My grandpa and Ava

I'm not sure if it gets any cuter...

Ava's first graduation

I arrived at my parent's house in the afternoon of December 15th, and 12 hours later, was on the road for a 500+ mile drive to Tennessee for my cousin's graduation.

While at the ceremony, Ava was super-talkative. My best photos were of her, rather than the activities on the stage.

Only happy... all the time

Okay-- so there's this site called Happy News.com and their whole goal is to provide happy news, rather than the depressing stuff.

I'm used to depressing news. Happy news? What's that like? So I had to check it out...

What I realized, after browsing the headlines for a few minutes, is that what I was doing was looking for unhappy news. It wasn't an intentional thing--- but the cynic in me was like "yeah right--- there's gotta be some bad news in here somewhere..."

There is bad news at HappyNews.com. Not just questionably good, or "good from most perspectives", news (of which there is also a lot of). Actual bad news. It took me a while to find it, but the Environment section seems so obvious in hindsight.

In the Health section though, I read an interesting story about a professor who has lost 50 lbs. and has developed a new no-diet diet. It's called "intuitive eating", and he eats whatever he wants.

Apparently, he's happy with it.

Restricted

Before I started this blog, I had decided that I would keep the language at a PG-13 level.

I'm for the most part a PG-13 guy anyway :)... it's not much of a restriction to only say bastard, ass, shit, dick, bitch, screw, piss, balls, prick, love-canal, tits, melons, and boobies.

I think it's interesting that most of our bad words concentrate around bodily functions, body parts, and things that you do with body parts.

Also, I realize that several of the above words are some of the famous "Seven Dirty Words", but I believe that shit, piss, and tits are all part of a PG-13 vocabulary. They just don't seem very bad.

I learned a new word today though. One that I REALLY like--- which is the inspiration for this foul post. Really, it's the climax of this foul post. If you've been offended up to this point, then read no further, for this post is about to cross over into an "R" rating.

The new word that I learned today is "unfuck". I had never heard it before, and it's a fascinating word--- which, I think, has a lot more versatility than the common non-pre-fix-ed root...

Some examples of the actual usage are:

You can't unfuck a sheep.
Could you unfuck these cords for me?

Brilliant. So eff'ing brilliant.

hang-ed

Yesterday, I felt less than 100%. It was not challenging to pinpoint the cause.

Some days, my mortality is undeniable.

Good article about poker

I don't come across many good articles about poker... This article is a very good one to read though, if any of you are interested in playing the game: Poker Can Be an Addiction or a Character Builder

Poker is fun... it's exciting... it can be financially lucrative... One of the things that poker is not, though, is glamorous. It's a tough way of living. Psychologically, it can be very demanding. For example, you don't ever know if you're going to win money or lose money for the day, or the week, or the month... (and that's the relatively easy part)... Believe me--- if you lose money after working your ass off for a month, it becomes very difficult to get out of bed in the afternoon.

Most difficult though, is that there is a fine line between being a winning player and a losing player. It's easy for a winning player to cross that line, and many times it's extremely difficult to analyze your play and figure out what you're doing wrong.

The feedback mechanisms that we all use to learn are not valid for poker. For example, if you touch something hot, it hurts and you know not to touch it again (unless you're into that sort of thing). In poker though, you need to be very careful to separate the short-term feedback from your long-term results. What I mean is--- you can do very stupid things, make bone-headed plays, and make a lot of money... short-term. That short-term success reinforces in your mind that you are playing good. Over the long-run though, you will lose money by making those bad plays, and our brains are just not designed to automatically process that kind of long-term feedback.

When you first start to learn, and play the lower limits, it's not difficult to evaluate which plays are bad and which plays are good. It's just math. At the higher levels though, math is not as important. It becomes more of an art, and that makes self-evaluation much much more difficult.

Most professional poker players live miserable lives. It's not the glamorous scene that TV portrays. I admit that my life is pretty good--- but it requires a lot of self-control and discipline, something that most people who are attracted to "gambling" as a profession don't have very much of.

