seriously.  no joke.  i must have like 7-8 clips on my computer of anywhere between 8 and 25 minutes of hu plo play that i can record before somebody quits me.

why oh why are people such dbags?  what happened to good old ethics, and letting people know you were going to quit soon?

in other news, i made a nice chunk of change at 30/60 limit O8 today.  i have no idea if i play well – i imagine i don’t… or at least i don’t play “standard,” but i haven’t encountered many people at o8 that put enough thought into it to realize that when i check behind on a lot more flops than most, maybe check/raising flop and bet/calling turn with K962 on a KT7 board isn’t the best play.  when someone starts to have a clue, i might have to learn how to actually play the game.   until then, i’m having fun fucking around.

what else?  i played my 2nd round of golf ever today.  i had a lesson and it turns out my immense driving skill i’d acquired through extensive practice in 5 lifetime sessions at the driving range wasn’t so immense.   my grip was completely wrong, among other things.  so i had the lesson, went out on the course, and struggled to hit the ball.  we only played 6 holes (they took FOREVER) and i was averaging like 8 or 9 shots/hole.  but then this one par 3 was right over the water, and my grandmother, my golf partner of the day, told me not to worry if i lose the ball in the water.  but what do you know, i hit the ball off the tee and somehow landed it within 10 feet of the hole.  i would have birdied if i weren’t terrible at putting, but ended up with par.  i’m kind of sad though, because that hole was like crack.  the rest of the day was torturous, but that one hole will keep me coming back for more.  mmmmmm crack hole.

also, i’ve been working out every day.  it’s been amazing.  i’m still not even close to being able to do a pull-up though.  i guess it might take more than 3 weeks, but i’m impatient!  i’ve also lost 4 lbs since i’ve started this whole ordeal, which was around the new year, so that’s pretty exciting too.  yay.

ok, i’m tired.  i need to get some rest.  we have a bright future ahead of us in this country, and it starts tomorrow.  i wanna be bright eyed and bushy tailed like i’m supposed to be, and that entails sleep!

i swear i’m becoming middle-aged before my time, if i wasn’t already there.

i had a gym date with my friend beth but i overslept it because last night, when heading to bed, i set the alarm for pm instead of am.  so when i woke up at 10:30 i thought better of heading to the gym by myself in the brutally cold snow, and got to work on writing my take home paper part of my civ pro exam.  somehow stumbling into a well-written and thoughtful essay, i managed to surprise myself and finish 2 hours earlier than i thought i would.  great, time for the gym!  only problem was it was still 10 degrees outside.  so instead, i decided to use my new wii fit.  yes, i was working out to wii fit in lieu of going to the gym.  i am officially 50 years old.

to me, the best part of wii games is when you look totally ridiculous but just don’t even care.  a group of us frequently play rock band, and there’s nothing better than someone walking in the room watching a group of 3 people just completely rocking out, oblivious and uncaring of how utterly foolish everyone looks.  and wii fit is just on another level.  i actually broke a sweat running in place in front of my tv.  i did step aerobics and got so into it i was worried the people downstairs would come up and complain.  and hula hooping… don’t get me started on that one.  maybe it’s my white-jewish-girl complete inability to move my hips, but i look insane doing it.  that being said, it is SO MUCH FUN!  there.  i said it.  the sad part was when they told me my “wii fit age” based on balance tests they had me do, and i was 38 goddamn years old.

later though, inspired by my friend zach’s gchat status, i took another silly test online which revealed a “real age” of 23 – i guess that’s supposed to mean how old your health indicates you are relative to life expectancy… of course, this was based on all my new post new year’s resolution habits (which i’ve maintained well for… um… two weeks).  so hopefully i don’t go back to my old ways and have my “real age” catch up to my wii fit age.  whatever, as long as the online test doesn’t tell me i’m a fat ass, i’m fine  (the wii fit has a habit of saying “OH!…” when you step on the board, as if like some really obese chick bumps into you and you’re like “OH!…” sort of in shock/confusion).

