Good Weekend, Sigh

Let's start with pool. We played today, the roommate and I, a real game, for the first time in, let's see, three, four, nine and half, carry the one, integrate with respect to y -- 2 months, maybe? First to 11, 8-ball, alternating breaks, random rack for the opening break (we get the tray of balls and just scatter them over the table, replacing balls that go in). I was up 8 to 5 when Sam went to get a sandwich, and I went to try and get an Arnold Palmer. I came back with a Peach Orange Nantucket Nectar, and from that point on, I went on a 1-6 hot streak. Sooo good. On our way back, we tried to corner a rabbit, but even though he looked pretty obese, somehow he managed to elude us. We've completely fucked evolution, as a species.

Rewind a little, and we were having dinner at the best Applebee's in the state of New Jersey/anywhere. We got there around 6-ish, the place was almost full, and by 8:30 when we left, it was bloody packed. The 12 oz New York Strip steak obviously wouldn't measure up at an actual restaurant, but for Applebee's, it was pretty bleedin' good. I asked for medium, and the chef kept it just a shade under, something like medium-medium-medium-rare, which was perfect. Everyone raved about the grub, the buffalo wings we had for appetizers hit the spot perfectly, and the Steak Quesadilla Towers were apparently just divine. Drool. The $26 I ended up paying didn't even hurt too much at the time, since our server was so cool.

Rewind a little more, and we played something like 4-5 hour session of 拖拉机／捉汉奸／升级. I guess they must think I play pretty good, but the scores didn't reflect anything to that effect. I was stuck on 3 forever... but I managed a respectable 4th place finish out of the 7 of us, getting to 10 before we called it a night. Good times, good times. Sigh. Laundry did get wrinkled. Sigh.

Oh my god, but if you keep rewinding, you'd find us at the Szechuan Maiden, or 川妹子. Probably the greatest Chinese dinner I've had since leaving Beijing. Spicy as fuck too. I forget the name of the Szechuan place in Beijing we loved, but this was as worthy a second place as you could expect to find in the Garden State. $28, also another good server (man, we were lucky this weekend), and also a stomach so full it was spherical.

Fast forward to right now. Monday will be the suck, while right now is the pre-suck before the main event suck. Sucks.

Sigh.

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If someone would buy me some 2-cent stamps, I'd be eternally grateful. A little late already, but for the future...

Doing Stuff that Doesn't Need Doing

If only there were some way I could turn this posting into an English paper on the significance and interpretative role of photographs in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale... well I'd pretty much be in Heaven already, no? What the hell kind of Heaven is it where I'm writing English papers in my spare time? Oh that's right, the kind where I don't have this take-home Comp. Sci. midterm to finish.

I swear to God, it must all be one big conspiracy. For Christ's sake, they're both due at the exact same time tomorrow...

In other news, I did miss a posting yesterday, but no one noticed, so ignore what I just wrote, because we should just pretend what I just didn't write didn't happen.

My roommate today pointed out that this week, he has been so busy that he has only been able to watch about 1 hour of television, for the entire week. Myself on the other hand, I have been watching roughly 3-4 hours of television per day, counting the games of Madden that I play. My fuckin' Giants are 2-1 so far for the regular season, after a heart-breaking loss in their last home game against the Steelers, where a Brandon Jacobs fumble late in the 4th quarter resulted in a Steelers touchdown return to give them the tying score at 17-17, followed soon thereafter on the ensuing drive by an Eli Manning pass into triple coverage that was picked off and led to a game-winning field goal for the Steelers. Sigh. Story of my life.

This week's writing exercise:

The tall windows in front of me reflect an empty corridor, stretching out into the distance, a solitary girl walking in the darkness, floating hauntingly above the ground outside. Streetlights give off a muted, yellow glow, a sickly light, like the aisle lighting on a red-eye flight, submerged beneath the reflected floor. Two figures sit, hunched behind boxy frames of monitors, directly across from us, as if we are all sitting here working hard together. The girl two computers down from me can't quite contain her giggles. Her image in the glass laughs too, but silently.

Overhead, the line of ceiling lights go off in an unwavering line, reminiscent of a hospital corridor. After all, this is the building that's supposed to be Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. But the darkness outside swallows all this, as the hallway behind me stretches out in front of me in the window and fades, into the cold night air. Lifeless halls, fed by the mechanical churning of the printer, producing page after page of another junior paper, or God forbid, a senior thesis. Then it stops. The sound of the keyboard is all that is left, and even that drifts off slowly, into silence.