The last part of the article deserves to be quoted:

I'd like to give the following stern piece of advice to all the new poker players out there. If saying "no" to yourself 3 times out of 4 isn't your cup of tea, then poker is not going to be your friend. You'd be better off having a beer or two. But if you've got the patience to sift through all the garbage while waiting for a good hand, and then can exercise the self-discipline to throw that good hand away when your clear vision says you've been beat, poker can be a satisfying and financially rewarding character builder.

All good poker players have this quality. Most weren't born with it; they developed it. They learned how to tell themselves the truth, even when the truth was disappointing and they can use that virtue to their advantage in all aspects of their lives.

I read my first poker book almost 30 years ago, Poker, a Guaranteed Income by Frank Wallace. It contained a one page epilogue that I believe described true poker most eloquently. I'll summarize that inspiring epilogue here:

Poker is a character catalyst that forces players to reality. Those who evade thinking cannot escape the penalties. The winning poker player views all situations realistically. He pits the use of his mind against the unwillingness of his opponents to think. The loser makes himself a loser. The winner makes himself a winner. Poker is sheer justice.

A bottle of wine, and some thoughts on language

So I’ve completed my second whole week of Spanish lessons, and I feel like I’m progressing fairly quickly.  Adriana is a wonderful teacher, and is very good at explaining the reasons behind things… I suck at learning if I don’t have a foundation of underlying theory, and so I couldn’t have been more lucky in finding her.

The difficult thing about learning Spanish is that I have to learn how to think differently.  One could say that Spanish-speakers and English-speakers think the same, and just express it differently through language… but I don’t think that there is any way that could be true.

In college, I used to try to come up with “good questions”… it was sort of a game.  One of the questions from back then that has stuck with me is “Can you think without language?”.  Until recently, I had continued to ponder this question, and even minored in Philosophy of Language while in grad school primarily because of my interest in this question.

Now I don’t think it’s that good of a question at all, for a number of reasons… but basically, I am confident that one COULD think without language, but WE can’t think without language… if that makes any sense.

What I have been thinking lately is this:

1. When you learn a language, it becomes the underlying structure for your thoughts.


2. If you know a language, it’s impossible for you to entirely separate your thoughts from that structure/framework


3. Spanish and English have very different structures.. especially in terms of sentence structure.


4. Therefore, Spanish and English speakers must think differently.

This isn’t to say that Spanish and English speakers don’t usually come to the same conclusions… but I think that the thought-processes are necessarily different.

Adriana said something to me that I had never thought about before, but it makes a lot of sense.  She said that the reason English is such a successful language is not so much about cultural domination, but because it works.  

That resonates with me--- a kind of “evolution” of language.  A language that describes things in a more functional way will survive as other languages are replaced.  

I also wonder though whether the structure of thought that English supports is at the root of our domination of other cultures, the environment, etc…. thousands of academic papers have touched on aspects of this--- but what I mean is a little different, and not something that I have seen published before… I mean the basic sentence structure, which provides an order and categorization for everything that we perceive, which in turn affects our interpretation, then action,  etc…

These are just random thoughts though, me trying to make sense out of something that I don't understand, and not necessarily very interesting… no one is forcing you to read this :)


Poker is also a language.  The thing that complicates poker is that the goal tends to be miscommunication.

It’s a very simple language though--- especially online poker… in live poker, you add a lot more information, through body language… but in online poker, there are only a few words arranged in very short sentences.

What makes the language of poker so complex though is that there are a wide variety of interpretations possible, and it’s your job as a player to figure out what your opponent means by their “words” AND how your opponent will interpret your “words”, and then take advantage of that so that they misinterpret what you “say” and make a mistake.  It’s not simple.

