Masochism for Profit

1:01am: ...so that was law school
Sitting on my nightstand...

...in my bedroom...

...in my parents' house...

...underneath a stack of DVDs...

...is a doctorate.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. I win!

10:55am: Finger-pointing 101 is now in session
Hi, I'm your speaker for the day, Professor Bryant:

I felt fine physically. I felt like I could go the distance," said Bryant, who missed his last six field goal attempts. "I didn't feel like my legs were heavy. I didn't feel tired at all. They just double-teamed me and triple-teamed me. You've got the advantage when that happens. But we didn't make the plays and they did.

For the record, Kobe had 1 assist on the game. One. Single. Assist.

Hey, maybe if you start scoring 60 every game your team might hang onto that playoff spot. Hypocrite.

1:18pm: I really hate looking for jobs
Especially when there are none left to be had.

Sigh.

4:17pm: 300
I just saw 300. It was pretty good, if violent. Parts were completely ridiculous, like the guy with saws for arms. All in all: highly recommended. Well done, Frank Miller.

12:28am: My choices are go to sleep or play more poker and have a heart attack
So I played in two poker tournaments tonight. The first one was free (only 10 frequent player points; I have about 2500), and the prize was entry into the PokerStars Sunday Million tournament for the top 27 finishers. The Sunday Million has a minimum guaranteed prize pool of $1,500,000 this weekend.

The tournament started with a little over 4,300 players. After about 2 hours, I found myself in the top 60. Not just in the top 60: I was in SECOND PLACE. I knew anything can happen in poker though, so I didn't start counting my chickens until I was in 7th place with about 50 players left.

Naturally, right at the three-hour mark, I found myself busting out in 38th place. I took a rough beat - just one! - and after that the blinds ate away at my stack until I had to make a desperate move. A desperate move that failed.

I laid on the ground for a little bit feeling sad for myself. Then, on a whim, I entered a $33 rebuy tournament where the winner got $1,000 plus a seat in the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event. Now, normally i don't like playing in rebuy tournaments. Everyone plays like a maniac because you can always buy back in. Plus, I don't like to buy back in. It gets too expensive. Nonetheless, there were only 214 players. That means only 213 people between me and entry into the Main Event.

So I played for awhile. I played well. I played good poker all night actually. I found myself hanging around in the top 10. And I didn't rebuy even once! After the first hour, I noticed that practically all of the 120 players left had rebought at least once. This put my chipstack barely above average. But I continued to play good poker during the second hour, and I managed to stay in the top 15.

Sadly, I lost two-thirds of my stack (my AJ ran into QQ) in one fell swoop. And on the following hand, my top pair ran into trips. And just like that, I'm out in 90th place and I'm not going to the Main Event.

These details probably bored most of you to tears, but it was a pretty dramatic night for me. Five hours of poker, $33 down the drain, several near heart attacks, and a whole lot of fun. But seriously, now I need to sleep. Maybe I'll do that school thing tomorrow.

1:27pm: Future Pro Beirut Hall of Famer in the house!
Law school is so funny. Yesterday I met this guy named Kevin. He's a 1L.

By day, he was sitting in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom, asking the Honorable Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (who was visiting Wash U yesterday, btw) how she felt about the way the Supreme Court handled the whole Bush-Gore fiasco. It was an awesome question, and I wish I could remember it verbatim so I could post it here. Needless to say, it took some balls for a first year law student to ask this to one of the most important Supreme Court Justices of all time. I saw several people congratulate him on asking the question for the rest of the day, and rightfully so. For the record, she gave a pretty defensive reply to the question which included the phrase, "I don't lose any sleep over it."

By night, I watched him team up with my old roommate to form the team "The Democratic Republic of Congo" (if you don't get that reference, hop on YouTube and remedy that immediately) and lose in the opening round of the Wash U Law Softball Club's Valentine's Day Eve Beirut Tournament. He then proceeded to get totally hammered and become my team's (cleverly known as "Daag/Roma" because my partner was Roma) biggest fan as we stomped our way to the semi-finals of the tournament before losing to the eventual champions.

The fact that one person can be involved in both of those stories on the same day goes to show that I had law school pegged all wrong before. It's a great thing.

11:46am: Hmm, maybe St. Louis isn't all that bad after all
Tuesday - few hours of poker with the guys after class
Wednesday - moved furniture into the apartment all day
Thursday - bar hopping, super late night trip to Del Taco
Friday - big sushi lunch, happy hour, dinner at Mac Grill, stopped by birthday party downtown
Saturday - beirut tournament, late night trip to Taco Bell with my partner
Sunday - Super Bowl party

Methinks that I was missing out my first couple of years here. Who knew?!

