Just Another Fish

So, the Council Tax people have realised I haven’t paid any for 18 months, and I now owe them £930.

This could be… awkward….

I’ve got word back from Durham: apparently I am their reserve choice (and apparently the preferred applicant turns the offer down more often than you’d think).

I knew I should have arranged to go on a date when I wouldn’t have been so shattered….

But, yes, I’m feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing. Intellectually, I want to do a PhD. Socially, I would love to stay in Manchester. And financially, of course, I’d like to have money. (Um, would that be amtrivalent, then?)

The 3rd aspect is leading me to considering seriously something that I previously rejected outright: actuarial work. Michael Hall has been making frequent suggestions on the banter list that someone should join his company, and a part of me is definitely thinking that if I can’t go for what I want academically I should just go for the money and use it to fulfil myself in whatever ways money lets you.

Of course, that would involve moving to Croyden….

Oh, and here’s some poker stats for you all to enjoy! (Or… not)

I have more time to write now, as I am not facing the imminent prospect of Pete coming up to claim his room for his own (apparently, sleep is one of those things he needs). This is because he is not in, and because I have bought a new wireless card to replace the LAN one that broke. So far it seems to be working OK. I also got a USB 2.0 card, which would be handy to transfer things to and from my iPod. Since Pete’ll have to transfer a huge amount of stuff from his computer to his iPod when he’s got it all back in his library, I’m imagining he’ll want to use it too.

Anyway, today I went up to Durham for a PhD interview. It went OK, but I was rather tired and drained from show-week, so we’ll see how it turns out.

More on show-week:

It was really rather brilliant, and I enjoyed it immensely. The first night was nerve-wracking to say the least, but I made very few mistakes. The entire week saw me with pretty much no free time and not enough sleep, which caused me to be very tired at the aftershow things. At the curry I fell asleep about 7 times, and I spent most of the aftershow party sitting down on my own, which was a bit of a shame.

I’m now left with a bit of a gap in my life, and after all the excitement my mood has inevitably turned somewhat maudlin. I’m feeling the need to be with people, and not a little bit lonely. Trouble is, it’s the sort of loneliness that persists (gets worse, in a sense) in company. And, as always when I’m a little down, it feels like I’ve always felt like this. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons depression is so compelling: it feels realer, like you’re more fully occupying yourself. Trying to be happy is difficult because it feels like a lie and inner-sensory-deprivation. Blah.

To be less abstract and general, sometimes I feel like I’m haunting myself; a small little ghost struggling to fill up a dark and roomy hall. The windows are far away and it’s hard to involve myself with the outside world. It’s far away and always feels a little bit removed from me. And the distance? That’s me, too. It’s like being trapped in a  hall of mirrors.

Or, in other words, I am way, way too introverted.

I think that even when I’m being manic, it’s just another form of introversion. It’s like shouting past a wall of noise; you still can’t have a conversation and the effort tires you out so you have to be quiet again for a bit. And the cycle continues. Obvious solution: ahh… I thought I had one just for a second, but it slipped away. One thing does resent itself: I could do with a connection, someone who could meet me halfway and draw me out. Gads. Other people have sex dreams, I dream about girls smiling at me. Hardly seems fair. Oh, and flying. I regularly have dreams where I can levitate a few feet from the ground and zoom down the street. It always ends with me losing control and rising, rising, until… I don’t know, I crash, or fall, something. Anyway, as it is all my history of girls I’ve liked weighs upon me oppressively. It’s like a sore tooth, an open wound. Sorry for being melodramatic… sometimes I just feel like a mass of scar tissue.

Ahhhhh…… I have Arcade Fire (No Cars Go) on at the moment. If that’s not succour for the tragically romantic, I don’t know what is. I’m feeling better already.

I wish I had the capacity to find attractive girls who I don’t find attractive. Yes, that sounds like a ridiculous contradiction, and that is precisely what I’ve said to all those people who have told me I need to lower my standards. The trouble is, either I’m interested in someone or I’m not. Perhaps that is shallow, but what can I do about it? I certainly can’t fake that sort of thing, and one of the reasons my two attempts at online things crashed and burned is that I am honest and anxious to the point of neurosis. I need to feel sincere….

and I’m rambling.

Off to bed I think.

