January 20th, 2007: Great Expectations

This is my final post. Perhaps the 2-week pause since my previous post was a function of some subconscious ambivalence about ending this blog. To be sure, it isn't something I'm 100% sure about; I'd be lying if I said that there weren't some times -- especially when I read encouraging comments or emails from readers -- that I think to myself "man, this has really been a gratifying experience...such a shame to call it quits..." I've certainly got some forces pulling me in the other direction, but unlike the previous times when I contemplated wrapping things up, I feel relatively at peace with the decision this time around.

Will this page be updated in the future? I don't want to close the door on it completely; I plan on playing in several WSOP events this summer, which I'm sure will provide me with some interesting stories that I might post about, but in the interest of closure, I won't get ahead of myself. Time marches on, and I'm happy to have had these experiences, but the timing is simply right to draw the curtain, so for all intents and purposes, let's say our goodbyes now.

My Australian sojourn has drawn to a close; I left just as their incredible summer was starting to roll in, and came back to North America…settling into another lovely Toronto January. I hated to leave Australia just as I felt like I was starting to put down roots and make good friends, but I left happy, content in the knowledge that I really made a lot of these past few months. A few weeks ago I made it out to the Great Barrier Reef, which was one of the places I really didn’t want to miss before I left. A Dutch friend and I took a 3-day sailing cruise out to some of the Whitsunday Islands, many of which really have to be seen to be believed. There’s a beach called Whitehaven that is easily the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen – I’d heard that it was a nice beach, but I thought to myself “yeah, whatever, I’ve seen plenty of nice beaches before – heck, I live on Bondi Beach, one of the most famous in Australia; white sand, blue sky, I get it...yawn.” Whitehaven shattered every last skeptical bone in my body. I want to post a picture here, but a) I still haven’t uploaded them to my computer, and b) I’m worried it still wouldn’t do it justice. Because the reef is so shallow, the sheer number of greens and blues in the water is astounding. And the sand, wow. It’s like talcum powder under your feet. And white. Not that sandboxy yellowish-white that you see on the nicer beaches of Miami and Hawaii. This is white-white: the color of the undershirts in a Downy commercial. And to top it off, the island is uninhabited, so there are never more than 40 or so people on this expansive beach at any one time. Complete silence, except for the tide rolling in. Mindblowing. (Alright, I found a picture of it online, but I’m going to give the caveat that as nice as it looks below, the picture still doesn’t do it justice.)




My entire Australian experience really got me thinking seriously about age, which is a topic that I’ve addressed in passing a couple times, but I haven’t quite given it the treatment it deserves. First off, in nearly every country in the world not in North America, law school isn’t a graduate program, but rather an intensive undergraduate program, so the final year law students in my classes down there were mostly much younger than me…typically 22 to 24. There were a handful in my age range: 26-27, but I was among the older students, even though I probably look a little younger than I am (not to mention that I act like an 18-year old), so I never really felt out of place.

Among the 25 sailing guests on our boat cruising the Whitsunday islands, most fit into one of a few identifiable categories:

i. College students (19 – 21 years old)

ii. Recent college graduates either traveling before their jobs began, or taking their first vacation, or traveling after having just left their first job out of college (22 – 24 years old)

iii. A few older guests, usually couples (30 – 38)

You know what there weren’t any of?? 25-to-30 year olds who were traveling for no other reasons than that they possessed the inclination, the opportunity, and the ability to do so. Oh wait, scratch that. There was one. Me. In many ways, our little sailing trip was a microcosm of the frustration I often feel that I meet so few other similarly-situated individuals…on the one hand I feel incredibly blessed that I’m able to take these great trips at a relatively young age, and yet I’m equally frustrated that it sometimes feels that I’m the outcast, even though I’m doing exactly what seemingly everyone else my age professes to want to do. I find it a source of endless frustration that so many people let their age – which comes down to nothing more than a digit on a birth certificate – dictate their life decisions.

Isn’t the theoretical permutation of the issue the following: in a true vacuum, would individuals naturally gravitate toward the same pattern of expectations associated with one’s age that our culture currently subscribes to, or is it merely a function of our society’s historical development. I guess what I’m trying to get at is whether there’s anything “magical” about why we assign certain expectations to the ages of 20, 25, 30, and so on, or whether perhaps it’s nothing more than a relic from times gone past: a self-perpetuating set of expectations that might merit reconsideration for ‘modern times.’