12:39am: Don't mistake fate for coincidence
As I re-entered St. Louis, "Mr. Brightside" shuffled its way onto my MP3 player. How appropriate.



(Wait a sec, what did he say?!)

2:26am: High school reunion
Tonight, my friend and fellow class of 2000 alum Rico Brown organized an unofficial high school reunion for people that graduated from my high school between '99 and '04. I decided I'd go because, well, I didn't have anything better to do if I was going to be in Savannah and it was going to be Christmas Eve eve.

All I have to say is wow. I honestly don't think I've ever been happier after coming home from a bar. It was way better than I ever thought it would be. I saw so many people I haven't seen since graduation. The highlight of my night had to be when my friend Faisal (who I've known since 1st grade but actually DIDN'T go to my high school) told me our friend Ashley, who moved away after 1st grade, was at the bar. We spent several minutes looking for her until we realized it was just an Ashley look alike. A few minutes later, Faisal runs into Tracey Hewitt, a girl we'd gone to school with for all of elementary school. Talk about surprises! I was literally speechless for like a minute after seeing her. Imagine growing up with someone and then randomly meeting them in a bar 15 years later. Yeah, that's what happened. Her boyfriend kept looking at me suspiciously though, especially after she kissed me goodbye. Heh.

On top of all that, I got several phone numbers, so I should be hanging out with old friends for the rest of my time in town. I needed a night like tonight. I was starting to get bored to tears.

Three cheers for Rico!!

6:38am: Are You Afraid of the Dark?
So tonight (early this morning, actually) I downloaded the beta version of the Opera browser for my Wii. Once I found out it was Flash enabled, I started looking for cool video sites. I wound up at alluc.org, where I found some episodes of one of my favorites as a kid, Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

Dude. This show. Wow. This show is still kinda scary now. How on earth did I watch this when I was like 10 years old and NOT crap my pants??

P.S. - The Wii is like the greatest invention ever.

5:41pm: Out of sight, out of mind
That's how I've felt for the past 4-6 months. You get close to people over the course of weeks or months (or, in some cases, years). But then you face some geographical distance. Maybe it's from Durham to Chapel Hill. Maybe it's from the Eastern time zone to the Central time zone. And all of a sudden, you're forgotten.

Normally this would be no big deal for me. I'm notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people. But I've been working really hard at correcting that. I actually write people, call people, attempt to see people. Guess I picked a bad time to try to do that.

I was talking to a really close friend yesterday (let's call this person Pat, for convenience) whom I haven't seen in about 7 months (but talk to regularly), and I was talking about how I recently have started worrying about my friends. I can't really explain why, I know it's kinda silly. I suppose between Will's passing and Allison's near encounter with that unsane gunman in Chicago (which gunman? this gunman), I've started to realize people die. No shit, right?

Anyway, so I'm talking about this and it's obvious that I'm talking about something important to me, and all Pat can do is ridicule me and ask me what the hell I'm worrying about. And I'm just thinking to myself, this person is generally not rude, not mean-spirited. From talking to Pat and reading Pat's away messages and Facebook (I'm still quite the webstalker), Pat seems to be your regular happy-go-lucky twentysomething. But since I moved to Durham to do my thing, that's the way Pat's been to me. If I even get the courtesy of a hello (which I usually don't), I get rudeness and meanness. And like I said above, I've tried extra hard to keep in touch and whatnot. I even bought Pat a birthday present and sang happy birthday! Since when do I sing??

I feel like my decision to take time off from school was 100% the right decision because otherwise I'd be hating my life and quite possibly failing out of law school. But every once in awhile something like THIS will happen, and I'll think that maybe I made the wrong choice. What is the price of making my life easier for a year? Is it worth losing potential lifelong friends? Maybe, in actuality, I'm finding out which people I called friends before really ARE my friends. For every two Pats out there, there's at least one person who's still keeping it real. Hell, I have friends that I haven't seen in YEARS that I still talk to daily. I dunno, whatever.

I wish I could just tell all my Pats to take a hike. Unfortunately, I can't.

2:48am: ORLY? YARLY!
If you ignore the bullshit, life is simple. Why didn't I realize this earlier?

Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Hmmm..

2:13am: Life is short
"Life is short."

I hear it all the time, but I never really think about it. On Saturday, it will have been a month since Baxter died.