ok i’m heading to bed as it’s 3:25.  I’ve been doing well with most of my new year’s resolutions.  gym: check.  diet:  check.  quit drinking for a while:  check.  be more studious:  check.  it’s the last one that’s a kicker, the no laptop in bed resolution, my thinking being the laptop is the only thing keeping me from a decent night’s sleep every night.   i’m probably right, and yet somehow, it’s a hard habit to kick.  maybe that’s just a goal for another day (year)…

24 hour take home con law exam: done in 4 hours.  i don’t think i learned con law this term, but i’m pretty sure i learned something.  my next goal is to try to figure out what that something was.  i know because i realized i forgot to use one source for the essay that would have been perfect – so i read through the outline after i was done, only to realize i’d made all the points the article did, but on my own.  i’d actually thought of them myself.  it was sort of a strange feeling.  so either the articles are all just a lot of not very profound nonsense, or i actually learned something this term, or both.  tough to say at this point.

contracts tomorrow morning at 9am.  3 hour in class closed book final (that we have to hand-write in a blue book, wtf?), followed by a 2 hour take home essay on something involving feminist interpretations of contract law that i clearly have no idea about.  i might or might not read the material for that essay, depending on how well i do tomorrow morning.  i’m feeling pretty good though… whenever you put a bunch of numbers in the material, i’m bound to do something right.  so once again i should be asleep but can’t seem to get there for some reason… i’m all wired.  i guess the constitution will do that to you!

in other news, taking my con law exam today means i get to go to florida to visit my grandparents and not have to worry about taking a silly exam.  so the 17th to 22nd i’ll be in florida, and then the 22nd to the 25th i’ll be in vermont skiing with a bunch of law students.  actually, we have a really fun group going up to killington, and i’m looking forward to it a lot.  there’s also open spots, so if you’re a friend of mine, and you want to ski with a pretty fun group of people in a sweet house we rented, get in touch with me yo.

so i got rock band 2 while i was gone and it’s been sitting around collecting dust for the past week.  well since we have an eternity of 3 days to study for the next exam and learn everything i failed to understand all throughout the semester, it seems like tonight is a perfect time to give it some love.  it’s compatible with my old guitar hero guitars so now we can have 2 guitars, drums, and the mic going.  the playlist seems super awesome, and now that i’ve been going to the gym more, hopefully my leg won’t get so tired using the pedal on the drums!!!  who knew that the first thing that would excite me about being in better shape would be my ability to play rock band?  we’ll see how it goes.

so yeah, 1 exam down, 3 more to go.  today’s was actually pretty fun, i thought.  issue spotting is kind of cool because part of it is sort of issue inventing – i’m into finding creative ways to justify litigation that maybe aren’t exactly what the prof is looking for in terms of obvious legal issues.  and since it doesn’t matter how we do (thank god for pass/pass system), you can just take your time and have fun with it.  our exam today had 2 questions – the issue spotter, and then a second more theoretical one where we had to critique a posner decision (he’s the really conservative law and econ guy) about the economic efficiency of a luxury hotel providing security and preventing rape.  that was fun because in one answer i managed to critique him for being completely cold-hearted in not considering the real harm rape victims face, and laud his model of economic efficiency to analyze the situation.  i actually wound up writing a math equation to talk about legal issues… which is pretty much what i want to spend my life doing.  using equations to make arguments.  i actually wish i could just do that in casual day to day conversation, but i’m afraid people wouldn’t get me.  and they’d just think i was crazy.  which i probably am.

(If anyone is interested, the equation was Proximity of Cause = K(Foreseeability)(Directness of harm) where directness a measure of things like distance in time and space and intervening wrongdoers.  The idea was that with criminal interveners (the people that commit rape), the chain of promixite cause is severly broken between a hotel guest victim and the hotel’s negligence in prevent a rape, so you the hotel’s negligence is only proximate if the foreseeability is much higher than otherwise necessary).

