Let it be

I don't ever delete posts. Even the bad ones. The really bad ones. I figure I've already said it, and deleting it won't make it disappear. It has already existed, that thought, and nothing I do can make it un-exist.

Still, there is something to be said for regret.

I think I remember beginning a story once, one that seems to have just the vaguest of connections to me right now. The first few lines went something like this:

"Other people liked Deck. That wasn't the problem. Deck's problem was that he didn't like himself. It went farther than that actually. Deck absolutely loathed himself.

Strange then that the barrel of the gun which Deck was holding was not pointed at someone whom he really hated, like himself, but rather at a man whom Deck had not known until thirteen minutes ago. Deck was sure that the man regretted meeting Deck even more than Deck regretted being born..."

Ok, I lied. The first two lines were kind of the same. I ad-libbed the rest. Interesting story though. Man holds up a convenience store, while in a drug/alcohol induced daze. Rest of the time is spent figuring out who he is, and how he got there. Short term and long term answers to both parts of both questions, of course.

Maybe I'll get around to writing it out someday.

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Don't take me too seriously. For the love of God, please don't ever stop shooting me full of holes. I need it. I need to be reminded of how ridiculous I am.

Thank you.

8 Months

I've been pregnant with words on this blog for over 8 months now.

And all of a sudden, I haven't got a thing to say anymore.

Well, a lot of things have been happening, all-of-a-sudden-like. It's as if the universe knows when high school is going to end, and she's picking up the pace as we rush towards the finale. Just me and my universe. In this train. Going... well I don't know where my universe is taking me.

She told me it was going to be a surprise. I told her I didn't like surprises. She told me to go to hell.

Surprise!

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I'm sorry for the things I said.
I'm even more sorry for the things I didn't say.
I can't take back the former,
And I can't make up for the latter.

Farewell then.
May this memory rest in peace.

Bridge > Poker

I pulled off a squeeze!

Dummy (North):
A-x spades
x-x hearts

Declarer (me, South):
x spades
A-x hearts
Q diamonds (squeezing trick)

Led Q of diamonds, squeezing West who was defending spades and hearts. West discarded a spade, I discard a heart from dummy. Play the Ace of hearts from South, transfer to Ace of spades, last spade is good as well, for 3NT on the nose. Of course, the beautiful part of the squeeze play is that when it's set-up correctly, it's failproof. Had West discarded a heart, I would have discarded a spade from dummy, transfered to the Ace of spades, and played out the last two winning hearts in South. (West had something like 9-x of spades, K-x of hearts, for his last four cards.)

90+ duplicate MPs.

Best hand of bridge I've ever played.

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Ok, it's 3:17 AM, cut me some slack.

What a Difference a Day Makes

Dear God,

I take it back. You rock.

Sincerely,
Cody

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I wonder if anyone saw the haggard, unclean, and unshaven Chinese boy as he walked out to his mailbox today. I wonder if anyone saw the expectation in his face, the fear in his eyes. I wonder if anyone heard his heart pound when he saw the oversized envelope leaning lazily against the inside of his mailbox. Maybe someone heard the fleeting joke that ran through his head:

"God, they sent me the deferral in a big, fat envelope just to mess with me."

He didn't want to open it. More than anything else in the world he did not want to look. He didn't want to lose that comforting blanket of not knowing. He'd been wrapped in it for so long, and the world without it was so bare and cold.

Jack Burden looked. Well, he looked too.

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I still don't believe it. How the hell could I? After the initial shock and amazement, the most predominant feeling now is one of immense gratitude.

No matter how much I may have complained about my so-called problems, my runs of bad luck in cards and in life, right now, finally, I see how damn lucky I am.

God is the only one who can really know whether or not I deserve to be as lucky as I am. God knows, but God doesn't like to intervene. Princeton, for some reason, thinks I deserve it. You have no idea how grateful I am to them. Not just for accepting me, but for believing in me, especially when I had no way of believing in myself. Heck, they're willing to put up $29,000 a year for that belief, in someone they've barely even met.

But they're not the reason I've come this far. Princeton is the next step in my life, but you guys have helped me and pushed me along for every single step of the way up until now.

Thanks to my parents, for putting up with me, and for being there; maybe you didn't always want to be there, but you had to be, and you were.

Thanks to my friends. You know who you are. For being smarter than me, in life if not in school. For believing in me when I know I didn't deserve it. For being some of the most generous, good-hearted, and caring people in the world. For keeping me firmly grounded when I needed to be, for making me listen when I didn't want to, and for shaping me into the person that I am.

Thanks to my teachers. A lot of you have told me that I make your jobs easier by being a good student, but the truth is, I'm a good student only because of the great jobs that you have done. Thank you for caring about my education, oftentimes more than I did about it.

I have come this far because of all of you. Now it is my turn to show you that your faith in me has not been unwarranted. I can let myself down at times, but I refuse to let other people down. I don't have that right, to waste something that's not mine to begin with.

