really going to go into too much detail, but I need to improve my betting. I used to bet pot, pot, pot for the most part, whether I was bluffing or I had it. I still like the idea because it makes it hard to determine what I had. However, I'm missing a lot of value by doing that because the bets get too big and drive hands out of the pot that would call for less. Further, if I have a bit more variation in my bet sizes, it will add one more element to my game that will confuse opponents. I want to play some matches this week and try to rebuild a roll to play the Bugsy's Tourneys with, but if I can only play one or two events next week, so be it.

Monique, Beaver Crossing, Huskers, No Poker

My parents did awesome. My new car, Monique, is a 2002 Oldsmobile Aurora. It's a pearl color and it's way too nice for me. I'm getting her a garage when I get paid to shelter her from all the nasty things outside. She has many wonderful toys for me to play with like memory seats with butt heaters and buttons galore. She also has a sunroof which I have done without since around 2002ish, so I will be running sunroof open and heater on until the first snowflake hits the ground. I think that my problem with my truck was that I didn't name her. My cars have been Bertha (1982 Chevy Malibu Classic), Berly (1984 Chevy Camaro Berlinetta), Vanessa (1994 Ford Ranger), and Veronica (2000 Mercury Cougar). In case you haven't noticed, I'm of the opinion that a man's car should have a female name (I'm not sure if there has ever been a woman named Berly, but deal with it). Women's cars should have men's names. It's just how it works. And they should be foreign sounding and intriguing.

As I was driving back to Omaha, I passed Beaver Crossing and laughed as usual. When I was 6ish, I was going to either Lincoln or Omaha with my dad and my sister. We were in the front seat of a truck and I was in the middle. My dad and my sister were chanting off the names of the various counties denoted by numbers on license plates because my dad had lied to my sister and told her that she couldn't get her license unless she memorized them all. I interrupted their game by loudly yelling at my dad to slow down. He dutifully did so and asked why in a scared tone. "Because there's a beaver crossing in one mile, the sign just said so!" I was so worried for the defenseless beavers trying to make their way across interstate while avoiding the hulking two ton death machines hurtling at them at ungodly speed. Poor beavers.

This pains me to say because I'm such a ridiculous Husker fan: we need to get embarrassed in the rest of our games (except Colorado). This is the only way that change will come about. If we win out or improve, there will be excuses to keep Cosgrove as defensive coordinator or Steve Pedersen as AD (I'm not after Callahan's head quite yet). However, if we become the laughingstock of college football, shit will go down. It's the only thing I can hope for now because we suck shit and it's not going to get any better with the aforementioned making influential decisions.

Reading/Listening, Work, Card Sharks, Poker

Reading: White Noise by Don DeLillo. No link. This is a quick and dirty long blog. I'm only twentyish pages into it right now, but it's not drawing me in. I hope it picks up as I hear it does in the second half. I'm guessing that I will need something light to read after I finish this, so I'm eyeing Galapagos by Vonnegut next, but who knows. My wants and desires typically change on a whim, so I'll just as likely to read Rousseau when I'm done with White Noise.

Listening: Going back to Cali by Notorious BIG. It's awesome.

Work is going well. My job is fairly simple and I'm becoming comfortable with more things every day. The worst part are the hours. Since I have to work most Saturdays and Saturdays are only four hours, I "get" to work two ten hour shifts a week to make up the hours. Add in my forty-five minute lunch and I'm there for half the day. Which brings me to my gripes: waking up early and having no day. I have to be up in five hours because I work 7:15am-5:00pm tomorrow. And when I get home, run a few quick errands, and eat, it will be 8pm or later. I pretty much have no week. My exercise is falling off, and if I didn't stay up late, I would feel like I had zero life. However, I only have to put up with this for one year. Deep breaths...

Card Sharks sucked. It was totally chick lit, but bad chick lit. Any given line of dialogue felt like the author was forgetting "Oh my god" at the beginning of it and it was absolutely unbelievable. Here's a summary of the entire book: nerdy tax accountant girl (NTA) and soon-to-be-poor trust fund girl (TFG) can't meet men despite NTA's super-hotness and charisma and TFG's super-hotness and flashiness. NTA's ex-that-is-still-around says that all single men are playing poker every night, so NTA and TFG go to play poker with EX and HNG (hot neighbor guy). The women play poker like ten times and then NTA wins a seat into the World Series of Poker (value $10,000). NTA is obsessed with poker by this time but TFG is still on the man hunt in Vegas. HNG is always there for her but not rich and she is a gold digger, EX is still supportive and defensive for NTA despite his failure to commit. NTA marries HNG pissing off EX and TFG, but then NTA gets fourth in the WSOP Championship, everybody makes up, EX and NTA tell each other that they want to get married and HNG tells TFG that he loves her and is going to be rich. Then BRET pukes.

I pulled a Londer and lost around $600 in two days. I had done a great job of staying away from poker and then I read that stupid book, got mad at how unrealistic the poker was in it and apparently decided to prove the author wrong by showing how easy it is to lose. I started out playing bad, started playing better but had a couple of bad beats laid on me, then the wheels fell off. I wasn't playing awful at the start, but I was laying down too many hands all the way and had shit for a table image. I then got aggressive and made most of it back when hands like my JJ vs Jx 3h on a J 9h 2h flop comes, we get all the money in, and the board comes heart heart. This led to more bad play, which led to me quitting before I was bust. I still have like $160ish left, so I have something to rebuild with, but I would rather have my $600 back. I guess I don't learn some lessons, I just increase the amount of times between Londers.

Big Liar

Through a combination of back pain and general insomnia, I only got two hours of sleep last night before my 10.5 hour shift. Then I had a bunch of errands to run and things to do at home. Bottom line: no in-depth post tonight. Easy day tomorrow so definitive post. Sorry for being a fibber.

Absence, Poker

I was very busy with work this past week and also had a few non-work things going on, so I really wasn't motivated to spend the fifteen minutes or so that it takes me to write a blog. The blog will, however, return to its regularly scheduled postings tomorrow.

I only played one day of poker since my last post, and it was a BAD day. I will elaborate tomorrow.

Carlin, Camus, No Poker

These may or may not be quick.

The Carlin book was fun, but it was primarily stuff that he has done in stand-up. I would say that I recognized 85-90% of the stuff in the book, and I'm guessing that everything in there appears on a comedy DVD or CD somewhere. It's still nice to get Carlin's refreshing point of view on most things because our society gets bogged down in bullshit quite often. George is a guy who cuts right through all of it, and it makes you look at how you lead your life, which we all should do regularly.

I hated The Stranger by Camus. I read the introduction which discussed all of the philosophy behind the book, but when I read the story, I was let down. Maybe something was lost in translation, but what I thought the book lacked was a human element for the main character. Meursault (sp?) just wasn't a real person to me. I understand the point that Camus was trying to make (according to the preface); that we don't all have to buy into social norms and that they can be oppressive, but he went beyond social norms and past basic animal instincts like the right to survive or logical thought. I feel that the main character is mentally disabled and we simply weren't told that, because I don't buy into the notion that self-preservation is a social norm. Interesting idea, terrible execution.