Last night I was talking to my friend Hensley, who went to grad school at Tech and played ultimate with me for a few years. He told me some terrible news about our mutual friend Will Campbell, who also went to Tech and also played ultimate. This Sunday he was driving in Florida (back to school, I think). It was about 2 in the morning and it was raining. Because of the rain and the darkness, Will didn't see the flatbed truck that had wrecked in the middle of the road. Will hit the truck and flipped his car. His body was relatively okay, but his skull was crushed. He died Friday afternoon.

Will and I weren't very close. We were friends, but we weren't BFF or anything like that. He wasn't a very good ultimate player, and in the world of athletics, not being good at what you do makes you an easy target for ridicule. But that never seemed to matter to Will. He was a nice guy though. Really easy going. It could be just my misperception of things, but it seemed like he was always having fun, especially when ultimate was involved. Even though our respective times at Tech barely crossed, he always stopped me to chat it up when we happened to be at the same tournament. I always saw him on the sidelines of other people's games, cheering them on and helping out where he could. It seemed like nothing could phase him. Great guy. Great guy.

I almost feel guilty that Will's death has hit me so hard. If we weren't even close friends, how do his close friends feel right now? His teammates? His family? It's just that, it's such a waste of a perfectly good life. And it happened - *snap* - just like that. One minute he's there and the next he's not. Death. I mean this thing really happens to people. I can't even think about it. When I think about Baxter and Will, I just go numb. It makes no sense to me that someone who's so happy and so alive one minute ceases to exist instantly.

And what about the rest of us? Sure I'm sad now. And I'll grieve. And I won't be able to shake this feeling for awhile. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't going to move on. And it'll probably be too quickly. Even with Baxter, who was everything to me. A perfectly good life evaporates, and I'll be playing video games and playing poker and bitching at Michael Vick for fumbling the ball and praying that Calvin Johnson stays in school for one more year and wondering what ultimate team I can play for next year and trying to figure out whether such-and-such girl likes me anymore and.. what's the point? If a life - yours, someone you know, someone you're close to - can be taken away so easily, what's the point in worrying about trivial things?

I'm sure this entry makes no sense, but nothing really does right now.

7:08pm: Buy a missile launcher!
Only $39.99!

Also, I own a PS3, high five!

12:41am: This world will never cease to amaze me
Three truly ridiculous links for you today:

An air guitar shirt - as in, you wear this shirt and your air guitaring becomes real guitaring

OJ speaks on Fox - "speaks" is the understatement of the century

Chris Cornell covers "Billie Jean" - it may seem cliche, but you really truly must hear it for yourself to believe it

Thank you, teh intarwebs!

7:35pm: These two videos are the reason why YouTube exists
I cannot even begin to describe these two videos. And I randomly discovered them both practically back to back. I'm still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Clip 1 - About 30 seconds long, don't watch it if you are easily squeamish, although if you don't watch it, you're missing out! Linky

Clip 2 - About 4.5 minutes long, but worth every single second. I can't describe what happens without ruining it, but to summarize, it's from a high school football game, and it is essentially the greatest comeback of all time. That probably sounds somewhat cliche, but TRUST ME, watch it. Linky

Wowzers.

10:42pm: Cameron Fire Hazards, be gone!
Duke To Cameron Crazies: Sit Down (aka, pwned by your own school)

From the article:
"But Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is questioning the policy, saying the students are on the team as well and should be as close to the court as possible."

WTF does this even mean?? Isn't there a roster limit of like 12? Cheaters!!

3:49am: October 11
I thought about Baxter tonight and cried. Not much, but some. I think it's finally hit me.

11:10pm: Okay, I can FINALLY agree that Fox News is biased
Today, Fox News called former Congressman Mark Foley a democrat.

Whoops.

12:57pm: Mr. Peabody
Baxter may have a UTI (aka, bladder infection).

When I was taking him out in the middle of the day yesterday, I noticed he was peeing while we were walking to our normal spot. Then, last night before I went to Francesca's with Makr, I noticed he was making a HUGE puddle right inside the glass door at the bottom of the steps. That was annoying because I had to spend 15 minutes trying to clean it up in the dark. The only light I had access to was the movie light on my cell phone's camcorder (which, btw, is actually pretty good).

I got him out this morning without incident, probably due to the fact that we RACED down the stairs and the glass door at the bottom was already unlocked, so I didn't have to waste any time fumbling with it. When we got back though, I noticed one of my landlords had left a note outside my door. It said that we need to deal with Baxter's peeing problem. I thought they maybe they noticed traces of the puddle at the bottom of the steps. Oh no no. Apparently, I completely MISSED the trail of pee going all the way down the stairs on the inside wall.

