Bipartisan

This house - my former and current home - is a social experiment of sorts that is rarely if ever invested in. Perhaps I am too open-minded to state my case as a liberal, but in the context I would almost certainly be considered a die hard. The context being, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh devotees. Of course, they too are open-minded and rational beings that make the idea of us all being polar opposites somewhat untrue. That said, it is probably as close to true as you're going to find under one undemolished roof. Breakfast talk can literally go along lines of the reasons for impeaching Obama and instituting martial law on one end to the sanctity of eco-systems and the argument for human restraint on the other.

Here is the fantastic, unbelievable thing: the truth as each of us sees it is voiced and heard by the various parties day after day. Because we love each other unconditionally, there is suddenly an atmosphere that allows honesty and acceptance where there is only ridicule and scorn in the public debate. Since the two political parties not only do not accept each other's stances but are not re-elected if they even appear to consider each other's ideas, there is no possibility for open debate. The reigns of power are held by extremists by necessity and thoughtful conversation is replaced by fear-mongering and empty platitudes. The macroscopic venue for change is, in my opinion, hopeless.

Yet, in the microcosm of our unlikely home and family, I see a small seed. I see the respect of listening and the freedom of love to express and refine opinions with and against each other. I see apparently divergent theories and ideas melding in conversations that shouldn't be possible in today's framing. There is certainly plenty of blustering and cacophony as these ideas meet and clash, but there is a commitment to each other that allows us to weather the storm and come to some peace on the other side. Though we are molded by all our inputs of media and political guidance to be extremists, we find the secret moderates within as we let our mutual love and respect seep into the conversations handed to us bereft of anything so lofty.

Perpetual Motion

Bills to pay. Miles to drive. Tools to move, remove, place, replace. Phone ringing. Customers customing. Sleep when you can or can't help it. Wondering about tomorrow. Too busy with today.

Interruption.

A rain storm and sheltering under a tree. Warm scent of baked and cooling pine simmering with the fog of rain on Texas pavement. A moment insisting respite. Mother and daughter resting weary backs, sharing time removed.

Sabbath

I woke up in the middle of last night in the throes of pure animal pain, the muscles in my calf tangling and choking themselves. There is nothing you can do except ride the waves of pain in a crumpled, whimpering heap. While I have spent this morning milking every bit of the limping sadness left to me still, I will never forget the morning after morning stretching to months that I would leap from my top bunk to the cold concrete floor after the nightly double cramps that would rack me every night of basic training. I can remember the electric shock of impact as I landed to muscles that told me nightly that they needed to be tended to and cared for. I learned to shuffle (instead of the required running) to the bathroom then back to my bunk to begin the morning ritual of cleaning that would never be quite good enough to spare us from the paired morning ritual of doing push-ups in our own sweat for punishment. All this with the muscles in my legs cleaving to themselves and the bone as if they had forgotten the natural assembly of relax and contract. Somehow, I would find myself on the PT field a half hour later, pushing or running or flutter-kicking, and I would discover that my legs had released me of their reasonable demands. I eventually learned to hold my consciousness somewhere just below wakefulness as the pain screamed at me every night and then let the scant dreams enfold me back on the ebb. Somehow, it became a sacrament of sorts, blessing my body and mind with the remembrance that I was human and not the mindless, heartless machine they would have me be. The weakness and terror of those moments was precious to me as the never-flinching shield of my days melted in the small whimpers of my night.

The work that brought me to this memory is wholesome and good, and I am glad for the chance of comparison that such a small but insistent part of my body can give me. And the comparison is kind. To now be surrounded by people that consider even this smallest and most habitual of pains something worth commiserating over and tending to. To find nourishment in both my labors and rest. This is what all of us are really searching for, is it not?

Old story; New beginnings

It is the day for writing, but can my newly adjusting, bone-tired, sun-weary mind and body come up with anything more interesting to write about than the divinities of cleansing showers and my soft, soft bed? Forgive me if the result is negative, but I will try anyway.

