Poker: On a downswing of sorts. Losing patience for poker is certainly not going to help with that. Sometimes I find myself getting upset over such stupid trivial things, and it’s definitely not right. Oh well…I’ll still play, but not that much. Meanwhile, didn’t get another shot at the turbo takedown, which is too bad.

Spirituality: On a downswing of sorts. I really wish I have a good friend to talk to about problems and questions in Christian life. A friend who would take these matters seriously. I used to have Samuel, but that went bad after I screwed up royally. I was originally hoping that the brothers prayer meeting would deal with some sort of personal spiritual issues, but that never come to fruition. Anyway, now I can only say, I don’t have a good friend. It’s pretty disappointing.

Schezophrenia: On an upswing of sorts. Being pulled by two extremes of emotions certainly helps me become schezophrenic. How else can a person be extremely happy and extremely sad at the same time? It’s so bizarre…

So I played a $0.25 90-player poker tournament today. I somehow got lucky enough to jump up to the top 5 and stay there quite early in the tournament. While there were 13 left, which was the bubble, I was 2nd in chips, and I went out with Francis for lunch and stuff. After half an hour, came back, and there were only 8 players left, and I was 7th in chips. Then I got lucky over and over again until I finally won the tournament. Ok, so it’s a small buy-in tournament, but there was a sense of accomplishment, sort of. This is just a textbook definition of running good! I got at least an ace like almost every second hand during heads up…and the other guy was complaining about me pushing every time he raised…well, that’s because I got great hands! Even when we saw flops, I connected almost every time. So yeah…it was a nice (albeit small) positive result after running badly for a while…

I discovered perhaps a huge result for the postdoc engineering project thingie. The thing is, I wanted to tell somebody, but my supervisor is away… I so wanted to explain this (probably) amazing thing I’ve discovered to people, but couldn’t. And that got me to think, why is it that I have this desire to tell people about something stupid, yet I have no desire to tell people about the Gospel? Is it because (gasp!) I don’t care much about it? Hmm…

Hmm…cool card shuffler, anyone?

Yesterday: Pretty much spent most of the day watching Timex, to a disappointing end. Ed had a guy over to do basement renovation consulting, so I spent most of that time in my room. Breakfast consisted of things I baked or steamed that didn’t taste good. I spent some time writing down my ideas from Friday. Fellowship with Pastor Vincent…wasn’t paying much attention. Lots of people there, though. After fellowship, Ed invited everyone to come to his place for my birthday thing, which I was kind of embarrassed about. I don’t like to be the centre of attention at all, of course, but I guess I just had to play along. There were junk food, and then there was more poker, this time with 8 people. With 100K in starting chips and two bail-outs for the newbies, we ended when Francis captured all 1M chips. Well, I stumbled when Ed and Francis rivered their 3-outers in the last two hands…heh. But then previously I got lucky with Roger by rivering a straight myself. So yeah, anyway, that’s how I spent the first day as a 29-year-old.

Roger and Ed mysteriously went out to buy the chips and drinks for the mystery party during the fellowship. I guess personally, I would rather like them to be in the fellowship than to do this for me. I don’t know…I really don’t like the attention.

This is the point in life where I’m just totally lost.

Yesterday: Walked to school and hurt both my ankles. I was pretty much crippled for the rest of the day. Meeting with the engineers, and somehow came up with a good solution during the meeting except I didn’t tell anyone. Gary Au visited afterwards, first time I talked to him in person, I guess. Lunch with Roger and then watching Timex play poker in my office, except we didn’t see much of Timex. Taken around and then finally home by Li Zhen. Watched more poker, where Ed was inspired to play some, and we did. All night short-handed limp-around poker. It was fun, actually, and there was one brilliant moment where we saw a 5676X board, I deduced that based on everything, Ed must have 46 or 68, and was indeed shown 46. Very short at that point, but got back up and won eventually in that game. And that’s how I spent my last day as a 28-year-old.

I don’t usually care much about other people’s birthdays, and I don’t care much about my own, either, except to feel depressed over being so old now. I much prefer to just lay low and stuff. Don’t care for gifts or meals, since no one would be able to give the gift or meal that I would have liked anyway. Messages are ok, but they tend to be all the same, with few exceptions. So…yeah.

Facebook’s new page really sucks.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of my first landing in Canada as an immigrant. On one hand, it felt like it went by like a breeze, on the other hand, it felt like such a long long time. So many things have happened, as expected with such a long period of time. Overall, however, I am grateful to God for the life experienced here, even though I probably was down more than I was up.

I managed, for the first time, to walk to school and walk back. It took more than 1.75 hours total with the stroll that I was doing. The cold wasn’t entirely pleasant, but it was sunny, so it wasn’t too bad. I managed to listen to three sermons total, which is good, I guess. Went to school because of this big meeting with everyone in this postdoc project thingie. I feel useless. Oh well.

Ordered some Philip Glass CDs. Go minimalism!

I have been creating board games, made a couple of prototypes, tested them a bunch of times. What I find is initially I would be very excited about my “brilliant” ideas, but then as the time goes on, I would be less and less enthusiastic about it, eventually getting tired of them. I guess that’s true of a lot of things for me…

With money being tight in general, it’s bringing me to a (perhaps faulty perhaps real, but most likely in between) different perspective on the human society. Probably stirred up by the car trouble, followed up by reading things about other industries, I just felt like this entire society is out to scam every dollar that I have… I’m increasingly distrustful of anybody whenever money is involved, so much so to a point where I figured I really can’t live on this planet. Or it just makes me want to go to heaven sooner than later… (Of course there are other contributing factors…)

What am I doing? What have I done?