preposition

at: Wild Kingdom

I'm calling all these schools to set up chess programs for the upcoming school year, and almost all of them have a phone tree system that says, "Thank you for calling Rich S. Benefactor Elementary School, Home of the Mascots. Press 1 for...". That's all fine.

But just now, i called Doris French Elementary, which made me really want to hear, "Home of the Frogs". But alas, it is the French Elementary "Superstars".

C'mon, some anthropomorphic frogs, maybe with some bleu/blanc/rouge paint on them[1]? That's an awesome mascot. Go Frogs!

Furthermore, a couple schools i visited over the summer had cartoon animals posted in the cafeteria that represented various positive character traits. Again, this is fine, but the animals and traits seem to have been matched at random, leaving us with characters like Responsibility Elephant, Trustworthiness Camel, and Citizenship Bear.

about: The Meadows

I don't really like blogs that are just exposition and general wankery, but i'm looking at like 5 unanswered emails in my inbox that all ask, essentially, "what the fuck is going on with you?". So here is some exposition and general wankery.

I moved to Vegas on Memorial Day weekend. I was hoping to move the Thursday or Friday before Memorial Day weekend, but instead i got repeatedly fucked by the U-Haul corporation. The long version of the story is pretty boring, but the short version goes like this:

Yeah, we can install a trailer hitch on your 2003 Subaru Outback. Bring it on in tomorrow. Oh wait, we can't install a trailer hitch on your 2003 Subaru Outback. We have the hitch, but we don't have the finger quotes bolt kit end finger quotes. The Thirty-Minutes-Away San Francisco U-Haul can do it tomorrow at noon, though. And they have the 4' x 8' trailer you want as well. Yeah, we can install the trailer hitch, but we take twice as long as the guys in Redwood City to do it, so it's going to cost you an extra $100 for labor. Also, we don't actually have the 4' x 8' trailer you want, but i found one of those for you in Moss Beach. No, i don't know where Moss Beach is either, but i can tell you that it's 25 miles from here. Oh, by the way, the U-Haul in Moss Beach isn't actually a U-Haul, but is instead a corner market on Highway 1 that also happens to have a 4' x 8' trailer. The guy behind the counter there will be happy to run your credit card and hand you some paperwork, but he won't help you connect the 4' x 8' trailer to your new trailer hitch, nor will he know anything about the three extraneous wires not connected to the wiring harness. Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing U-Haul!

There are a lot of reasons i moved to Vegas. The obvious and most imminently quotable reason i moved here was for poker. Poker is my number one hobby and interest at the moment. I spend a tremendous amount of time playing it, reading books about it, studying it, and posting to internet forums about it.

I am currently billing myself as a "semi-professional poker player". What this means is that i'm running out of regular money and have paid some rent out of my poker bankroll. People always want to know (whether they think it's rude or not to ask) how much money we're talking about. Well, i'm a pretty novice poker player. I play for what are considered small stakes. As of tonight, i have played 129 sessions since November 11, 2004. I have played for 419.4 hours and have won $1154 for an average hourly wage of $2.74/hr.

(Poker players: i am currently averaging 0.42 BB/hr, which is moderately terrible. I am also in the middle of a fairly large downswing, caused by a combination of bad cards and bad play. I'm still up on my poker since moving to Vegas (+$263 over 163.15 hours, for an hourly average of $1.61/hr), but the last 30 days has killed me (-$657 over 53.25 hours, for an hourly average of -$12.33/hr). On the plus side, i am doing some real work on my game and am hopefully going to emerge from this downswing as a better player. We shall see.)

I also knew when i moved out here that i was not good enough (or disciplined enough) to make enough money playing poker to pay for all my expenses. My original plan was to get a job as a poker dealer in a casino. I figured this is a job that would be relatively easy, fun, and would pay well considering its ease/fun index. I also figured there would be some corollary benefits for my poker game just by watching hundreds of hands every day.

What i did not realize was that casinos are bitches about pre-employment drug screening. Now it's no secret that i have been known to enjoy some marijuana from time to time (or, when spending the winter skiing in Tahoe, more frequently than that). My thoughts about marijuana use and legality, drug testing, and the right to privacy are topics that are best left unexplored if we ever hope to get through this narrative, but whatever. Shortly after i moved, i adopted a Just Say No policy, because i know that THC generally falls below testable levels in urine after about two weeks of abstinence. The desert air and omnipresence of air conditioning in Vegas means that drinking a lot of water is a good idea anyway, and i love cranberry juice. No problem, right?

Wrong. Casinos in Vegas drug test against hair. This type of test detects drug use within the past three months. I did some googling about using various products to beat the hair test, but it seems that results are inconclusive at best, so i decided it wasn't worth my time. Since i didn't have three months to wait around for a job, i adopted a new strategy: i turned to Craigslist.