The difference between playing against a bad player, a good player, or a great player has nothing to do with vocabulary.  The vocabulary is very simple.  The difference is in what the words can mean and how they can be interpreted.  In actuality, a good player is the easiest to play against--- because their “words” typically mean fewer things than a bad/great player’s, and their interpretations are much more predicable and exploitable.

The early bird

The birds here are definitely of the early variety.  

At least an hour before there is even any hint of light in the sky, they start chirping like crazy.  It’s really strange.  For the last few years, the sound of birds chirping has been one of my signals to go to sleep… but here, it’s just way WAY too early for any self-respecting poker player… and they only get louder and louder as it gets closer to dawn.

There’s only one explanation:  these birds are freakin’ ambitious.

Kiss of Death

I was reading this story the other day: The kiss of death for nut allergy girl, and the more I started thinking about it, the more horrible it became to me.

To sum up the story, this 15 year-old girl in Canada was kissed by her boyfriend and then died. He had minute traces of peanut on his lips, and she was extremely allergic.

Of course-- it's horrible that this girl died. If it was just some girl dying of a nut-allergy, I would have forgotten about the story though.

I think the worst part is the boyfriend--- what kind of emotional scarring is going to occur there? Killing somebody by kissing them? I've had some not-so-good endings to some of my relationships, but nothing really compares to that.

"and that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires"

I mentioned in my post on Nov. 26 (18 More Days) that I was feeling like I wanted to come back to Buenos Aires after the holidays--- and now it's official.

I'm planning on coming back in early January for 3 months. I've already found a couple of apartments that I like, which are nicer than I currently have and at about 60% of the current price that I pay.

I really like my Spanish teacher, and am looking forward to continuing my lessons when I get back. I'm not sure if 3 months will be enough time to get a handle on this language, but I'll at least get better. I've also met a few interesting foreigners through Adrianna, and it'll be nice to get to know them better.

I'm excited about coming back! I'm just not sure if 3 months will be long enough... :)

**The title of this post is a line from a Jorge Luis Borges poem, "That One".

The Train

Currently, my favorite song is Breakdown by Jack Johnson.  It’s strange, no?, that no favorite thing seems to change as often as a song.  I’m not sure why that is--- there are really only three possibilities.  The first being that a better song comes along (which I think is the least common reason), or you can listen to the song so much that you get sick of it (I think this usually happens with songs that aren’t actually good in the first place), or lastly, you can just move on to a point where the song doesn’t speak to you anymore.  I think that this last reason is probably the most common--- and it’s why hearing a song that used to be your favorite years ago evokes such emotion.  Songs are like landmarks.

So anyway-- Breakdown has been my favorite song for almost 3 months now… If 1 year is 7 dog years, 1 year might be 20 song years… I don’t know what the exact equation is, but it’s a long time.

What has kept my interest for so long is the metaphor:

Breakdown by Jack Johnson

i hope this old train breaks down
then i can take a walk around and
see what there is to see
time is just a melody
but all the people in the streets
walk as fast as their feet can take ‘em
i just roll through town
and though my window's got a view
well the frame i’m lookin' through
seems to have no concern for now

so for now

i need this
old train to breakdown
oh please just
let me please breakdown

well this engine screams out loud
centipede gonna crawl westbound and
so i don't even make a sound cause
its gonna sting me when leave this town
and all the people in the streets
that i’d never get to meet
if these tracks don't bend somehow
and i got no time
that i got to get to where i dont need to be

so i

i need this here
old train to breakdown
oh please just
let me please breakdown
i need this
old train to breakdown
let me please break down
i wanna break on down but i can't stop now
let me break on down

but you can't stop nothin'if you got no control
of the thoughts in your mind
that you kept and you know
you dont know nothin
but you dont need to know
the wisdoms in the trees
not the glass windows
you can't stop wishin if you dont let go
the things that you find and you lose and you know
you keep on rollin'
put the moment on hold
the frame's too bright
so put the blinds down low

i need this
old train to breakdown
oh please just
let me please breakdown
wanna break on down
but i can't stop now

Of course, listening to the song is better than just reading the lyrics.  It’s hard to get a feel for it without hearing it.