Apologies if the previous paragraph seems a tad esoteric…I’m still ploughing through Atlas Shrugged, which is undoubtedly rendering my writing abstract. In fact, let me just restate it in the simplest possible terms, since I think it’s a pretty straightforward inquiry, and an important one at that. Here goes >> Our society has come to expect certain accomplishments or life milestones by certain ages…graduation from high school in the late teens, and then graduation from college in one’s early twenties, first job soon thereafter, marriage in the mid-to-late twenties, children between 25 and 40, progressing to middle- and then upper-management by age X (depending on profession) etc, etc, etc. I’m sure that I’ve railed against these preordained sets of expectations in prior posts, so all I’m asking now is whether there’s anything “real” about them, or whether they’re merely the product of (antiquated?) custom. I mean, besides menopause (something I’d consider a “real” constraint; e.g. women need to have their kids before around 41 or so), and a couple other ‘non-negotiables’ (such as graduation from high school) it’s really quite surprising how much life “we have to work with”, and yet how stubbornly rigid our society is in perpetuating a certain set of expectations for us as we reach certain ages. I don't want to be the guy shouting into the wind; I'm not suggesting any massive paradigm shift...just something that my experiences to date have got me thinking about to an ever-greater degree.

Anyway, I am currently studying for the New York bar exam -- a place I really didn't think I'd be when I took my leave of absence from law school a couple years ago (and doubly ironic because I don't even live in the US.) I think back to the meeting I had with the dean of students when I told him that I wanted to leave school; I remember walking down the street afterward relatively secure in that decision, and truth be told, I thought it more likely than not (maybe 60%) that I wouldn't be returning at all. But I don't for one second regret returning to school, nor completing my degree. I couldn't even count how many times I've been asked in recent years what kind of law I want to practice, which I always answer by saying that I don't really want to practice law at all, which inevitably draws an incredulous response along the lines of: "Wait a minute -- you're in law school, but you don't want to be a lawyer!??" Yes, that is correct. I don't. But I can't think of any way I would have rather spent the previous three years: I met some of the best friends I've ever made, and with whom I had an absolute ball. It was intellectually stimulating and challenging, even when I was having doubts about how it would contribute to my eventual career. And maybe most important of all, it allowed me to discover poker -- an odd thing to say, I know, but I think one of the reasons that poker in North America is becoming increasingly dominated by the 25-year-old and under set is that it's that age bracket that really had the disposable time to devote themselves to reading, learning, and practicing (read: playing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of hands.) I'm grateful to have discovered the game while I was in a position to really indulge my passion for it, a rather unique opportunity, which I'm not sure would have come along later in life. I don't think there's any one sentence, nor paragraph, that can possibly sum up the past few years of my life, other than to say that it's all in the pages of this blog -- the veritable life cycle of a poker player, from my initiation into the online game, to my progression up through the stakes, and all the accompanying psychological states and insecurities. Perhaps what I'm most grateful for is having developed over the past year or two what I felt to be a great balance between school, work, travel, leisure, and poker; an equilibrium that's about to change dramatically, of course.