Keep in mind that i had no idea what kind of job i wanted. I did know that i didn't want to work a regular full-time tech job. If i had wanted that, i would have been a giant idiot to move away from the Bay Area and all of my tech industry contacts there. So i tried the few potential leads i could think of: I showed up at the offices of CardPlayer magazine and dropped off a resume. I chatted up the owner of the only local dive shop. But mostly, i spent a couple weeks reloading the Craigslist "all jobs" page every half hour or so.

Eventually, i stumbled onto two gigs. The first was to be a walking billboard for Gamesgrid.com (an online poker site) for four weekends at the World Series of Poker. My job involved wearing a yellow Gamesgrid shirt, hanging out at the largest poker tournament in history, watching those famous guys from TV play and sign autographs, and even playing in side games (netting an extra ~$100 in addition to my cool $10/hr hourly wage). Sweet.

Now, i'm not the kind of guy who really cares about celebrities. I don't read Us Weekly, i don't collect autographs from movie stars, and i don't really know who Tara Reid is. But i must admit that i was totally starstruck during that first weekend at the WSOP. It was like, omigod, it's Howard Lederer. And Daniel Negreanu. And John Juanda. And Phil Hellmuth. And Antonio Esfandiari. And Gus Hansen. And Doyle! Also, i nearly swooned when Tobey Maguire walked by in the rotunda. Tobey is (i've heard) a decent poker player, and is also (i've observed) totally fucking hot. To borrow my friend sandiego.Ben's line about Shana Hiatt, "I'd hit that. 'Til it fell off."

What were we talking about?

The second gig i found was teaching chess to elementary school kids. A lot of people who know me are surprised, amused, or confused when i tell them this. I guess i can't blame them. First of all, it's kind of a strange job logistically. The company that runs the program (and signs my paychecks) is a non-profit headquartered in San Francisco and founded by a Berkeley grad. It sells an afterschool program to elementary schools in various metropolitan areas. The program runs for 8 weeks and the kids learn about chess, everything from how pawns move to endgames to tactics. The curriculum is pretty great -- it is dynamic and silly and fun. The next time you're in Vegas, you may ask to see the Rockin' Rook Dance, or you can hear the story about why the king only moves one space (hint: the king loves gold!).

I think people are also surprised about this new career path because people who know me understand that i'm a grumpy asshole, which is not a personality type typically associated with working with children. It was not so long ago that then-coworker Amy announced ironically (and to a chorus of chuckles), "I think Tyler should be a kindergarten teacher". And yet, here i am, teaching kindergarteners.

Nonetheless, this job is, so far, a great fit for me. The hours are good (a couple hours a day, in the afternoon) and don't interfere with my poker playing. The pay is surprisingly good, and since my employer is looking for someone to take over the program in the Las Vegas area, there is supposedly more work/responsibility/money on the horizon. But more importantly, i love to teach, and i love kids.

I think i love teaching because it strokes my ego in a number of ways. It allows me to be a pedant and a smug, superior bastard all at once. Less cynically, one of my greatest passions is to learn new things, and far and away the best way to learn anything is to teach it to others. While i am not a very good chess player -- although i've been playing since i was about 7 and was in chess club in middle school (yes, really) -- i am good enough to teach nine year-olds. Plus, i have already improved my game quite a bit from a little casual study. I hope that as i teach some more advanced topics in the upcoming school year, my game will get even better.

I also enjoy any excuse to hang out with kids, although in some ways this is also the most challenging part of my job. I love kids, and i am constantly overwhelmed by their capacity to amuse, bewilder, and move me, but i also don't have a lot of non-observer experience with kids, so i feel a little intimidated. I realize it's strange to be intimidated by a bunch of people that aren't even four feet tall, and yet there it is. For one thing, i want them to like me. It is, in fact, sort of imperative for my job that they like me. And as anyone who has tried to ask his crush out on a date knows, liking someone and wanting them to like you back is a recipe for awkward silences, laughing too loud and too abruptly, and generally crashing and burning. Kids also have an extra-sensitive nose for insincerity (which they mistrust) and nervousness (which makes them anxious).

For another thing, the part of me that is an enormous nerd and that got picked on in grade school isn't so far under the surface. Some kids pick up on this, too. I was hanging out before i started teaching, and one kid came up to me and said, "You're a nerd!". Except he was a first grader with a slight speech impediment, so what he really said was more like, "You'we a newwd!". This is an example of me being amused, bewildered, and moved all at the same time.

It also illustrates a fundamental weakness i have when interacting with kids. My only saving grace in a social setting -- indeed the only thing that bolsters that chubby, picked-on inner child when faced with a crowd -- is my sense of humor. But my inexperience with kids means that i don't have any idea how to be funny to them. What snappy comeback is appropriate for a seven year-old who calls you a nerd?

