Thursday, April 9, 2009

Door Number AA23 double-suited

Here in the Free State of Kansas we are experiencing "Spring." It's a petulant season. Within the last ten days we've had a severe thunderstorm, freezing rain, an afternoon of cloudless skies and a slight breeze ruffling the daffodils as the temperature hovered in the mid-very-nice-indeeds, and graupel. That's not a typo whatever Microslush tells you. 'Graupel' is a real form of frozen precipitation invented in Germany.

Fortunately I slept through it.

I had no choice. PokerStars has seen fit to entertain the poker world with its Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) and since playing poker is my only means of providing my cats with kibbles and me with boots I was compelled to participate. Work all night and sleep all day or have howling moggies and wear sandals.

I've tried the other kind of working and frankly it didn't suit my constitution. For a while I was a university professor. Then I had an epiphany. I realized that if I was going to earn my living exploiting the mathematical ineptitude of others I could either continue teaching or devote my considerable intellect to the Holy Game of Poker. I compared the office facilities associated with the two options.

Behind door number 1: A computer, a carpet stained with undrinkable state university coffee, a suicide note, a phone that never stops ringing ("Professor... um... yeah it's Shannon... in your class... er... Astrology? Sorry Astronomy. Yeah that. Okay so about the mid-term. I really wanted to be there cos, like, I studied all the material and even bought the book. You wrote that, huh? Wow. Heh. Um. Yeah... Oh! So, you know the Red Lobster on 59th Street? Yeah, next to the..." CLICK), mounds of ungraded papers, invitations from Deans and Vice Provosts to attend "Working Breakfasts! Let us enrich you so you can enrich your students!"

Behind door number 2: cocktail waitresses with fake tits and free drinks, people who are bad at math who came here of their own volition and not because of a university Gen Ed requirement, bathrooms that always have enough paper towels and that are free from the angry scrawl of students who just failed my class and see fit to describe in fourth-grade handwriting and grammar their theories about how I am gay and/or nailing that girl in the front row in the denim miniskirt that they wanted to nail but never got anywhere because the girl in question found them indistinguishable from all the other terminally dull guys in baseball caps and sweatshirts, and... oh yes, sorry, I digressed. Behind door number 2: POKER.

The odd thing about this decision, particularly given that I never did nail the girl in the front row in the denim miniskirt, was that it took me more than thirty seconds to decide on door number 2.

Doors, like Omaha-8, are notable for their bidirectionality. They allow the passage of bipeds, quadrupeds, thoughts, smells, bills, food, drink, and bowheads, both in and out. If a door ever runs for the office of President of the United States of America this apparent intrinsic ambivalence will doubtless be characterized as "flip-flopping" by Fox News. And the door that led me to Poker is no exception. In future blogs I will describe the adventures that commenced as I walked through that door, those that I had thought had ended but were in fact just resting, and adventures that have not yet begun.

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