I feel like, when I was in school, I was on that train…. and I might have just changed trains, and am on a different one now--- but at least I’m not looking out a window wishing that I was going somewhere else anymore.

When I quit school, I worried a lot of people.  It was just not comprehensible-- and I understand why…. they just didn’t know how much I wasn’t looking forward to the life that lay ahead of me.

I worry-- I’ve always been a worrier… but one of the only things that I worry about nowadays is that something is going to happen and I won’t be able to play poker, more specifically, won’t be able to make money playing poker anymore, and that I’ll have to get back on that train.

It reminds me of another song lyric-- sung my Janis Joplin-- “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”.  I think that this wrong though… I agree that there is a freedom associated with not having anything to lose, but it implies that freedom itself cannot be lost.    

Maze

On one of the poker strategy forums that I read, there was a post linking to this little game: River Game.

It's kind of fun, and a good way to waste a few minutes. I would describe it as a maze, because you only ever have a very few options, and you will run into a dead-end fairly quickly if you make the wrong choice.

It also helps to read the directions first.

Mi sobrina

On September 8th, my sister gave birth to a 10.5 lb baby girl. I don't know--- can you say "give birth to" when the baby is born via Caesarian? In any case, Kendra was pregnant, and then she wasn't, and Ava was here.

Ava is pretty amazing. She likes ceiling fans, swings, music, milk, cuddling, and Bob Barker. She doesn't like dogs, long car rides, going to sleep, or waking up.

I'm a proud uncle.

(In the picture, Ava is the little one. She's two months old here.)

Everyone loves a parade

I was walking through town on Saturday, exploring a part of the city that I hadn't been in before, when I stumbled upon a Christmas parade. It was fun. Jingle Bell Rock!

Almost none of my pictures came out well though.... I had to shoot them with my camera held up high, because of all the people that were in the way. I'm kind of disappointed--- there were these girls on rollerskates that were twirling all around and doing fancy synchronized rollerskate moves, and those pictures are blurry. All the children loved some crazy-beetle costumed people, and most of those pictures suck as well.



This picture was good though--- I liked these toy soldier guys. I was thinking that sending a bunch of these toy soliders into troubled regions might be a good idea.

It's worth a try.

all work and no play...

I’m completely exhausted.  I don’t think that I’ve been this mentally worn-out since back in my dark days of engineering.

I blame Party Poker.  Every now and then, they send me an email, offering me some sort of a monetary bonus if I generate a specific amount of revenue for them.  When they sent me the email on November 15th, I looked at it and laughed.  It was just ridiculous.  I even sent them a reply telling them that they might as well not make offers to me that were impossible to fulfill.  They chose not to respond.

So the other day, I was looking at how much I had played, and I realized that I was actually fairly close to fulfilling the offer.  If I played 20 hours of poker before midnight on Nov. 30, I would get the bonus.  

Yesterday and today, I played for a total of 20 hours.

Now 20 hours of work might not seem like a lot to you guys.  A lot of people can easily work 10 hours a day.  I usually try to put in 4 hours.  If I work 5 hours, my brain feels like it’s been put in a blender.

It’s because when I play online, I play 8 tables at a time.  I see over 400 hands of poker per hour… and it’s not something that I can half-ass, or I end up losing a lot of money.  It’s this very high-intensity stressful thing that I voluntarily subject myself to every time I work.  I just can’t maintain that level of focus for a long period of time.

(In further defense of my work-ethic, 4 hours of work for me equates to 32 table-hours…. 30 hours/week of work ends up being 240 table-hours… There aren’t too many people out there that work much more than 200 hours a week…. even the most unethical lawyers keep their billable hours less than that!!)

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I decided to “go for it”… I just hope that I don’t ever decide to do this to myself again.

I need a vacation.