Hey, I apologized in advance for the law school content.  In other news, I had my first session with my hot, sexy new personal trainer yesterday.  He seems really good actually – he’s young and doesn’t really explain everything super well in terms of why he chooses various exercises or what they do (this is after 1 session, so it might change) but he is really energetic, and he’s into not letting me slow down over the course of an hour.  That kind of motivating force is exactly what I need right now.  It’s also helping me on the eating sensibly front – I think it all goes together nicely.  By the time I get to Buenos Aires this summer, I’m going to be ridiculous.  I might even run/swim to Argentina, come to think of it.  Hmm, maybe I have a new goal…

Oh, and I’m waiting until January 15th to make my decision about where I’m going to work this summer, but I’m supposed to have two phone interviews, for the NYCLU and the Urban Justice Center.  I’d love to work at any of the three places (those and Center for Appellate Litigation, where I got my offer), but the NYCLU totally just stood me up for an interview!  WTF.  They were supposed to call me at 3:30 and didn’t, and this is after totally flaking on calling me back to set something up back in December.  Good impression, NYCLU.  Sucks that I still want your job.  That’s called lack of bargaining power… or something.  Well, that’s not really what it’s called but I don’t know Contracts yet – that’ll be in 3 days.  But it’s fucked up how they can just play me out like that and since we all want their jobs that don’t pay us shit anyway, we’ll put up with it.  I’m not your punching bag, NYCLU.  I’m not.  I just won’t lie there and take it.

So this guy completely and utterly owned me tonight.

I had $500 in my stars account (I don’t keep any money online) and I was bored late at night, so I decided to open up a couple of $220NL freezeouts.  For some reason I decided to play the ones with no blind increases.  Mistake #1.

I then proceed to get the biggest donkey ever who loses to me by cold calling OOP with hands as good as 93o and such.  I win the first match in about 20 minutes, when he decides to berate me.  I indulge his barbarian desires and berate him back. Mistake #2.

I am clearly winning the argument, but that is just the battle.  He will soon win the war.  In the remaining match, he proceeds to let each hand wind down to the last second of his 20 seconds he has to act before each decision.  So instead of each hand taking 10 seconds average, it is now taking about 1 minute.  I sit there for 2 hours, and there’s nothing I can do.  I am infuriated – this busto clown is clearly willing to sit there for hours to take my $220, and I need to go to bed and it isn’t worth 200 bucks to me to keep at this.  Still, I don’t want him to get the $220.  But he wins the war and eventually I start going all in every hand until he calls me and I lose (I had 4 to 1 chiplead when he was doing this).

I emailed stars support 3 different times (mistakes #3, 4, and 5) during the course of the match to explain the situation and see if I could get his account frozen or his 15 second time bank cut down.  They don’t respond until after the match of course, and this is their response:

Hello Vanessa,

Thank you for your e-mail.  It’s best to think of a player who is sitting
out as simply folding every hand.  This is a completely legal tactic, as it
is up to any individual player to decide his own best strategy.  There is no
rule, for obvious reasons, against folding every hand.

A player who is sitting out actually puts his opponents at a significant
advantage.  The player who is sitting out is still forced to pay his blinds
and antes, and is never able to build his stack.  On occasion, a player
might blind off into 3rd place, or maybe even 2nd, but players who employ
this strategy are usually far worse off than those who play their best game.

You may wish to read more regarding sitting out in tournaments here:

http://www.pokerstars.com/tournaments/sittingout.html

Good luck in your future games, and thank you for choosing PokerStars.

Regards,

Dario
PokerStars Support Team

Lifetilt ensues.  And now I’m going to bed, sleep deprived, out about $350 of equity, and stark-raving mad.

