Get ready for the full monty

So it’s been a month since the last update. I’m lazy, what a surprise. I’ve been back in the U.S. for over 3 weeks now and it has actually gone pretty fast for me even for the slowness of an unemployed summer. I have to admit, Spain was fun and nice but it’s good to be back to all of my favorite places to eat, golf, and hang out. It’s nice to be back to knowing 100% of what’s said and 15 minute, hot showers, back to the American Dollar, which is worth nothing anywhere else.

My journey back to the U.S. was not as simple as my departure. My original flight plan was a mess, Sevilla to Madrid to London to Chicago to Pittsburgh, a 20 hour ordeal. The first flight went without a hitch, I didn’t even get knived waiting for a taxi in Sevilla at dawn like I expected. The flight from Madrid to London was a frantic moment as I realized I had 25 minutes before my plan took off and I was in the wrong building and needed to bus across the huge airport. After getting completely lost for a few minutes I made it to the plan in time. Now the flight was running late and it landed at 3:35, 70 minutes before my next flight. After a few mishaps at the cluster fuck that is Heathrow I made it to the check-in desk 15 minutes before my flight left only to be denied. The reason for not letting me on the plane was that they needed 30 minutes to process my information because the flight was in-bound to the United States. Yes, make sure you be weary of all those American citizens wanting to come back into their own country. I mean really, if I wanted to attack the United States, don’t you think I would pack a truck full of explosives I made in the comfort of my own home within the U.S. and drive it into a government building rather than try to avoid multiple layers of intense security to attack it via an airplane? I mean really America, fucking think, you damn retard. Uh oh, I might have just upped the terrorist watch level to orange.

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I most cases I’ve used my handy-dandy blog to make updates that have little to do with my personal life. But, in keeping with the category marker that lists this as “personal life”, I’m going to talk a little bit about the end of an era. I don’t remember exactly when it happened but poker started for me when I was probably 16, about five years ago. Once I had learned the game it took forever to find people who also knew the game and liked to play it as much as I did. For a couple years my hometown friends and I would play Texas Hold’em in various places and with variable blinds and structure. My addiction became quite apparent to me; I knew what was going on but I couldn’t stop, that is until my friends did. Even after play ended and we all went back home I still wanted to play more, it’s hard to categorize it as much more than an addiction.

In the Fall of 2006 my former roommate Sean introduced me to the wonders of Bodog poker. It was and still is an online gambling site with everything from sports betting to poker. I nervously put I think 40 dollars on my first deposit and played $2 and $4 tournaments. I didn’t do half bad at the beginner tournaments. I was still by no means a pro at the game. Over time through playing with friends at home who knew more than me about the game and my friend Sean, who I’d say was a fairly technical and mathematical player, I started looking at the game differently. I took delight in my small victories here and there and proudly would cash out 20 dollars at a time on Bodog. Eventually I placed in a large multi-table tournament and got a couple hundred bucks. Bodog did not have a high limit on withdrawal of money, so each week I made enough to take about $30 off. This was my tiny supplemental income for the fall of 2006.

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A couple weeks ago I was angered, tired, and distraught. I wanted to be done with the boundless amounts of work that had been bestowed upon me by 6 college courses. I was tired of doing group projects and papers, the mind-numbing repetition of daily live that was submitting lesson plans and creating materials. My mind was focused on a singular week of time that was Thanksgiving vacation. It really is quite odd how the holiday season is laid out for college students. In the spring semester it makes sense to have spring break exactly half way through the semester. You don’t work an 8 hour shift only to get put on break 6.5 hours into your shift (unless you happen to work in the fast food industry or Wal Mart). This is what the fall semester is like. You go 11 weeks without a break and then you get an entire week for Thanksgiving, and then you have 3 more weeks of class until you are done with the entire semester.

Don’t get me wrong, I am surely not complaining about it. Thanksgiving vacation has come and gone now. Aside from about half a dozen large ordeals, that will no doubt consume my life, the semester is over. The largest determining factor in a typical collegian’s life is their final exam layout. We here at Penn State pride ourselves on being able to throw everyone into a computer and spit out their final exam schedule. While this may be the simplest way, it is also the most painful. What I mean is, you have no choice in when your final exams will be even though it may make no sense. If you are unlucky enough to have 1 final and it is on the last day of finals week, you spend 4 days going insane because everyone you know has to study. Some people have 6 finals, and some people have none…it is up to the professor and the luck of the draw. I hit the semi-grand daddy of all final exam schedules second only to having zero finals. I have 1 final and it is on the first day of finals week. This instantly gives me 4 bonus days of x-mas vacation.

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This past weekend I returned home to the small, quiet town of West Middlesex. I skipped my classes on Friday because I only skip when I plan it out. I never just get up one morning and go “You know, I don’t think classes are for me today.” and then go back to sleep. Perhaps I justify my absences via saying I deserve a break. In any case, I arrived back at home Thursday evening where I immediately went to Denny’s with Jeremy and Julie. I was starving and I missed them so it was a good combination.

I’m not going to devote this entry to going over in mind-numbing detail what I did over the weekend, because when people do that I just want to kill myself (figuratively of course). But I do want to say I got to see the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra play and it was spectacular. I knew that they would play Wagner and Beethoven, and I eat that classical shit up. The piece from Beethoven that they played was his Symphony No. 5 which probably everyone in the world knows. It was just such a treat for me to hear and see professionals play a classical music piece that I’ve heard shitty recordings of for years. The musicians really got into it, too.

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