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Dear Cody,

You're welcome. Do us proud. We know you will.

Sincerely,
Everyone

Lucky

Dear God,

Not to question the whole grand plan and what not, but dude, wtf?

Sincerely,
Cody

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I don't think I can handle more than another day of this waiting for my ED letter. I wish I bit my nails or something. When you don't have any nervous habits, like me, you just kind of sit around and wait for something to happen. Me, I'm waiting to explode.

::sigh::

I can't get in. I wouldn't freakin' deserve it if I did. I am still absolutely convinced that I have yet to do a single thing in my life that would merit something this good happening to me. Way to not find a cure for cancer, asshole.

Deferred. Deferred. Deferred. The word just rings out with a silent boom inside my head. More hurried applications. More making things up and catching up at the last second. More last minute and half-baked. More being the same old lazy and pretentious me that I've been for the past two years. More not living up to myself. More dashed hopes, ruined chances, missed opportunities, and silent screams into smothering pillows.

I want to pray, but like I said, God probably has better things to do with His time, even though He sorta is timeless.

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It's the same feeling in poker. You wake up in the BB with aces, get raised, reraise, and the other fellow pushes in preflop. You call, a little reluctantly, since this is your entire bankroll right here. It's not as much as it should be; you haven't played as well as you could have. Too late to change that now, and for whatever it's worth, it's there sitting in front of you, but a little out of reach now since it's in the middle of the pot. Your man flips up kings, and you want to close your eyes before this flop but you can't.

2-5-7, rainbow.

You begin to hope, not daring to believe just yet, but with each passing second you want it to be so, you want it to be true, that you could actually win this pot. The sheer audacity of the thought shocks you and scares you. You're still stuck in awe when the turn card comes.

A blood-red King of hearts.

And before you even knew you had hopes, they're crushed. Into a fine powder that's blown away with the wind. What's left is nothing, and that is the worst feeling in the world. Pure emptiness. When you can't even see the glimmer of a hope. But there's still one more card to come.

This time you really don't look.

...

Determination

Red light. Damn. I'm not even in a hurry to get anywhere, but damn anyways. I hate being stuck in traffic. I feel my life just wasting away, with every monoxide-filled breath I take. Plus, it's enforced idleness. I like being lazy; I hate being made useless.

A flicker of movement. Something in the bottom corner of my left eye. That's my better eye. One of the most memorable things any medical professional has ever told me was what my opthamologist (he may have just been an optometrist, actually, but the difference escapes me now) told me during an exam two years ago.

"That right eye has gotten a lot worse."

And everytime I put my contacts lenses in, I think of that statement. It doesn't even mean much, but it's stuck. I'll be eighty years old and blind, but I'll remember that line. Wonder what else I might remember.

I turn my head now to look. Remember that scene from 2 Fast 2 Furious when Paul Walker drives while staring at Eva Mendes and not the road? I've been practicing that. Why, sane people ask me? Why not, I retort? Do you have a deathwish, they come back with? Not if I get good at it.

There's a tiny little fly on my window. The inside of my window, after I close in and notice his feet are sticking outward onto the glass. I lower my window ever so slightly, and perhaps tasting his imminent freedom, he crawls slowly up to the edge of the window and flips himself over. I close my window, expecting him to find new and more exciting company than I soon enough. But he sticks around though, there on the outside of my driver-side window. His little orange fibers that passed for legs somehow hold him there.

Green light. Go. Go. GO. There is this evolved sense of urgency attached to green lights; suddenly life starts moving again. He's still there, my new little insect friend.

Like a lizard, I keep one eye on my speedometer and one eye on him. Five miles per hour. Nothing but a slight breeze for him, and I imagine that he's probably pretty comfortable out there. Ten miles per hour. Still leisurely enjoying the wind in his... antennae? Fifteen miles per hour. I can't believe the car in front of me is going so slowly. Twenty miles per hour, and I see that his wings are getting tickled now by the wind. Twenty-five miles per hour. Thirty. Thirty-five. He's really holding on now. Fourty. Fourty-five. Why didn't he just let go already? What the hell is so important about holding on, to something which could not possibly have any significance for him? Fifty. Fifty-five. The wind must howling at him now, tearing at his feeble grip. Maybe it's like a roller coaster. Maybe he's out there holding on for dear life and having a hell of a time doing it.

And all of a sudden, he's gone. Flicked off by the unsympathetic hand of the laws of physics.

Maybe he's got himself a good story to tell his buddies now.

Maybe he knows why we hold on to these things, these things in our lives which one can never tell if it's worth holding on to or not. Maybe he knows something of loss, of pain, of sorrow, and of regret. Or maybe he is just a fly.

And maybe we are just fools.

La Vie est Belle!

(under construction)

Ok, no really that was the whole post.

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Brevity, thou art my goddess.