I don’t know if it’s the being in high school, the being a girl, the west village, or the being in a place where you can eat delicious things with very few calories, but something about the pinkberry in the west village apparently encourages girls to act like complete moronic fools.  i have nothing more to say about that.

in other news, mike brabiglia is funny.  we saw him tonight in the bleecker street theater which is a nice venue that attracts way fewer annoying high school girls than pinkberry.  i give the show a B+, as i was bored for a little bit toward the 2/3 point and some of the schtick was a little predictable/repetitive.  but all in all, a very solid time.

So my family and the Green-Spectors (Sue, Don, Lara, Avery, and Hal) have this tradition of making sushi and playing games together.  It started as a Rosh Hashanah thing, you know, typical Reconstructionist traditional meal for one of the most religious holidays of the year… but it has grown to an at-least-once-annually-but-usually-more event.  I’ve brought it to my own life with great success last year, and I’m actually planning on having a sushi-making party this coming week with some friends back at school.

Sue is such a classic Jewish mother – loves to cook and entertain, and wants everything to be perfect for everyone.  As the entertainer, everyone needs to have their favorite ingredients for the sushi making.  As the cook, new ingredients are constantly added for more adventurous sushi.  You can see where this is going.  Last night we had 16 sushi ingredients, most of which worked incredibly well.  They were:

Tuna

Yellowtail

Salmon

Smoked Salmon

Eel

Cooked Shrimp

Lobster Salad

Egg (Tamago)

Cucumber

Avocado

Mango

Inari (Bean curd pouches)

Masago (Flying fish roe)

Sesame Seeds

Cream Cheese

Imitation crab sticks

The best rolls were actually the ones with cream cheese in them, in my opinion.  Cream cheese was the new addition, and it worked very well.  The winning roll from the evening was:

Cream cheese, tuna, smoked salmon, cucumber, egg, masago, and sesame seeds with a touch of wasabi, all wrapped in nori.

Runner up of the evening:

Tuna, salmon, cucumber, eel, mango, and masago wrapped in nori.

There were lots of other crazy adventures, but these worked the best.  Sushi-games night is always a good time.  One observation: My brother still can’t cut sushi so it doesn’t completely fall apart.  I told him how to do it but he insists on doing one quick cut down each piece quickly (this method decidedly does NOT work).  I think he secretly wants to be a samurai ninja, and is using the sushi to practice for more important battles yet to come.  Beef, maybe.  I blame it all on the ninja costume he insisted on wearing for Halloween 8 years in a row growing up.

Well, no promises this time… but I’ve heard it’s good for people to write so I’m hoping that this will make me feel good.  Plus, I have the world’s shittiest memory, so I’m hoping that writing more details about my life will actually make me come back and remember them later on.  I apologize in advance for the lack of too much poker content (I don’t play that much anymore!) and any law school content I may post, but hey, life is pretty simple these days and there ain’t much more to say.

I guess I haven’t really written in 6 months – I could try to catch up, but that seems silly… I feel like I’m getting coffee with a friend I haven’t seen in 6 months – where do you begin?  The long and short of it is that I moved to New Haven, bought a sweet condo there, (almost) completed my first semester of my 1L year at Yale Law School, ended my relationship with Nora, met a whole group of amazing people, got my life somewhat in working order where I kind of get shit done now, and (almost) kicked the poker bug.

OK, that last sentence was a lie.  I didn’t kick the poker bug.  In fact, every so often, I just get it bad and have to make a trip to Foxwoods or something, but it’s never very satisfying.  I think some friends are going out to Vegas for my friend’s birthday coming up in February, so maybe I’ll tack on an extra day or two then and hit the tables.

I finished my semester a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been hanging out in NYC since then.  I have to head back to school tomorrow though to begin studying for finals, which start in a week.  Luckily, they’re all pass/fail, so I’m not really stressed at all.  The last semester was sort of brutal in that I had class at 8:30AM every day.  Towards the end I didn’t go all the time, so I really don’t know as much as I should about the last 1/4 of the material in any of my classes.  That with my bad memory and the return to freshman year of college style drinking that law school invites, and the last few weeks before classes ended were kind of a blur.  But I’m psyched for next semester now, I’m only taking early class twice a week, and I’m not going to drink for a while to clear my head.  I’m taking sweet classes though – law and economics, another microecon class, an LBGT rights litigation clinic, property, and a latin american film class with undergrads to bone up on my Spanish before heading to Argentina for a month this summer.