Excellent blog posts I wish I could emulate:

Tao of Poker (March 26, 2008)

Poker in the Weeds (July 12, 2006)

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I'm hooked on multi-v Vitamin Water. I figure I have to be missing some vitamins at least.

The Big 150

Whoopdeefuckingdoo, as I like to say to such occasions which are more coincidences than meaningful events.

I cannot get this one hand out of my head. The contract was 5 Spades, doubled, declarer was East, and the salient features of declarer and dummy's hands are a 5-3 fit in trumps with the AKJxx and 86x respectively, a 6-2 fit in the diamond side suit with Kx and A-10xxxx respectively, one club loser, and xx and AQJ in hearts respectively. After the opening club lead to the Ace with North, the second round was a low trump. Here a safety presents itself, which allows for all 4-1 and 5-0 combinations where North has the long trumps (the most likely scenario, given that North doubled in the first place), by playing low to the first trick. Assuming we can set up diamonds, or that the heart finesse is on (both options can be explored in due course, with plenty of entries), we have no other side suit losers, so we can afford to give up one trick in trumps.

Goddamn I suck balls at this game.

Of course, if I really did suck balls, I wouldn't be able to appreciate how much I suck. Idiots don't know they're stupid, as it were.

Nothing much happened today; I had my usual individual session with Prof. Liu in the morning, spent the intervening period of time finishing up the reading and doing homework, attended my regular 2:30 PM drill class, then finished up the last part of the weekly homework (the 800-word+ essay), and turned everything in at 5:00 PM exactly (the due time, of course).

Then, it was TV watching, some Ba Jin-reading, and a few hours of bridge playing, comingled with a few AIM conversations. Sometime soon, I'll also have to check out the warranty on this laptop, and either break it in hopes of getting a new one, or do something else fun with it.

Oh yeah, I also had buffalo wings. There is a God after all; in His benevolence He saw fit to answer my prayers for more chicken wings. Amen, and God Bless. One more thing, I steal cakes now, chocolate ones, from the dining hall. Bitches.

Old man blog, he just keeps rolling along.

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For my 150th post, I would like to point out that I've done everything I needed to do classes-wise in the past 2-3 days. Huzzah.

Almost

I was on my way to bed when I literally stopped in my tracks, changed my mind, turned around, and sat back down on this couch to write an entry for today. In the same vein that I almost mustered up the energy to go to my first class this morning at 11 AM (MAT 201, which is basically multivariable calculus), I almost didn't write today. A curious comparison of almost did and almost didn't, but dichotomies seem to be my new thing.

As it was, I did still manage to swing by 3 out of my 4 scheduled classes today, and in a bout of guilt/determination, I also attended a lecture entitled "Managing Sino-U.S. Relations: the Chinese Way" given by a visiting professor from China Foreign Affairs University, a Prof. Qin. This may have in some obscure way made up for missing my morning math class with Prof. Chen, but more likely it was just the first time that I can remember actually going to one of the many, many special lectures/talks/conferences/seminars that happen on campus and which for brief moments capture my attention. Wednesday, there will be a discussion with Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart of IB English fame, at Nassau Presbyterian Church I believe. The jury is still out on whether I will be there or not, as my current interests don't really run much into issues facing the pan-African diaspora, but then again, why the hell not?

Because really, there's only so much dilly-dallying one can do before even that becomes boring. How about a little structure? Upholding one's promises, both the ones made to oneself, and the ones implicit in one's functioning in society, should be a nice change of pace. And maybe eventually I shall find the good sense to drop this English butler act. Mr. Stevens, really, I must protest.

I even wore a collared shirt today, put on a belt (damn you non-beer-belly), and moussed my atrocious haircut. For those of you who have yet to have the distinct horror of viewing it, imagine if you will, wetting your hair so that it sticks straight down flat across your forehead, then cutting it with a laser beam that runs precisely along the horizontal axis of your forehead. I have not the means to describe the precision, the skill, nay, the very art which it must have required from my barber to manage such a straight horizontal line. In any case, I look ridiculous, and even with the generous application of mousse, the best I could achieve was apparently quite a comical effect, as the entire classroom burst into cheerfully good-natured (I hope) laughter, when the first question of my Chinese literature class was directed towards me. Not being one who is unused to being laughed at and with simultaneously, I responded with gusto, but unfortunately the professor seemed quite confused by my ramblings and shrugged off my wayward comments, leaving my colleagues in stitches yet again. One teacher whom I'm quite fond of described my appearance as that of a local county official in China, dressed up and on a tour of the province. My roommate called me quite "studious," as if I had the look of one who had spent many hours buried in the labyrinthine corridors of Firestone library.

