Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Gambler

To me there really is nothing more glorious than waking up on a weekend morning with nothing to do and doing just that. Laying around all morning drifting in and out of sleep, catching up on your Tivo then rolling out of bed at the crack of noon. That’s living if you ask me and that’s exactly how I spent last Sunday. About midmorning I started to get a little bored though, not bored enough to actually get up and do something with my life mind you, but bored none the less. Occasionally in cases of extreme doldrums such as this I’ll turn to online poker. There are free tournaments you can play in that I’ll use just to pass the time when I have nothing better to do. When I logged on to the poker site though I noticed that I had $5 in my account. SCORE! From time to time the poker Gods will give you free money to encourage you to deposit more of your own money to lose to them. Trust me, it’s effective. Anyway, I was pretty pumped to be able to play with real, free money instead of fake money. In the last two days I’ve turned that $5 into several hundred dollars, because I’m good at poker. I don’t say this to brag, it’s not that impressive, it just got me thinking.

I’ve spent the first half of this week working outside doing more bridge inspections. It’s terrible; you might have noticed it’s been a brutally cold week. I still can’t feel my toes. I can already see what I’m going to be thinking about tomorrow. I mean after I get over the thoughts about how I didn’t pay $130,000 for college to hang out underneath of bridge while my balls freeze off. I’ll be thinking, in two days I was able to take $5 and turn it into almost as much money as I will make the first two days of this work week doing something fun instead of doing something awful. Why would I not just quit my job and gamble for a living. And inevitably my mind would drift off to what my life would be like as a professional online poker player. Here’s a hint, it involves a wireless connection, a pool, and spreadsheets.

Why don’t I do it you ask? Well I’m really not as good as I imply first of all. Secondly, it’s stupid and impractical. I mean, you probably won’t be surprised to know that $130,000 in schooling comes with some pretty massive student loans.

So what’s the moral of this story? Sometimes I daydream about what I’m going to daydream about in advance.

1 comment:

Los said...

Many, many people have dropped out of college, or stopped working to do exactly what you are "contemplating." I worked with a guy who moved to Atlantic City so he could play in tournaments on a weekly (daily?) basis.