So, I’m not sure my whole volunteering plan is going to work out that well.

Debate works as a distraction from my vast emotional pain for two reasons. For one, it is a reaffirmation that I have some modicum of self-worth. My ability to have things to offer in the context of debate is one of the very few things that I have confidence hasn’t been completely destroyed by the events of this summer. But for the other thing, debate is loud. It’s noisy, boisterous, active. Often three or four or seven people are talking over each other, striving to be heard. There is little to no time for contemplation, for reverie, for the creeping dragon of self-doubt to tiptoe into the back of one’s mind and start breathing fire all over the neighborhood.

Volunteering, on the other hand, at least the early-morning kind that starts in a quiet kitchen at 8:30 and involves shifting chairs and wrapping silverware, is almost silent. The work is rote, but it’s mindless enough to set one’s mind to all kinds of frenetic racing. I was almost elated when a seemingly schizophrenic client and apparent some-time volunteer came up to the table to assist with rolling cutlery up into napkins. He bantered on about coyotes and baseball cards and the lyrics to songs and my only regret was that he wasn’t more plainly audible so I could engage him more thoroughly in conversation.

It’s just one day, my first at the mainline traditional soup kitchen at Elijah’s Promise, as opposed to Highland Park’s experiment of A Better World Cafe. I’m sure that if I become a regular, even one day a week, I’ll get brought in more to the kitchen, strike up conversations with the retirees and the full-time staff and the congregation members who have all known each other for a long time running. But the number of times I nearly broke down weeping today was far too many for this to work. I suppose weeping with a broom in my hand or while I’m cleaning dishes is better than weeping alone in my room, but I’m not sure the kind folks at the kitchen would agree.

The problem, more than anything, is how profoundly I’ve been rejected. Ever since I had to leave Broadway Middle School after skipping four grades to get there, there’s been a taunting narrative of failure and incompetence running in the back of my head. When PLB dumped me via paternal e-mail, the narrative got a brutal and powerful ally in the field of romantic viability. The extremity of both of these circumstances, especially the latter, has indented me with a deep-seated feeling of certainty that I am worthless and that the only antidote to my worthlessness is either unassailable intellectual accomplishment (e.g. North American Debate Championship) or unassailable romantic fulfillment (e.g. marriage to the love of my life). Unfortunately, one of these is revocable. And there simply isn’t any way to build it back up. There isn’t. I’m not saying I’ll never love again, though I might not, but the tarnish that a lightning-fast and permanent betrayal of a 7-year marriage imprints does not wash out. I am marked with this for life.

As I told Fish and my parents last night, time doesn’t do a damn thing. Memory might fade, or distractions might arise. Those are what people are really talking about when they say time changes something. It’s not the nature of time or its passage – it’s the nature of human frailty and malleability. People get older and decay and their minds get less sharp and that’s why things hurt less over time. If they’re thinking clearly and living meaningfully, nothing gets better. They just tell themselves a story where it seems less relevant because it was longer ago.

We all have needling voices of self-doubt and perhaps even self-loathing in the back of our heads. Most of us can wash or paper them over with the realities of their true achievements or strengths or inner beauty. But my counter-arguments have been silenced. Nothing is so inculcating of self-hatred and despair as being rejected in this way, cast aside so cavalierly in the name of selfishness. The love of one’s life is supposed to be selfish by staying with one, not by leaving. I have been told I failed at the only thing I ever really cared about, and I will never get a second chance. There is no antidote to that rejection. The best-case scenario I can paste up is dirty transparent wallpaper for the lurking reality of an endless wall of shame.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Today I decided to try somewhere that wasn’t Stop-N-Shop for my what is apparently becoming bi-weekly grocery trip. This meant heading back over the Raritan into New Brunswick to check out C-Town, which would have been the local place to buy food had I wound up in any number of apartments I sought in NB before winding up in Highland Park instead. When I’d passed it a couple times doing exploratory walks to go with apartment visits, it had seemed a friendly enough place, bustling with young families and the like.

If you’ve never heard of Stop-N-Shop or C-Town, don’t be surprised. (I had never heard of the latter till discovering this locale.) For some remarkable reason, grocery stores seem to be one of the only commercial enterprises in America that resists nationwide consolidation into mega-chains. Sure, the somehow unrelated Wal-Mart and Walgreens have started selling food and getting into the action, but there is no universal grocery store chain. I grew up with Safeway and Albertson’s, only to discover upon moving east that these were unheard-of there. When I moved to New Mexico, entirely foreign names like Smith’s and Jewel Osco entered my lexicon. It seems entering a new part of the country always means discovering at least one completely unknown chain, such as when we drove to Maryland with Fish last year and came upon a cluster of Food Lions. Food Lion? Are you kidding me? The first five times he said it, I thought Fish was saying “Food Line“, which was a hilarious enough name for a grocery store without being the complete non sequitir that is the king of the food jungle.

Anyway. I get over the river, hang out at Chipotle, almost ask a girl in line out before I remember what my personality actually is, then head down to C-Town. Why it is called C-Town, I have no idea, but one theory that dawns on me as I enter is that the “C” stands for “convenience”, because this place doesn’t really look like a grocery store from the inside. The shelves are too small, the aisles too crammed, and the proportion of overpriced junk food too high. Needless to say, the clientele is also decidedly more down-to-earth and desperate than at the Highland Park Stop-N-Shop. The predominant language within is Spanish and the prices are… higher. Yes, higher for the poor folks in the poor neighborhood than in the spacious overlit aisles of the place across the river.