But here again, i'm learning. You can really view my post-adolescent life as the process of trying to figure out what other people think is funny. Seventh through tenth grades were learning what my peers thought was funny. Eleventh and twelfth grades were trying to get my peers to laugh without letting everyone else know i was an asshole. During college, i worked on picking up the kind of humor that works with coworkers and relatives. Now, every day when i go to work, i'm discovering what works on kids.

Fortunately, kids like it when adults are just plain silly. And a large part of me, nestled right next to the picked-on nerd part, is the gangly fourteen year-old who loves to just be a big dork in front of an audience, and who gets a huge kick out of the fact that, no matter how tough the crowd of kids, they always laugh and shout "Eeew!" when i say, "...the king even had gold underwear!".

All of this turns out to be largely moot, however, because i was given a secret weapon by the guys at chess HQ: chess piece keychains. They aren't fancy -- just a tournament-sized chess piece with a hole in the top and a small chain run through it -- but the kids eat them up.

My favorite part of any presentation is the part where i give away the first keychain. I ask for a volunteer to come up to the big board and participate in the Pawn War by taking a white pawn and capturing a black pawn. After she does this, she sticks her paw into Bag #1 and pulls out a keychain. There is a collective holding of breath and a feeling of intense concentration as i thread the chain part through the hole in the top of the bishop and hand it to the kid. The kid goes to sit down. I say, "Now i need another volunteer", and every hand in the room shoots up.

One of my worries about working with kids, however, relates back to my fundamental grumpy asshole nature. The longer i am in a situation, and the more comfortable i get, the easier it gets for me to slide back into my cantankerous mode, and that's not fair to my pupils. I do feel like i have an extra reserve of patience for children (and animals) which offsets my generally short temper with foolish adults, but it's still something i worry about and need to work on.

For now, i like my job a lot more than i've liked a job for quite some time. There's also some sort of spiritual resonance in the fact that i play games for a living.

So now that i've been here in Vegas for nearly three months, how do i like it? My mind still boggles at the number of tourists wandering around on the Strip on a random Tuesday afternoon. When i'm driving towards the enormous towers of Caesar's Palace and Bellagio, the pink-tinted windows of the Flamingo, the green behemoth of MGM, or the giant bug-light atop Luxor[1], i still can't quite believe that i live here.

As expected, i acclimated to the temperature pretty quickly. Like everyone in industrialized nations who are brain-damaged enough to live in the desert during the summer, i rely heavily on air conditioning, but it's really not that bad until it gets above about 108. It is, as they say, a "dry heat". However, this doesn't really matter when it's 118 -- then it's just "way too fucking hot".

I will never get used to the ubiquitousness of video poker. I can almost reconcile the idea that every gas station, convenience store, and supermarket is going to have a minimum of four video poker machines sitting somewhere. What i will never wrap my brain around is the fact that there is invariably, at any hour of the day or night, more than one person using said video poker machines. Is the Arco on the corner really the place you want to spend your free time? If you are the average Las Vegan, the answer is clearly yes.

I'm not a huge fan of the fact that the city is so big and car-oriented that you have to drive everywhere (though the bus system is okay). It kind of doesn't matter, though, cuz it's too hot to bike anywhere anyway. Luckily, there is a large 24-hour CVS, a Wendy's, an IHOP, and ein Wienerschnitzel within a block of my house. And i must admit that my life in the Bay Area has made me appreciate returning to the institution that is the Drive-Thru Window. Because really, at the point where you're driving down the street to get a cheeseburger, why bother getting out of the car at all?

As a fast food junkie, i would be remiss in not mentioning that Vegas is flush with Sonics, and that Sonic has a number of delightful treats, not the least of which are mozzarella sticks, chili cheese tater tots, and the orange creamsicle slush. Also, there is a TacoTime!!! This is not to be missed if you can get behind a deep-fried tube of refried beans or ground beef (and you should really be able to get behind these things, because they are unspeakably awesome).

Meeting people is, for an eccentric misanthrope like myself, a bit tricky. The one person with whom i've really hit it off and become fast friends is fellow WSOP-yellow-shirt-wearer Jennifer. Since we get along so well, it should come as no surprise that she is female, straight, already in an LTR, and moved back to the Bay Area for grad school at the end of last week.

Because Craigslist did such a fantastic job of finding me housing and employment, i continue to ply it in hopes of finding a boyfriend as well. I've had a few dates that haven't worked out so well, but the great poker nerd philosopher in me has produced the following bit of wisdom: my problem is that i need to see more flops, but be more willing to fold. We shall see whether this strategy is +EV or not.

I don't know if moving here has clarified anything about what is going on in my life, or what i'm going to do next, or when i'm going to just give up and become a proper grown-up. But so far it has at least been interesting. When in doubt, just change a bunch of variables at once and see what happens.