So I spent the past half hour trying to clean and disinfect the steps. They're pretty dirty too, which made it a huge mess. I don't know how good of a job I did, but hopefully they're satisfied for now, and hopefully I can convince them that Baxter does NOT do this regularly. (And hopefully this stops without me having to spend another billion dollars taking Baxter to a vet that doesn't know what he's doing.)

Sigh. I need more money.

11:50am: Take the good with the bad
Today, I realized that my cell phone ringer doesn't really work anymore when it's plugged into the charger. So while I lay on my floor half asleep waiting for Rooms to Go to call me and tell me that my couch was here to be delivered, they called me twice. And then they called Rebekah Sharpe, who I apparently designated as the backup/emergency contact if I was not reachable (when and why did I do that??). She called ME, but my phone was still plugged into the charger so I still didn't get the call.

About 40 minutes later I checked my phone to see what the hell was going on and I saw that I had missed three calls. Whoops. I called them to ask if they could still deliver today since it was still technically within my 4-hour delivery window. They refused. I told them I've been without furniture in my apartment for nearly a month and that if they can't deliver the couch today, I was going to cancel my order and buy from another company. Yes, I know it was my fault, and I told them this, but it's just getting ridiculous now how long I've been waiting. The customer care guy called the dispatcher, but they still refused to come back. So now i have to decide whether to wait until next week or to make good on my threat. Thing is, if I cancel it's probably going to take even longer to get a new couch, and I got a pretty sweet deal on this one (including no payments for 2 years!).

That's the bad. The good is that we FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY got DSL installed. I set up the wireless router/DSL modem in my landlord's bedroom this morning. Luckily I get a pretty good signal through the walls, but the connection itself isn't that fast because we went for the cheapest package, which I think is only 784kbps. We live in a pretty old building that was not originally intended to be residential, so the phone wiring is kinda tricky. I had to install two of those stupid DSL line filter dongles, but because of the awkward wiring setup, it's not the most elegant thing I've done. I don't know how picky they are, but they're probably going to want to change some stuff around. Either way, I don't really care, because now I don't have to hang out at Dook just to use the internet. Woohoo!

(I'll save my trips to Dook for ogling college girls, eating McDonald's, watching cable TV, harassing tiplets, and downloading music illegally at a high rate of speed.)

(P.S. - For those of you that have no sense of humor, I do not ogle. Sheesh.)

11:25am: I know it's only football season, but I'm already saying my ABDs
I decided recently that Panera and Mad Hatter's were too expensive for me to steal my wireless from, so I've started obtaining my wireless from Dook's Bryan Center. Having spent many, many hours here now, I have come to realize a few things:

1) I still hate Dook.

2) Dook students look as clueless in the local media as they do on ESPN, ABC, CBS, etc.

3) Dook students look as clueless in person as they do on TV.

4) I can point out most Dook students, even off campus, without any verbal cues.

5) The only good thing about Dook is the Bryan Center, including its sketchy wireless, complete lack of cell phone reception, and 24-hour McDonald's.

6) Shouting "Fuck Dook!" at the top of your lungs in the middle of a pack of Dook students will bring about no retaliation whatsoever.

7) Dook girls are far more annoying than Dook guys.

8) Dook athletes are approximately 94 times the size of the average Dook student and stand out more in the student population than at your average D-I school.

9) Everyone at Dook really IS from New Jersey.

10) Dook is crawling - and I mean CRAWLING - with tiplets.

Oh, the people watching to be done! Too bad they're all Dookies.

1:44pm: These guys are badasses
Pictures from a couple of guys that crashed the LOST set when nobody was around.

Holy cow!

12:28am: Speaking of people getting married
Yeah, I know I'm getting carried away with this Facebook thing, BUT..

There's very little sadder than looking through your friends' recent photo albums and seeing a bunch of wedding pictures, full of people you went to school with, and then realizing you weren't even invited to the wedding.

Ouch.

2:10pm: Two updates in one day? Yeah, don't get used to it
So on a whim, I decided to do an advanced search on Facebook to see if any of my friends had gotten engaged or married recently. I still haven't finished looking through the results, but it appears that every single one of my friends got engaged in August if they didn't get married earlier this year. Every one of them. Yes. Even you. What does this mean??

Oh, dear reader, will you marry me?