Slogging It Out

I want to write. In some ways, I need to write. It's the same need to write as the one that produced my New Year's post which, incidentally, was a 5am thunderbolt and which, I note with wry amusement, nobody in comment-land wanted to touch with a 10-foot pole. But the age-old problem that has haunted this site for the last year or two, that I've probably discussed before, still lingers - what should I write about?

The logical choice is poker. This, theoretically, is a poker-themed site, and even if I think strategy is largely overdone at this point (and done in a far smarter, more eloquent way by people other than me), there's always a nugget or two that can be mined from the experience of sitting at a table. Thing is, I haven't sat at a table, real or virtual, since December 9, the Sunday of the Vegas trip, and the frequency of sitting at the table isn't going to change much in the near future. That's mainly a function of circumstance - I don't play online anymore except for the very occasional blogger tournament, I missed one home game due to some travel, I haven't had the time or desire to go to AC, and the holidays wiped out most other home games. Circumstance or not, when you don't sit at the table, it becomes pretty damn difficult to mine the nuggets that come from sitting at the table.

Poker is out. What are other sources of ideas? There, I'm a little stumped.

It's not that I have writer's block. Just within the last week, I have plenty of ideas, plenty of experiences I could write about, plenty of thoughts that could be sorted out by being expressed in a written form, whether literally, or metaphorically, or even thematically. But they are part and parcel of some of my innermost and sensitive thought processes and emotions, and that presents a problem.

I have always found it difficult to write about myself here. Things that are intensely personal, which would make for interesting reading if written the right way, are things that I typically share only with a small cadre of people that are very, very close to me. Throwing these things out on Al Gore's internets for anyone and everyone to read, however cathartic it may be, is not something I have ever been able to do.

By the same token, I'm sure nobody really cares about the more banal aspects of my life -- like, for example, that I had brunch with my college roommate yesterday, was able to look at and play with his 1-year-old daughter, and think to myself, "Nope. Still no desire to have one of these for myself." Fundamentally, that's not terribly interesting, even if I were to somehow present it in a well-written and/or amusing way.

I guess what it all comes down to, is I'm either going to have to "sac up", as they say, and start writing about some of these deeper things, or I'm going to have to become more of a storyteller, in the Otis-ian sense. These thoughts need to come out of my head in some form or another, and there's only so much I can ask of, or expect from, that small circle of close friends that I turn to, and who have to deal with me, when I get in these moods.

This whole post was a long way of not really saying anything at all, and of saying a nothing that I've probably said before, but hopefully it's the last time. In the new spirit I'm trying to strike going forward, I'll close this off with a recent conversation I had, that's not really all that personal to me, but can hopefully get the thought-process juices flowing.

My friend's boyfriend told her that, at one time, he had considered being a ski bum in Andorra. She asked me if she was a snob for being potentially embarrassed about that. She is a highly driven person, and in the back of her mind, she was freaking out that he might not be "the success type".

We discussed it a bit, I mentioned some of my past experiences -- specifically, dating a stripper who seemed to always be letting life make a victim out of her, and finally, I came to this: you always have to take people as you find them. In the case of the stripper, as long as she had some ambition and was applying herself to something, instead of blaming the world for her ills, none of the other trappings of her life mattered to me. But she didn't and she wasn't, and showed no inclination to change. That type of person is not for me. Is that snobbish? I don't think so. To be embarrassed for the other person is snobbish; it implies that your way is "better", or "more proper", than theirs. It's making a value judgment about your own life and applying it to theirs. On the other hand, knowing that such a person, such a style of thinking and living, is not for you, isn't snobbish. It's just about getting out of life, and other people, what you want to get out of them.