While I say I don't want to practice law at this point in time, who's to say how I'll feel about things 5 or 10 years from now. I'm sure a day will come when I'll be happy that I'm an actual lawyer and not just a law school graduate. Besides, if I don't study for and take this exam now while the general workings of the law are still relatively fresh in my mind, I doubt I'll ever come back to it later in life, and if I do, it will pose quite a formidable challenge. You ever come to a decision point in life and your instinct simply tells you that one option is the "right" one? Well this is one of those for me >>> I simply know that studying for and taking the bar exam is the right call. So I'm gritting my teeth for the next 7 weeks to take care of business. (Sidebar: in fact, there is one aspect of the law that I happen to find fascinating -- I really mean it: I follow this stuff for fun >> Google has been on the receiving end of dozens of lawsuits recently because of its practice of selling "keywords" to corporate competitors. Basically what's going on is this: Nike can "purchase" the search term "Reebok", so that any time somebody Googles "Reebok", a banner ad for Nike is displayed alongside the search results. Reebok cries trademark infringement. There's just one problem: Nike isn't actually using the trademarked term. All they've done is contractually agreed with private company Google that any time the user searches for Reebok, an ad for Nike shoes will be displayed. And there's no risk of "consumer confusion" here...all users see is an ad for Nike shoes...it's not Nike passing off their goods as someone else's. There are actually a number if very interesting legal questions here including (i) whether Nike is using the term "in commerce" (a requirement for a finding of trademark infringement), and (ii) whether Google is even the right party the plaintiff should be suing...after all, it's Nike that's making use of the trademarked term, not Google >> they're really just facilitating it. Of course, this isn't really an issue in my hypothetical example of Nike vs. Reebok because both Google and Nike have deep pockets to satisfy a multi-million dollar judgment. BUT, in reality, there are a lot of big corporations who claim that little mom & pop operations are inappropriately buying trademarked search terms through Google's keyword sales...so the big corporations think to themselves "gee, even though it's the little mom + pop shop that's infringing our trademark, let's go after Google and the keyword sales program itself because they've got the deepest pockets for a potential settlement, etc." Anyway, I don't know how I got off on this track, but I really do find that area of internet law fascinating...because it's so new and completely unsettled. So I've been making some overtures to Google (and their legal department) and some IP law firms who work on these types of cases. If anyone out there has any connections they think might be of interest to me, I'm all ears :)

But I digress. Between the time that I'm putting into study, and the Neteller bombshell that dropped the other day, this also seems like a rather opportune (and perhaps necessary) time to scale back on poker. As a bit of a "last hoorah" I went to Atlantic City last week for a couple days of poker, and played something like 30 out of the 48 hours I was in town. FWIW, I absolutely crushed the 5/10NL game there (to another commenter who asked about why I didn't post much anymore about my online results...well, I guess I simply don't find that aspect of the game all that interesting to talk about; there's an ample supply of such braggery in the 2+2 BBV forum; just didn't want to cast my lot in with those yahoos, even if reading that forum is a favorite guilty pleasure of mine.) One comment about playing NL live: It's absolute cake (easy to say, I guess, when you clean up.) I played a little scared for the first hour before realizing that out of 9 opponents, at least 7 of them had absolutely no clue what they were doing post-flop, and you could read them like the Sunday Times. It wasn't so much about picking up on tells but rather simply betting pattern/sizing -- (digression: God, how I love the inexhaustible supply of Bridge & Tunnel trash who fancy themselves good poker players because they can, quote, "read people" well, not realizing that this is a game of math, not perception.) No one wanted to get caught making ill-advised bluffs (or worse: calldowns), so it was remarkably easy to bully people out of pots when scare cards hit, and easier still to get out of their way when they picked up a monster. In 30 hours at the table, I can count on the fingers of one hand the times when I saw anyone make anything that could be classified as a real "move". Anyway, that marathon session really sapped the poker lifeblood from me, at least for a week or two, so I feel a little more comfortable eschewing the felt in favor of bar study.

So I guess this is it. Do I have any remaining words of wisdom culled from these past few years?

Well, it's funny: I try to compare the state of my life as a 21-year old finishing my undergraduate studies, and a 27-year old graduating from law school, each experience being accompanied by a certain degree of uncertainty about the future. But there are differences, too. At 21, I had hooked up with my fair share of girls, but I didn't know the first thing about dating or relationships. I had plenty of friends, but I didn't know anything about actually socializing. I'd held down a number of jobs, but I didn't know squat about working. At 21, I knew absolutely jack-shit. At 27, I still know jack-shit, but I know that I know jack-shit. Do you follow? In the 5 intervening years, I accrued experience and humulity at approximately the same rate. Keep an open mind.