Last night was New Years’ Eve, but a relatively uneventful one.  I went with Beth (law school friend) and Erin (old MIT friend) and her girlfriend Laura to this party out in Prospect’Heights.  That isn’t a typo – it was in the neighborhood of Prospect’Heights.  My friend originally told me Park Slope, then switched it to Prospect Heights.  At the party she clarified that what she said was “Prospect Place in Crown Heights” but just said it very quickly.  Crown Heights is quite different than Prospect Heights, you see.  Anyway, it reminded me a lot of how realtors skew the nicer neighborhoods to have very generous district lines… and it seemed funny to me.  The party was fine – I met a couple nice people I guess, but we didn’t really talk to anyone else.  It seemed like everyone else knew each other, and the layout of the apartment wasn’t great for getting to know people – the narrow structure sort of made it difficult to have group conversations.  Also, we tried to play the finger game but it didn’t catch on!  In fact, people were too bored to even finish one round of it.  W T FFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!

So this vacation is now coming to an end.  New Years’ resolutions are pretty cliche.  Especially weight loss new years’ resolutions.  But fuck it.  I had lost a lot of weight last yr just eating healthy and not drinking much… and I’ve been in terrible reverse since the start of law school.  so one of my new years’ resolutions is to make the last weight-loss new years’ resolution I will ever make.  And that includes a 1 month from this date no-drinking period, followed by a reevaluation and possible continuance of the policy.  Also, personal trainer time, it is.  I was going to start this last term but I was playing a lot of basketball and squash – maybe 4 or 5 times a week.  So I got spoiled and thought I didn’t have to waste time boring myself at the gym.  But then I realized that when we actually had a lot of work to do, 2 hours playing basketball is sort of an unreasonable hope.  So I’m going back to my old ways, I’m gonna hopefully find some Yale-based personal trainer to work with me, and start lifting again.  Actually, if anyone reading this knows anyone in the New Haven area who would work with me, please let me know.

In poker news, I went to play the WPT at foxwoods a little while ago and I’m planning to go again in April.  I managed to make some huge laydowns in the 10k (including correctly folding a set to one bet on the turn on a K946sss board and laying down TPTK way too many times to count) but I couldn’t make the last one, sadly one of the more obvious ones despite being against a crazy aggressive player, and I was out.  That brings my record of cashing in 10k WPT events to like 0-12 or something insane.  And it’s sick that I’ve become one of those live pros that brags about all the sick laydowns they made rather than the sick bluffs.  Ha.  Weep for me, please.  Luckily I took down one of the 2k preliminary events for 115k so that was nice.  Especially after being in law school and not being able to play really, an unexpected 6 figure score is a nice bonus.  I’m excited for the WPT in April and sad that this is my first World Series that I’m not going to be able to be in Vegas.  Between Argentina for a month and a summer job in NYC, I’m cutting it really close to all of the weeks of the summer.  I’m waiting for the schedule for the WSOP to come out to see what I can swing, and sort of trying to finagle a summer job where I can take a week to go play, but I’m not too hopeful.  Still, I’d love to head out there for the 10k HU of course, the 10k PLO, the women’s event, and anything else.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Last but certainly not least – DJ and I got together again and made a sweet series for season 1 of the 2nd year of DeucesCracked.  I can’t say too much about it but I think it’s better than unconventional wisdom – I’m just throwing that out there.  Stay tuned.

And with that, I’m done.  I’m not going to promise to keep blogging, but I’m certainly going to try.  Like a friend you haven’t seen in 6 months, the first chat is always very superficial.  I promise to add more of the ridiculous idiosyncracies of my every day life in future posts, should I be inclined to make them.  Have a wonderful 2009 everyone.