Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fungus
Well, who says absence makes the heart grow fonder
In all the pictures that you send to me
Your hair seems to get just a little bit blonder
Cars break down
And people break down
And other things break down too
I felt something slip
When you left on your trip
And now I think I'm breaking down on you
-The Refreshments
Yeah, so I haven't updated in a while. Spent most of the month very, very depressed. I've been really sick, which hasn't helped, although I have lost about 20 pounds. Of course that just means that the $300 suit I just bought won't fit by the time I get a chance to wear it. My job is still killing me. Home life has still been alternately stressful and boring. But the real problem, the absolute heart of the matter, is that I dropped almost $1100 throughout the month of August.
As of August 1, I had just moved up to the 3/6 tables on Full Tilt and was doing pretty well for myself. Then the slide started. Honestly, I can't tell whether all the things whined about above are the cause or the effect of the slide. I think it's a self-feeding cycle: drop a couple buy-ins, bad mood sets in, making all the other things seem/get worse, which just tilts me more, making me drop a couple of buy-ins... Later. Rinse. Repeat.
Things have mostly turned around now. I'm eating occasionally, home has settled down to just boring, work isn't bothering me quite as much (except while I'm there), and I've started the long slow climb out of the hole I've dug. For the moment, I've dropped back to 2/4. I think I plugged my leaks well enough to handle 3/6 again, but I'm going to make myself earn it.
All things considered, the month could have been worse on my bankroll. Barring a really bad or really good night tonight, I should finish up around $900 in the red for the month, but thanks to my obsessive bonus chasing the final total will be more like -$400. If that's the worse downswing I ever take... well, I should be so lucky. I've read other bloggers having downswings 100x that amount.
Hey, I got mentioned on
Card Club! Cincy and Stacks read bits of my email on the air. I feel like such a fanboy for getting excited, but it was really just a quick Thanx that I dashed off to them after listening to the last show, so I wasn't expecting to get airtime. They did make the first public announcement of my impending podcast, which I mentioned was directly inspired by them. They even promised to pimp it, no matter how disgusting or profane the subject matter. It really makes me want to strive to offend, but that's really not my forte. Still, I'm going to hold them to it... as soon as something is ready.
Speaking of ready, I've got a longish post (oh, like this one is short or something?) on How I Turned It Around earlier this month that's almost in the can. Expect that sometime soon. I've got a major announcement that I hope to make in the next week or so, for which you will all (yes, all
twothree of my readers) will call me crazy. I've got a whole bunch of blog posts flagged in
Rojo that I want to comment on. I've got quickie reviews of some of my favorite poker blogs written and Saved As Drafts in blogger. I've got design changes coming. And I've got to get back to work.
Shot In The Dark
"Am I dark?" I asked my friend.
"You mean, like, your skin, or...?"
"I don't know. I was told I'm dark."
That's not exactly what I was told. I was half-way through a bottle of wine with an attractive friend when she said, "I love you, Brian. You're always so dark."
Cute girls telling me why they love me always seems to stick in my brain. Unfortunately, I did not have the same reaction with whatever I said that inspired her commentary. I don't honestly pay much attention to anything that
I say, but I've never really thought of myself as dark.
"I'm a realist," said the optimist. "Yeah, well, good luck with that then," the pessimist replied.
"I don't know if I'd call you dark," my friend finally replied. "Although your humour can be."
There's only two kinds of funny. There's human suffering, and there's juxtaposition of the absurd. You can, of course, combine the two (Alan Funt As A Nazi: "We were just wondering what would happen if we installed jets that spew deadly gasses into these average-looking shower stalls. Let's watch.") but all humour can be reduced to one of those.
Of the two, juxtaposition of the absurd is far more humourous. Unfortunately, not everyone finds the same things absurd that I do. One man's Alien Kidnapping is another man's Finding Five Dollars In An Old Coat Pocket. Human suffering, on the other hand, is universal. Man Falling On Banana Peel is funny to anyone in the world, no matter what color the man is, where the banana peel is sitting, or what language he uses to say "FUCK!"
It really isn't that I'm dark. It's just that my idea of absurd is so much more absurd than yours. The jokes about human suffering are the only ones that most people understand.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Despite the following results:
the Wit
(68% dark, 23% spontaneous, 5% vulgar) |
your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK
You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're
probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean pretentious. You
realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons'
philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most
other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.
I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer.
Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.
PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais
AND FINALLY -- after you rate my test with a sweet, sweet '5' -- you must take this test next: The Genghis Khan Genetic Fitness Test. It's not mine, but it rocks.
|
 |
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: | You scored higher than 88% on dark | | You scored higher than 3% on spontaneous | | You scored higher than 0% on vulgar |
|
Hey, Everybody Wants To Pass As Cats
I was actually in the process of writing a long, introspective entry on the advantages of having a blog that no one actually reads when I noticed that
ScurvyDog had actually left a comment. Less that 10 clicks later, I determined that I had failed to set it up to email comments to myself. Bad Captain, no biscuit for you.
Somehow, almost immediately, all those advantages I had started to write about seemed incredibly unimportant. Upon re-reading, every paragraph I had written screamed, "Fuck it, those grapes are sour anyway." I guess it's only human to appreciate attention. "We all want to be big big stars, but we get all fucked up about that."
I kind of feel bad too. I had offered to help Scurvy with
BonusBug, a site he set up to announce and discuss poker and casino bonuses. Then this whole
house thing came up, with all the attendant time-suckage, and I never even got to look at the code. For what it's worth, if you're reading this and interested in free money, you ought to check it out... it's already better designed and more informative than
bonuswhores. Hopefully in a month or so, once life settles down a bit, I'll be able to help him add some of the super-k-rad-nifty features we talked about and it will be better still.
To answer your question, Scurvy, we don't own the house... at least, not yet. The owner (and our landlord) did a pretty half-assed job of fixing the place up sometime in the mid 1970's and really hasn't put any work into it since. This would be fine, except that he's asking $600K for the place, which is the top of the price range for the nicer houses on the block. So for now, we rent.
Once we get some furniture in the right spots and there's at least ten square feet of floor space not covered by cardboard, I'll get some pictures of the inside up, but it's pretty amazing. Legend has it that it was used as the Italian Consulate during the 1904 World's Fair, and has been both a brothel and an illegal casino at various times throughout the last 100 years. If things work out such that we're still living there in a few years, I'm definitely going to start looking for ways we can talk the landlord into selling. While it needs quite a bit of work, it
feels nicer than anywhere else I've ever lived.
I'm told that once you go mansion, you never go back.
Returning to the question of readership, I suppose I ought to just give in and admit that I wish there were more people reading this drivel. Of course, there's no one to blame but myself and my laziness there. It's not enough to Build It and hope that They Come. The closest I've come to publicizing this space is a few comments in
other people's blogs with the URL, and telling my friends who are too busy to read anything that doesn't show up on their
LiveJournal Friends Page.
Sigh. I guess that means I'm going to have to do some work around here.
So, coming soon to a blog near you: an actual blog-roll with a few (for starters) of my favorite feeds. A hit-counter or something so I know if anyone actually shows up. Some linkage for some recently-discovered local peeps. And a special request involving The Hammer. If all of that doesn't bring in an eyeball or two, I'll just go back to writing the post on The Advantages Of Being Alone.