I took the train from St. Louis, Tom and I having battled a storm that came with a ferocity I haven't seen since the Oklahoma plains to get to the station. The anxiety of leaving was mercifully abated slightly as I encountered the almost antiquated joys of rail travel. Whereas I was unceremoniously booted from the last flight I tried to take and given virtually no recompense, checking in at the train station took all of five minutes. When I asked whether or not I needed to check my duffel bag (a point which was critical in the flight fiasco by the way), I was met with the response that I could if I wanted, but could really do whatever I chose. The attendant was even teasing me about my trusty travel lion/pillow instead of exhibiting the absurd ennui of overwhelming stress that I had seen in the attendants at the airport. At the depot, we all, workers and travelers alike, were relaxed and serene even.

Well, all except for the young kid who was apparently approaching an ecstasy of grief as the time got nearer for he and his mother to get on the train without his dad. When the somewhat late (but at least more on schedule than is generally true in aviation these days) train arrived, we all calmly lined up to give our tickets to the conductor and watched the miniature (but fundamental) drama of the small boy saying goodbye. He latched on to his father's neck as they all finally came to the spot where non-travelers had to stop and exploded in a litanous stream of "I love you, I'll miss you, I love you...". Even the conductor was moved and muttered to me as I handed him my own ticket, "Well, that was nice now." Never mind that the child was at that peculiar stage of life that delivered him from his grief only minutes later as excitement of the coming adventure overtook him.

It was amazing to find myself with a similar experience to the young one as I found myself a little relieved so quickly from the anxieties of making the decision to work and live so far away for a time. As I situated myself in the oh, so spacious seat of the upper level in my designated car, I looked out my window at the setting sun and found the realization that we were going to be alright. Whatever was coming, whatever was past...we would find the way. One day at a time.

Second Wind

It is an unfortunate and difficult thing, but not uncommon: we are being forced by a Spring of upsets and false starts to take a few steps back before we can continue. I can't decide between the two of us who is going to have the harder job since poker is quite literally the most difficult thing I have ever done and I am quite looking forward to the "respite" of manual labor that I am heading to in working with my parents. Tom stays here in the poor, abandoned Poker House with Greta-meister and continues to fight the beast of cards and behaviors that has trampled us so hard. I will be living relatively stress-free at least in the manageability of definable tasks and physical exertion while leaving for a time the necessarily all-consuming and never-ending tasks of mental and personal evaluation in playing a profitable game online. It is not really a matter of having lost money to poker, but simply having existed for too long on the statistical back slopes and having to shell out the cost of living in the meantime. So we will be trying to retake the hill from a different angle.

You will probably find me a more mopey author for some time, but know that I will continue writing and that I am content even with the difficulties of the situation. I have the opportunity to help us rebuild without having to give another day to the meaningless redundancies of most of the workforce. I get to work with and for my family. I am a grateful if momentarily sad writer/electrical apprentice/former and soon-to-be-again professional card player.

Homage

I have long been meaning to write a tribute of sorts to a dear friend of mine who would be totally appalled by such an idea. She is far too modest and grounded to accept such praise as "hero" or "role-model", so I will share these terms with you and hope that she doesn't get too angry with me.

I met her almost seven years ago as I took charge of my first piano class. My supervisor had taken me aside prior to the semester to ask me if I would be okay teaching a blind student. Her demeanor when asking the question sobered me and stilled my immediate response of "why would I mind?". She told me that it was going to be challenging for the entire music staff to have a new music student with such needs and special requirements and that she didn't want to overburden me. We could move the student to a different class with a more experienced teacher perhaps. Thank God for my stubbornness kicking in and allowing me to say that there would be no such need. How much my life would have suffered without this person I was so cautiously introduced to. I can, without reservation, say that she was also the best piano student I ever had. I often told her that I wished that all my students would forget they could see for the hour in my class and feel the keys like she did. What a gift. And here's the truly remarkable thing about her: she would absolutely agree with me that it is a gift. She has used every obstacle (and there have been heartbreakingly many) to climb to new heights of self actualization and was already one of the most wise and independent souls I had ever met when I came to know her in her freshman year.