Regardless, the manner of dress which I chose this morning was dictated not by comedic concerns, but by a desire to look decently presentable at the special lecture that afternoon. Not that there was any particular dress code, but one does feel the need to fit in, with the 90 year-old professors and the cheery, preppy grad students. Anyways, the talk itself was rather long and laborious, and I got the distinct impression that our speaker Prof. Qin was not really saying anything at all. Rather, the amused half-smile he maintained on his face all the way from Prof. White's awkward introduction to the last question posed by an ancient husk of a gentleman who went on and on about how China should not forget the charitable support of the U.S. during World War Two which turned out not to be a question at all but a tired admonishment, Prof. Qin seemed to be spending his time trying to explain very simple (in his mind, simple at least) concepts to the audience of stupid, lazy, American pig capitalists and Western bourgeoisie intellectuals, as it were. His attitude was appeasing but disdainful, however only subtly so, so that it was only really identifiable by one who knows these Chinese mannerisms, especially the signs of false hospitality presented under duress or because of the necessities of etiquette and politeness. I should have very much liked to know what he might have said at dinner, in Chinese especially, in less formal settings, but I did not have the fortune of such an opportunity.

Instead, I watched TV for the rest of the evening, pondering Hustle and melting my brains. I watched most of an episode of Intervention on A&E, this time about a meth addict and a heroin/cocaine addict. The meth addict I thought was pretty special, as he had managed in his senior year of high school to impregnate both his girlfriend at the time, and her best friend. What a virile guy... and now both young mothers, who are no longer best friends, live together under one roof in their baby's daddy's parents' house, each taking turns berating him for his addiction and his consequent failures at fatherhood, each with a young son.

Interventions are for people with problems. Serious problems, I might guess, since they are not so common. At least only the serious ones make for good TV. But for one who has never faced such problems, what can Dr. Phil offer? If there is nothing wrong with your life, is everything alright by default? Even if we are kind enough to allow for an answer of "no," then how hard could it be to make things right? Whatever we may think otherwise, we know that someone for whom nothing has gone wrong can't possibly have all that much on his plate. That inference may not be correct at all; for I ask you, who has the easier choice to make: a man picking out a suit out of the 5 good ones which he owns, or a man choosing between rehab and likely death.

But certainly, we don't need to devote too much energy to the guy with too many suits; at least, not until he becomes a meth addict anyways.

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One day at a time is the only way time happens. Like you have a choice. Or maybe what you do with that day that is given to you makes a difference in how quickly or how slowly it passes. We'll find out, tomorrow.

Always Relative

The one bad thing about a long-running (and generally inconsistent) blog is the wealth of past posts which remain semi-permanently buried in the intricate tubings of the intarwebs. Lost to most, they are nevertheless uncover-able by the avid researcher/determined stalker/nostalgic author. Of the aforementioned categories, I have had the distinct pleasure of being all three at one point or another in my career. In truth, this ease of looking-back is only a bad thing for the last of the three; the other two probably find those past entries quite helpful in their own way.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing however, and in most cases is best avoided. One risks looking back on things which no longer are, and wishing for things which never were. Not that the past is such a terrible thing, but to sacrifice present experience for past remembrances and/or fantasies risks creating a future when such activities are all which fill one's days and nights. Truth be told, "moving on" in no way implies that anything was wrong with the past; one "moves on" because nothing is wrong with the present, yet. Failure to "move on" rectifies a situation that hardly needs rectifying, thus creating problems where there were none to begin with.

Or is that the case at all? Peter Singer once raised the example of a man who comes across a child drowning in a lake; his purpose was to describe a situation where it was plainly obvious that the man had a moral obligation to save the child, since the benefits of him doing so (i.e. saving an innocent life) far outweighed the costs (i.e. getting his clothes wet, possibly catching cold, ruining his iPhone, etc.). Ok. Now imagine the world 5 minutes after the man first comes upon the child; during this period of indecision as he pondered his moral obligations, the child has since drowned. Maybe the man should just "move on?"