Well, that’s show week over. Haven’t got time to say much now except:

it was bloody fun!

and

what now?

The evening’s look a bit empy now…. 

I have finally managed to get on the net but gmail is blocked. Just to rub it in, I can see the details of some of the new ones on my google homepage. Some of these emails are bound to be important. There are 49 threads’ worth of them.

Anyway, a brief recap of events:

• My network card has broken and so I cannot access the net at home
• I have been mainly out of work, though I have had something today and yesterday. I also seem to have found something starting tomorrow for a couple of months. All this is great, however…
• THIS IS SHOW WEEK. TODAY IS THE 1ST DAY. Frankly, I’m terrified. I also now have absolutely no free time to do anything, which is a shame because my mum is visiting for the show on Saturday and my room needs an unbelievable amount of tidying.

There, that does ya. I’m now going to try and find a way round the website filter….

This week I’ve not been working and have not found a job to go to anytime soon. This means that my bank account is going to start dropping in a very alarming fashion soon, and I do not have much of a buffer before it gets to no-food/no-rent levels. All because the damned agency lost the job I could have had this week by holding on to the possibility that the one I had for 2 days last week might extend to this one. It didn’t. Did I already say this? Ah, yes I did.

Talking about memory issues, I was near the university at noon and called up Adrian to ask if he wanted to have lunch. After a few confusing sentences he realised that I’d thought he was still working on his PhD in the maths building. He finished that months ago and I’d completely forgotten. Oh dear. Still, he was nearby at the MRI and we got to do eats anyway. I was good and didn’t buy anything sweet from the bakery.

What else have I been doing this week? I went for my registration at Manchester Temps yesterday and then started my dole (sorry, JSA) application. I remember when all you had to do was fill out a massive form and then talk to someone about it. Not any more. Nope. Now you have to ring them up and talk to them for 10 minutes. Then, at some point, they ring you back and talk to you about the same things for 45 minutes. And then you have to talk to them for another hour in person at your local jobcentre (this I shall be doing on Thursday). One almost feels that they don’t really want you to claim your JSA (sorry, dol–, no, yeah, JSA).

Today I had an interview with the Alliance & Leicester, which I think went quite well. We’ll have to see, and it couldn’t start before April anyway as their HR department seems to be something of a behemoth. I really must stop thinking of HR people as robots.

And before that, on Sunday, was a rehearsal for The Mikado (and if you’re reading this and not attending, well, you’d better have a damned-good reason) which got very stressful for some people - as things stood, the set had taken over the stage and Jo was left with substantially less space than she’d thought. It looks like the crisis is over and things have been solved, but my word did people get all flustered and worked-up. Not me, of course. I just wish more of them had come to the bar afterwards….

OK, so I’ve followed Pete’s suggestions and stuck to playing 2c/5c. It’s still rather fun, especially when playing with madmen who think they’re Negreanu or something. Case in point, today I lost a $10 buy-in with AA<T5 to one of them, which brought me down to $35. This was before (well, not so much before as as…. in actual fact I hadn’t reraised that hand as a reaction to another LAG player who’d been picking on me and had opened the pot, with T5-guy just a pot-sweetener as far as I was concerned) I’d realised how so very LAG he was, so I rebought in for another $10 and over the next hour or so I proceeded to get my stack up to $30 before before the table dried up. End result, $10 profit and I’m up to $55.

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The common wisdom in poker is to make sure you can beat the game at a certain level - be it the stakes in a cash game, or the buy-in fora tournament - before you move up to the next level. And damned well make sure you have a big enough bankroll to ride the bad days and still be able to go back.

I don’t like the common wisdom.

I took out out a large amount of my bankroll to cover Xmas and have generally been broke since then, so I was left with a measly $50 in my account. Playing on micro-stakes cash games and small tournaments was pushing that up, but two tournies in a row with no winnings pushed it back to $40. On 1c/2c tables I was finding it very hard to make it back (was, in fact making a loss), as the players are so bad and the games are so dull I generally 4-table it. So I moved to 2c/5c 6-seaters, which was better, and then accidentally sat on a 5c/10c table which was very nice. People were playing actual poker for amounts that seemed to actually mean something. So in 20  minutes I’d made back today’s losses and more besides.

I’ll probably stay at this level — the game is far more interesting and I can play it better.

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