While at the state school where I met her, she was the victim of countless acts of ignorance and malice due only to misconceptions. No one could look at her performance with a rational eye and find anything lacking, but she was constantly treated as a liability. I never once saw her behave as if she had a handicap, yet her own successful efforts were drowned in a sea of conflicting assumptions as to her capabilities. Her teachers refused to help her obtain braille music, yet insisted that she not learn from recordings. Her seeing eye dog (my dog soul mate, Abby) was once taken off the stage in the middle of her performance, with her professor whispering in her ear, "If you stop singing, I will fail you." And she was also once accused of ruining a pianist's Master's recital because Abby did not like Hindemith and kept jiggling in her collar. A note on that: as a graduate of the same program with the same degree as the pianist in question, and as a good friend of said pianist, I would say the fault lies entirely in the performer that cannot maintain her concentration and poise. Perhaps I'm biased, but ask any performer and they will tell you the same. Finally, my friend began losing her love of music and changed her major; immediately being met with a professionalism and respect of the success that she so constantly demonstrated. Not all Southern professors are ignorant, and thankfully she found some that appreciated an excellent student when they met one. The girl even pulled off a major in literature if that tells you anything about her determination and abilities.

As deeply as I respect her for how she put so much ignorance to shame in her education, it is her response to grief that constantly moves me. Her grace breaks my heart as she faces tragedies that most of us will never even conceive of. After knowing me for some time, she told me of the first great grief of her young life, which was not the blindness in itself as one might assume. No, she had been told by a specialist when she was sixteen that with one more operation, she would be able to see well enough to drive, and then the specialist had botched the operation and she had woken up to darkness and no ready explanation. The doctor had simply sent her home after accidentally cutting a tiny but essential vein in her eye with a scant apology. Not only had she lost the hope of more vision, but she had been robbed of the precious little she had had in that eye. When I met her, she had a glass eye covering the shriveled remains of what had been her best eye before the surgery. It is telling of her character that she made good use of pulling the glass eye off to the utter delight and horror of her classmates and friends. I found her one day at the center of a group of my students all squealing as she theatrically pulled away the prosthetic to reveal the shriveled organ below. It wasn't until later in our friendship that she revealed the pain it still caused her. Pain was not something she allowed herself to indulge in often as she considered her life to be too occupied with living to do so.

Recently, she was struck with yet another twist of malignant fate: her mother, sister-in-law, and thirteen year old sister were killed by a drunk driver with the two young children in the car just barely surviving. My friend was the first to the hospital of all the family, since her father and brother were working in Iraq. She took the responsibilities of arrangements for the young ones and for the deceased as her family members began to arrive, some with a lack of appropriate response that was tragic in itself. I will spare the details for sake of discretion, but will say this: there is a seed of selfishness that grows so large in some of us as to obstruct any sense of love or proportion. That my friend faced this in the midst of an overwhelming grief and was able to tell me the story only a few months later instead of retreating into a catatonic shell is almost unbelievable to me. She told me of her lost loved ones with tears tracing down her cheeks but in a clear, strong voice. There is certainly no justice in one such as her having to face loss after loss that would cripple most of us. There is only a wonderment to see her soul resurrecting beauty from the ashes.

So to my dear friend, I say this: may your strength be verified as tested, and may you find happiness to the depth of your pain. May we all be better in ourselves simply knowing that someone like you exists and be grateful for the good fortune that allows us to know you and love you.