For indeed, nothing is left to be done, nothing can save the child, and no amount of guilt or recrimination will redeem the man. What possible purpose could it serve for this man to dwell on the child's death? One may suggest that such reflection will lead the man to recognize similar situations in the future and act accordingly then, but such an improvement to his character (if it can be called that) requires not a lengthy period of self-blame or torment. He may simply acknowledge to himself that should he come upon struggling children whose lives he can save with simple actions on his part, he will endeavor to do so efficiently, confidently, and without delay in the future.

But were this man to keep a blog of his daily thoughts, we may not find it strange if he were often to return to that fateful day and read and reread his thoughts, his torments, his nightmares that night after he returned home. We would likely find sympathy in our hearts for this troubled man, and not begrudge him this indulgence. For it is like watching a train-wreck as the saying goes; one cannot avert one's eyes. And he cannot forget, nor can he avoid poking that sore, open wound, the deepest of cuts upon his heart, which he keeps fresh each day, week, or month, as he reopens the torn flesh and feels the pain anew.


It is a delicate balance that must be struck. Much like a child who learns to ride a bicycle, who grows into an adult, embarrassed at the occasional and perhaps accidental falls, we learn to balance our way through the intricate tubings of life. And when we fall off that bicycle, it is not that we have forgotten how to ride which prevents us from getting back up immediately, it is that we fear another fall. The choice then, is between lying broken and bloodied on the ground with our vehicle lying askance and wheels spinning idly, or to right the thing, pick ourselves up, and ride on. This latter choice carries with it the burden of a distinct risk of future failure; the former, certain defeat.

"Audentes fortuna juvat," as they say.

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There's a green poker chip, with a design of the 6 different faces of a die along the rims of the chip's two faces, lying next to a wooden bench on the carpet in this computer cluster. I have nary a clue as to its origins, lying as it is in such an ill-suited location. Perhaps it is a sign.

I had an idea the other night

The other night before going to bed I had what I daresay was one of the most intense literary dreams I've ever had, where the idea for a novel that might actually be interesting to people outside of my own imagination came to me. Sadly, said idea was lost upon awakening the following morning, as most good dreams are wont to be.

If I'm not entirely mistaken, there was definitely something involving poker. Of course. And a girl. Of course. Let's see... what might have inspired me in the last few visits to the local card-room. A dealer perhaps? No, I don't believe so. They're nice enough, but none have really made too much of an impression on me, nor I on them. In fact, I'm probably quite invisible at a poker table. I'm not one for idle conversation, nor am I all that demonstrative with my actions or words. It's a card game after all, one which I may forever remain embarrassingly atrocious at.

Something reminiscent of classic literature? Man vies for poker trophy that would validate his existence, to the exclusion of the girl who loves him. Girl sacrifices self to man's arch-rival, using her body to win his salvation, by making a deal with the rival to throw the match. Man wins trophy, loses girl. Gives up trophy in search of girl? Too little too late, appropriately tragic demises all around. Fin.

What a load of crap.

The problem is, this writing has never reached beyond the level of distraction. What it lacks is a soul. For one who's own life as yet remains unfulfilling (or perhaps not "as yet," but more along the lines of "currently remains"), it is rather to be expected that the literary products of such a life shall want for some animation, some of the breath of life which made all the difference for Adam. I write to ake my mind off things, but where that mind settles is both arbitrary and meaningless. I may as well write about the bloody weather.

Fuck the bullshit British butler-speak. Not only can I not pull that shit off, it's fucking embarrassing to throw it out there after just having read The Remains of the Day. Jesus Christ, have an original thought you fucker.

It's true though. All I've ever wanted out of life is to be distracted. And the irony of that overstatement is something only two people are now privy to. One of whom I'm no longer sure shares the sentiment, as I once did. I don't really know if I still feel that way. Maybe I will always feel that way. But don't I have a say in how I feel? Sure, you oversensitive little pussy. Shut the fuck up. Fuck.

And that's what a book I might write will end up sounding like. A ball of tears and shit on the floor, curled up in the fetal position and pissing his pants. God bless the souls who find that appealing.