The End?

I've ran this blog for a little over a year now. As the proverb goes, "all good things must come to an end." Well, in this case, my blog was probably just a marginal thing, but I felt like it was coming to an end anyways. Lately I just haven't been as inspired to write about things as I was... say, about a year ago. This seems to be all too often a case for on & off bloggers- they fall into a slump of having nothing particularly interesting that they want to get off their minds and onto the internetz.

The standard path of a blog fallout seems to follow this: frequent and interesting updates, less-frequent and mildly interesting updates, occasional updates, and finally updates just because you feel like you need to. I was hoping this blog wouldn't take that line, but it felt like that was the direction it was headed in and I've decided to at least take a hiatus before that last part really kicked in.

Call me extremely lazy, but I also found that it's very hard and time consuming to write good, solid, paragraphs of thoughts for a blog. It's almost akin to writing an essay for school, and god knows I am more than over that by now. For my ones of followers and readers (I know you're out there!), I sincerely apologize for failing to continue providing you with mindless updates on here.

...that's what Twitter is for.

Is my youth disappearing before my eyes?

Another year, another birthday. Just a couple weeks ago I wrapped up the long sought after age of 21 and finally turned 22. At this point, I'm pretty sure there aren't any more age-defining birthdays to look forward to, especially compared to some past ones. Relatively speaking, I am of course still "young", but definitely feel as if I've taken on a lot more responsibilities and independence than I imagined I ever would have at this age. Hell, my last night of being 21 was spent scrubbing the kitchen down when my sink decided to randomly overflow with other people's runoff water throughout the day. (I'm not going to get into why this happened or the mess that ensued, but just know that it was quite a depressing day.)

Well who cares, right? Everyone hates taking on more responsibilities, dealing with day to day problems, and all the other stuff I could rant on about when becoming an adult. However, being as I started a regular 9-5 job earlier on than most people probably would, I often wonder if I'm missing out on more things I could be doing while I'm still young. Should I have taken a year or two off to myself? Should I be studying more in school? Am I missing out on a lot more opportunities to do things at this age?

My biggest fear is to work a regular job for years on end and see my life just flash before my eyes. Realizing that 20-30 years passed me by and wondering where all the time went always scares me, especially if I didn't do enough in my life to feel satisfied. Particularly now at this age, I think it'd be best to keep an open mind and not be afraid to take on new opportunities as they arise.

But hey, what do I know, I'm still just a Kid.

Is the wrath of Rochester weather inescapable?

I once believed that a perk of moving down south would be to get away from the depressing & snowy Rochester winters. I once believed that, but have since realized how wrong horrendously wrong I might be. Last year, the DC area got hit with one of the worst series of snowstorms it had ever experienced in decades. Just a couple days ago, a mythical thundersnow struck the area leaving 300,000+ in the metro area without power.

The storm itself wouldn't have been so bad in a city where people could actually handle it (read: Rochester), but inexperienced drivers in the area quickly turned this debacle into perhaps the worst traffic jam ever witnessed. I was sent home from work earlier than usual due to the weather conditions, with my 10 minute drive home tripling to half an hour. This kind of irked me, until I learned that some of my coworkers had only managed to crawl out half a mile from work within one hour. The combination of heavy snowfall, incredibly inexperienced drivers, and no readily available snow plows turned simple commutes into hours upon hours of gridlock. Even now I still can't fathom how some people ended up sitting in their cars for upwards of 12 hours just to drive a few miles home. Hell, I could've gone to Rochester and halfway back in that time alone.

To top it all off, a majority of households in the DC area lost their power that evening as well. Imagine sitting through an 8 hour commute to go 10 miles down the road, knowing full well that you would have no power at your place. If that is not the definition of depression, I don't know what is. I quickly realized how good I had it to have been home in only 30 minutes with my electricity staying on through the night. It almost felt guilty knowing that so many people were incredibly worse off- though I seem to have always lucked out in these types of situations.

The best part is, just about every school and workplace had already planned to shut down the next day- but of course I still trudged into work the next morning. Typical. Shades of Rush-Henrietta & RIT not believing in snow days have followed me down south as well.

I feel at home.

The last hurrah?

It's such an odd concept to me having to earn vacation days now, whereas before I could just be done with a semester of college and have a bunch of time off. For that, I am envious of most of my friends.

Currently, I'm home on break for only the second time since making the move down south. The 7-8ish hour trip kind of detracts me from just driving home on any random weekend, so I really look forward to the longer vacations. Although Thanksgiving weekend only lasted a handful of days, it was great to see a bunch of close friends and hang out just like old times. This current 10-day break is even better as I've been able to see more familiar faces and plan out more things to do everyday (or just come up with spur of the moment plans).

When I catch up with people from home, it sometimes feels like we never missed a beat and I had never actually left for such a long time. The one thing that always gets brought up is where or what people will be doing in a year or two from now. This really got me thinking- is this one of the last times everyone I've been close to will be able to conveniently see each other at once? When everyone starts graduating and moving on into "the real world," I'd expect to see a fair number of people get out of the Rochester area like I did. The fact that most people are still around here for the holiday break is really a nice coincidence when you think about it, as things may never be like this again. Of course, I'm hoping that won't be the case, but it just goes to show that you should make the most of your time when the opportunity to see a familiar face arises.