Lone Star

Today was very unkind on the poker scene, and I feel inclined not to discuss it. So, I won't. Instead, I will lay some ground rules; mostly for myself, but also as a courtesy to those who might want to follow the blog. First of all, my intention is to update every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. For those anal enough to be checking my time stamp, you will see that I am writing this already behind schedule. My defense is that it is still Sunday a few miles West of here, and also that it is still Sunday where most of my loved ones currently are. So stop being so technical about it. But it does bring up a good point which is that our days and nights are somewhat mishmashed, so many of the blogs will be apprearing late at night on the proscribed "days".

The second matter is that I will most certainly not be spending all of my time discussing poker. I have quite enough of that in my moment to moment, so you will excuse me if I often digress. For example, right now, all I really want to talk about is this kill-me-now-I'm-so-happy chili con queso that we just made. It is moments like these that force me to the admission that I am a Texas girl and my heart will always return there. Just tasting the sublimity of melty cheesiness studded with hot peppers, cilantro and fresh tomatoes transports me to the state of my birth where the cultures of the Wild West and Mexico collide and create something so unique...and tasty. I was appalled and devastated when I asked a few college friends when going to school in the Midwest if there were any good Mexican joints around and was met with the response, "Well, yeah, there's Taco Bell just around the corner." I hope you can imagine my horror being met with a whole section of the country that was obviously uninitiated in the divinities of Salsa and Fajitas. I think that was when I really came to the conclusion that I needed to get serious about cooking so that I might give myself access to the delectables that, in my opinion, no one should go without. So, without further ado, I will return to my happy midnight munching and indulge in the soft memories of a place like no other.

P.s. If you would like to experience a piece for yourself, here's the recipe that started it. I just added a pound of ground turkey, chili spiced.

http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2008/04/more-natural-chile-con-queso.html

D O J

People needing constant validation of justice should avoid poker. In a way, I wish that someone could have accurately described to me before I started playing just how difficult and random the variance would be. But, having a good idea of the math, I don't think I would have believed how easy it is to begin adopting superstitions based on cycles that cluster up in favor of one random scenario after another. There are players who have been in the game for years - some of the "best" (you've seen them on TV if you've ever watched poker) - who have favorite hands that mathematically have little to no actual value. They're just hands that delivered more than they should in the player's memory and are therefore elevated above reason. For example, the ten-deuce played so well for Doyle Brunson that the two cards are simply known as "the Doyle Brunson". To be fair, he would still say that ace-ace is his favorite hand, but I guarantee his eighty-year old pulse quickens just a bit every time he's dealt his namesake just for the good memories. It is obviously stupid and unprofitable, but I can assure you that our brains more easily accept vivid experience and reward (or punishment) rather than cold, hard reason. Tom and I have just been through a stretch where he received near constant punishment for four straight months. Imagine going to work and finding that you will be required to pay your boss for the privilege of sitting there for your allotted time, and simply because someone (in our case, those referred to as the poker gods) has decided this would be so. Thankfully, the cycle has begun to roll over and we are most certainly stronger players for trudging through the gale... but I still would prefer that things were as predictable as they should be just for the sake of mental health. Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say mental comfort. It is becoming more and more necessary to attend to the solid health of our psyches and so, in a way, we are finding this an opportunity for strength that neither one of us have found before.

All that said, there are still rules in poker and the violation of these rules, though rare, is still responded to with justice:

