Leftovers
Time to clean out the refrigerator and make a meal out of what we find. These are bits of posts started in the last year that, for one reason or another, never made it out of "draft" status:
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Whoa, slow down there maestro. There's a *New* Mexico?
--C. Montgomery Burns
It can be very difficult to get to know me. While I think I'm as reasonably gregarious as the next person, I'm not particularly garrulous. Silence isn't something to be beaten back by an unending stream of words, and I feel no need to unburden every personal detail of my life or thought processes to people I don't know very well or have only recently met. When I'm with people I've known for a long time, it's a completely different story, but for the most part I clam up around new people and try to get to know them by listening to them. While I may get a great sense of who they are by shutting up and opening my ears, they don't always get much of a sense of me.
I bring this up because I had a chat with Pauly last night, during which I happened to mention that one of my three siblings is adopted. Pauly has known me for over two years and this little fact about my life (which, I admit, is somewhat interesting or at least unusual) never came out.
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I think F-Train needs to blog more cause in one night he was assumed to be a gay, Jewish Danish dude.
--Dawn Summers
On my way home tonight from an excellent dinner of sweet sausage and broccoli rabe panini, roasted artichoke, and half a bottle of red wine, I found myself with time and the right mood to write something substantive. My first instinct was to post something poker-related, and there were several candidates:
1. I could write up the best casino "home game" I've ever played - except that master storyteller Joe Speaker beat me to the punch four days ago, right after the game actually took place.
2. I could discuss the +EV effect of tilting a table while playing drunken 2-4 limit holdem with Bill Rini - except that I suspect most of my readers beat me to the punch on that experience years ago.
3. I could discuss the differences between a LAG style and a TAG style, using a recent post by SoxLover as a focal point - except that would probably wind up with me giving him some sort of credit, and if there's one rule in life I live by, it's that I never give SoxLover credit. Ever.
Righto. First instinct totally wrong. Personal post it is then.
I've had a very complex relationship with the City of Angels for about three years now. Wil (at least, I think it was Wil) once wrote that he has a nonspecific sense of loss every time he flies over the Los Angeles basin on his way home from a trip.
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* I have lived in five major world cities: New York (my current home), Los Angeles, Washington, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
* I have been a NY Yankees fan since I was 3.
* When I was 12, a teacher who directed a play I was in told me I was a "true Thespian". To this day, I cannot decide if she meant it as a back-handed compliment.
* I have jumped out of an airplane at 10,000 feet.
* I am SCUBA certified.
* I have travelled extensively through Europe, Asia and South America but have never been to Canada.
* I have been to Mexico once. For dinner.
* My grandmother, my mother, my sister, one of my brothers and I all have blue eyes.
* One of my brothers is currently serving with the United States Army in Iraq.
* I have never been arrested.
* I've performed long-from improvisational comedy with Upright Citizens Brigade and Improv Olympic.
* I love karaoke.
* I dance.
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Among many of the New York pizza institutions that can claim it's one of the cream of the crop is DiFara's. I was there a few weeks ago, where, for two hours, I watched the proprietor, Domenico DeMarco, repeat his 10-minute pizza-making ritual over and over, as he's done for more than 40 years. 40 years of doing nothing but making pizza! I don't know if it's uplifting to see such dedication to a craft, or depressing to realize that the only way to achieve success in something is to shut out everything else in your life to the exclusion of that one thing. Pretty much everything I've ever done has been abandoned, to some degree, after at most a few years, as a new, shinier object catches my attention.