Just something to think about as a solid year in 2010 comes to a close, and cheers to an even better 2011 :)

Where do all my monies go?

To be honest, I'd really rather not think about why I don't see much of the money I make. Every month, I just hand one of my two paychecks over to my apartment and try to make the most of the other one. I would be lying though if I said I never played around with the numbers to try & figure out where everything goes. Here is a rough breakdown of what I usually end up concluding:

30% of my salary goes to rent
28% goes to taxes
7% goes to health insurance, 401K, and other deductions
10% goes to bills, expenses, groceries, & general spending every month
25% I (try to) save

The red percentages are what I consider the most useless/wasteful parts of my earnings. Yes, if you did your math correctly, over half everything I make gets siphoned out to my apartment and the government. Thank you, DC area.

The orange deductions are what I see as (hopefully) useful investments for my future benefit-health insurance, 401K, and other miscellaneous expenses. Although I've yet to see a doctor here, nor do I really care about retirement at this point in my life, these payments do at least bring me some peace of mind. And 7% overall ain't that bad. (I guess.)

Finally, we arrive at the money I actually get to see every month. Of course, there are day-to-day living expenses that continue to eat up my salary here as well. I began logging these daily expenses into a database in July, allotting approximately 10% of what I make every month to these expenditures. My ultimate goal was to use the database to track literally every out of pocket purchase I made, and aim to save "X" amount of money every month as a result. With 4 and 1/2 months passed, I am surprisingly still on target with my goal. It hasn't been particularly easy though-things can come up out of nowhere (such as a car breakdown) and really set you back unexpectedly. All in all, 25% of my earnings adds up to just a paltry sum that I keep to myself at the end of the day.

And unfortunately for me, I can no longer take down the World Series of Poker Main Event at the ripe old age of 21. [sad face]

I miss being an insomniac.

Tomorrow I get to go into work ridiculously late.. we're talking 1pm or so in the middle of the week. Naturally, I'm going to stay up right now & do absolutely nothing in order to enjoy sleeping in tomorrow. I probably miss that aspect of my life the most now that I'm living in the post-college days. It used to be the norm to go to bed at 3am, wake up at 12, hang around, hit up some classes, and be done for the day. No structured schedules (aside from classes obviously), and just do whatever you feel like during the day.

I started working in July I'm only now beginning to adjust to a routine sleep cycle. It's almost kind of pathetic on my part. If I go to sleep before midnight(ish) I feel like some 45 year old, and anything much later than that and I wake up hating myself for not going to bed earlier. Quite the vicious cycle.

Recently, I've rediscovered the ancient kindergarten art of napping to try & balance things out. Sometimes, it works out well, or I just force myself to do it because I'm feeling exhausted after work. Most of the time though, it kind of fails because I can never get back to sleep afterward. Yet another catch-22. Can't we all just abandon the stigma of sleeping at work and embrace the new age of power napping on the job?

:::sigh:::
Probably not.

Rise of the R1ch_K1d?

I've been playing poker on & off for about six years now. I consider myself a beneficiary of the "poker boom" which popularized the game back in 2003. At the beginning, it was all about small home games where noone really knew anything about poker but thought it would be cool enough to try out after seeing it on TV. Of course, not everyone could be winners playing the game, and after a few years most people lost interest and abandoned poker altogether.

Although my results weren't anything spectacular, I had been showing some signs of profitability and was still intrigued by the game. Since all the dead money had virtually dried up at this point, it started becoming more lucrative to play poker online than to get a live game together. (Additionally, I was not of age to be playing in local casinos..)

The differences between online and live poker were huge. You could basically choose any type of game you wanted, at any hour of the day, with stakes as low as pennies on the dollar. You also got dealt a ton more hands per hour than in a live environment (where cards have to be physically shuffled and dealt). This also meant that you would start perceiving more bad beats and unlucky situations than usual because of the sheer volume of hands that were being played (this drove many amateurs to believe that online poker was rigged).

In order to maintain any positive results playing online, I had to learn the art of bankroll management. Admittedly, this did not come easily at first. During college, I never really took the game very seriously, so my results were consistently inconsistent. However, the opportunity to make a couple hundred bucks on the side here and there (especially during school) was a pretty big incentive.

Just about a year ago, I decided to really focus more on poker and make an effort to put in a higher volume of games in order to reduce the variance of bankroll swings. The results definitely paid off. I've been on an enormous heater the past year, making just about $5,000 from grinding out relatively low-stakes tournaments (anywhere from $3 to $12 buy-ins). I will undoubtedly admit that I have definitely had my fair share of luck and "running good", but I'm also attributing the past year's results to playing a more skillful game and sticking to much more conservative bankroll management guidelines.

Moving forward, I've decided to really try and think less about the intrinsic value of the $ and rather treat it as a tool of units assigned to the game. This really helps to reduce comparing a significant loss to material things that the money could've been used for. (To be fair, it certainly doesn't hurt that I am working on a salary which really renders my poker results to be not-so-important in comparison.)

I just wished these great results had come along during the college years of poverty- when it would've actually made a difference.