Last night, I was involved in a hand that I was almost certainly winning, and I was winning big. It was one of those hands that pretty much defines a particular session, depending on which way it falls. In this case, I was looking at a session I was going to leave smiling. As the fourth card came down, I had only one opponent left in the pot as the other (better) player had folded when the first three cards came out. Just as the player remaining hit "call" to my bet on the turn, the player no longer in the pot typed into the chat window the two cards he had folded on the previous street. Man, my blood started boiling again just remembering the moment. Let me explain: the entire game of poker is based on statistics and human behavior and deciphering that behavior to determine what cards your opponents might be holding. This information is required to be gained simply through betting behaviors (or mannerisms if you're lucky enough to be making it as a live player). "Table talk" - basically, anything said by anyone not in the hand or anyone in the hand speaking about anything other than their own behavior or hand - is strictly (STRICTLY) forbidden. In my particular example, the better player detailing in the middle of my domination what he had been so smart to fold let the less competent player know that he would be stupid to call on the last card with anything less. And, by the way, anything less was all he could have. Also by the way, he calls with that something less almost one-hundred percent of the time unless advised otherwise. Well, I watched in dismay as this player, who generally wasn't pausing for thought longer than a couple seconds, began to really think about how the hand had gone down. Finally, he realized what he was not capable of realizing on his own: "I'm beat." And he folded. Well, I don't think I've ever been so angry at the poker table. I immediately began berating the player who had ruined my prospects and was only getting more enraged by his benign rejections of my wrath. Of course, I was at this point so focused on venting my full indignation on this guy that I was ignoring all my other tables. After a few very poorly played hands due to this, I was officially on what I would like to call "murder tilt". Thankfully, Tom was in the room and was able to help me extract myself so that I could take a break and attempt to regain some perspective. When I told him what had happened though, he nearly went on murder tilt just to hear it. It really is that bad of an infraction, let me tell you. So, I finally remembered my recourse and e-mailed the situation to the poker site's moderators. The response I received is still singing in my heart. They congratulated me for being vigilant to the integrity of the game and said that the player in question had been reminded of the rules in case he was not aware of them. Any future violations could result in a site ban. Perhaps it is the rarity of it that makes it so very sweet, but I will still savor the title of "vigilance", seeking justice in the midst of chaos.

A Meditation

Growing up, my dad often took my brother and I fishing; not an unusual experience for a young girl in East Texas mind you. My dad would set up my line for me and thread some worm on the hook and even cast it for me, until I got old enough to realize that casting was at least ninety percent of the fun and I wanted to do it myself. I still let him take care of the worms and hooks though; no need to be too logical about independence. The pond was so small, you could almost throw your line from one bank to the other but had to be quick about reeling your hook across as there were only shallow lanes that were stump-free. We learned the map of that glorified puddle quickly, but still spent hours at a time in the hypnotic rhythm of cast and reel. Most days, we would catch just enough for my dad to clean and for my mom to fry up, and some days there just wouldn't be any bites at all. Whenever this happened, I had a tendency to believe that if I just kept moving around, I would find where the fish were hiding. It also sticks in my memory, just so, that every time I would move to a different bank, my brother or my dad would catch a fish in the exact spot I had just left. I'm guessing that my memory is slightly myopic on this point, but there's no arguing rationally with the certainty of injustice. There was one day in particular that is gilded in the light of perfection, however. It seemed like the surface of the pond was boiling with all the fish bouncing around the surface. Who knows what suicidal bent had taken over the poor fish, but I got to the point that I simply hovered my hook over the surface of the water right at the bank and let them catch themselves. It was almost like they were in a tidy line underwater, taking their turns jumping up to catch hold of the glittering god of their mass delusion. Of course, crazy fish still make good eating.

Poker players out there will roll their eyes as I make the obvious analogies to be had in these few images, but please allow them anyway. It is terribly relevant to compare the rhythms of poker and the strategies of hooking the big ones to fishing. I'm certainly not novel in my application of the metaphor as it is common to call bad players "fish"; horrific players being referred to as "whales" just by the way. What I'm guessing is one of the unspoken strengths of the metaphor, however, is the strength of meditation. Having experienced it myself and also having enjoyed the company of great amateur fishermen, I know this to be one of the silent appeals of the sport. Hours of quiet and nerve untying rhythms. Pulling up a piece of shade and letting the peaks of excitement when catching one take you and then bring you right back to the quiet waiting. It is essential to being a successful poker player to have this quiet within you and to return to it after every ebb and flow. It is simply too easy to get carried along with the disappointments or strokes of good luck and to lose sight of the fact that poker is best played as an act of patience. Waiting for the perfect moment to sink the hook.