Let me close with a brief story. One of my passions has always been comedy. No particular aspect of it; I just love the science of it. I love a good sitcom, old-school Marx Bros. movies, good stand-up (I even tried my hand at it a few times, which was a real rush), well-timed sarcasm, pregnant comedic pauses, stinging satire, snappy comebacks to stupid questions, and so on. I used to think that my dream job would be as a writer for The Daily Show, or some other smart comedy. Anyway, it just so happened that the executive in charge of original programming at Comedy Central is a graduate of my alma mater, so I used the alumni network to look her up, and send her a few letters asking if she might spare a few minutes to talk to me over the phone about work in the industry. (This was during my first year of law school, when I was just starting to get disillusioned with the whole enterprise.) I sent her a couple emails, and a letter by post, but got no response for over a month, so I figured they hadn’t reached or, or she was simply too busy to grant me an audience. So I forgot about it for a while. Then a couple weeks later, just out of the blue, she called me, catching me very off-guard, since I had more or less written her off. Because I was a little flustered, I bumbled awkwardly through some generic questions and answers, until we started talking about my ongoing law school education. In filling a bit of a prolonged pause, I lobbed her a softball, asking her what she thought of law school, and whether it could help in her line of work, expecting the standard “well, a law degree is so versatile, it would certainly prove advantageous no matter what field…blah, blah blah” response. But her firm and bleak answer took me by surprise.

“No,” she offered flatly.
“Oh…” I replied, somewhat caught off-guard.
“Well,” she continued “I just don’t really see what use a law degree would be in the field of comedy. I mean, I guess if you were going to work on artists’ contracts, or something, but that’s work for the law firms…doesn’t really have much to do with what we do here at Comedy Central.”

She didn’t speak with any reproach, and didn't intend her comments as a rebuke of any kind, but that’s exactly what it felt like to me. It was like an indictment of everything I was brought up to believe: that if you just study and work hard, everything else will take care of itself. That may indeed be a prescription for a life free of overt hardship, but I think it very far from a recipe for life fulfillment.

‘Of course law didn’t have anything to do with comedy,’ I thought (in many ways, it’s the complete antithesis!). ‘What on Earth could lead anyone to think otherwise?!??’

Her comments stung a little, but also carried with them a very important message; one that I had largely repressed until that time, but whose authenticity was undeniable: You are in control, nobody else. Deceptively simple, but it’s a message that has informed nearly every decision I’ve made in the past few years. Would you rather be playing poker than attending but ignoring a law school lecture? Then LEAVE, you’re not nailed down to the seat. Want to travel? Buy that plane ticket. Want to work on interesting projects? Well, you can interview for a position at a law firm and hope some interesting work finds its way across your desk once every couple of years, or you can decide what you want to work on and go seek it out. People love to come up with reasons why it’s not a great time to take a vacation, but you know what: if you wait until everything in your life is absolutely perfect before you take that trip/buy that house/talk to that girl/get in shape/have a baby, well, you’ll wake up old and wrinkled one day and wonder where it was you made a wrong turn. And maybe, just maybe you’ll come to the depressing conclusion that it wasn’t a wrong turn you took anywhere along the way, but rather it was your reluctance to make any turn at all. To cite a dumb and cliched example, I have never: N-E-V-E-R, not ONCE, regretted approaching a girl even when (as was the case all-too-often) she simply wasn’t interested in me, but man-oh-man I can recount with stunning accuracy the dozens of times when I was just too riddled with “what if I fail / look like a jackass” nerves to even open my mouth.

You can passively wait for knowledge and experience to wash over you, but that’s just about the least efficient way to go about things. Who you are and who you become is determined by the decisions you make and the actions you take. One of the somewhat-ironic realizations that I’ve had in keeping this blog is that we can’t merely think our way to happiness or fulfillment; so many of my blog posts have lamented the fact that I seem to continuously present problems and frustrations, and frame their parameters, but rarely do I approach an actual solution. But that’s what life is: more questions than answers. I used to love the somewhat-juvenile expression “Do it for the story!” While perhaps a tad elementary, I think it stands for the proposition that ultimately we are all destined to grow older, and eventually get very sick and die. One day we will all be elderly, shrunken shells of our former selves, devoid of the charisma, beauty, and intelligence that once defined us, and all that will be left to distinguish us from the other aging men and women on the planet are the experiences that we have accumulated, and the stories we’re able to share with a younger generation. I’m fiercely proud, content, and spiritually fulfilled with how I’ve spent the last few years of my life, and I’d like to think it’s a blueprint, of sorts, for how I might seek out similar degrees of satisfaction in other domains of my life going forward, even if/when I leave poker behind in favor of other life pursuits. Thanks for reading.