I don’t want to hear your economic arguments or your bias or your justifications or your excuses. I know that you could say that they have a higher risk of shoplifting to absorb, or have to guard better against break-ins overnight, or lose more carts on average than the swankier uptown place. If this were a debate round, I could come up with 12 good arguments to justify the higher prices in the poorer part of town too. But the bottom line is that, while it might not be C-Town’s fault per se, the fact that these realities exist, and are legion and provable, means that most people’s economic theories about escaping from poverty are bunk.

There’s a Shell station in Oakland that always has consistently the highest prices for gas, possibly in the entire state of California. We used to pass the place on the way to the Mexicali Rose quite frequently and would joke and laugh about what the astronomical figure would be today, continually flabbergasted that our outlandish predictions would always be trumped by the numeric reality before us. It goes without saying that this was in about the worst part of town we actually drove in when not looking for runaways from Seneca.

The problem is that the poor don’t have the mobility to get out of their neighborhood. Most everything has to be close because they are the least likely to have cars and spare time and the money to use public transit. And when grocery stores are really just slightly larger but still overpriced “convenience” stores, they get locked into choices that are less healthy and less auspicious, yes, but especially more expensive. Which means that the marginal dollar on necessities goes further for the rich than the poor. Making groceries an objectively regressive commodity in our society. Which would be less problematic if groceries weren’t, oh, the most essential commodity for people to buy in this society.

Yes, there are food stamps. But I’m willing to guess most of the Spanish-speakers in C-Town don’t have much access to food stamps or someone to explain to them how to get them. And the marginal cost still applies, for food stamps are priced by dollar of cost and not by nutritional value of item. So you’re still better off having food stamps at the HP SNS than the NB CT, if you’ve even been given access. Of course those close to the HP SNS are much more likely to have said access.

There’s a legion of documentation on the web about this phenomenon and how most poor neighborhoods (e.g. the Tenderloin in dear old SF) don’t have any grocery stores at all, driving the marginal dollar into liquor and Twinkies instead of even marginally groceretic junky food. And this means that getting out of poverty doesn’t just require saving money like it would for most people, it requires saving more money than most people. It’s these hindrances on economic mobility, along with the corresponding need to keep a certain quotient of the population in this marginalized state, that make capitalism insolvent.

I bagged up my items into the canvas bags I’d brought, zipped up my jacket, and decided to buy the rest of the housewares I needed online. With the internet connection that I have that gives me access to cheap things, without the depression of watching people struggle with being gouged for the barest necessities.

The New Brunswick C-Town, in a photo from Google Maps’ street view. Depression level is to scale.

Miles walked today: 2.5

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s been a long time since something went right for me. This weekend, a whole heck of a lot went right in a hurry. I am trying to get used to the feeling of being really super-happy. I was silly-smiley all weekend as things unfolded, especially today.

I am too wired to write effectively, but I want to capture my thoughts in their giddy haze. The setting was the University of Maryland at College Park, and the action was a debate tournament. Obviously.

In roughly chronological order:

• We got to Maryland on-time Friday despite traffic and checked-in to a GA I last attended at a tournament I won (Hybrids ‘01 with Kate Myers).
• I got to debate in a double-LO attack in a demo round with Mike Buckwald.
• We found (good) food after almost starving to death after rounds and going to housing.
• We found free parking on campus thereafter.
• I was able to retrieve my sleeping bag from GA hours after the building was locked by reliving my high school break-in-to-tight-spaces self by slipping through the narrowly open window.
• Two words: Party Bus.
• Knowing Dave & Kyle are in a 4-0 round.
• Getting to watch Dave & Kyle in a 4-0 round.
• Dave & Kyle winning a 4-0 round.
• Ashley calling the shot that they’d be a non-breaking 4-1.
• This meaning that Ashely & Gordon upset the 4-0 in their pull-up round.
• Both Dave & Kyle and Ashley & Gordon breaking in their respective divisions.
• Both breaking teams picking up in varsity quarters & novice semis.
• Dave & Kyle picking up semis while good rumors come from novice finals.
• Not judging finals.
• Dave & Kyle have qualled and gotten RUDU into their first final ever.
• Epic finals case.
• Floor speech mayhem.
• Holy speaker awards, Batman!
• Finding out ABom & Nisha just missed the novice break.
• Waffle House!
• 
• Ghost.
• Being too wired to sleep.

I could get used to this. Watch out, APDA, RUDU has thrown down the gauntlet. And we had fun doing it.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Debate seems to have this transcendent power to lift me up in the darkest times. Suffice it to say times have been pretty dark, so thank goodness I chose to spend a year focusing on debate.

I don’t know what it is about this week in particular. I was trying to explain the rolling waves of awakening to Ariel and having a lot of trouble. This week has felt, in some ways, like the whole crisis has started over again, anew, afresh, and it’s more real and vivid and visceral than ever. It’s hued in this new kind of vibrance where the aches are sharper and the pains more acute, the acupuncture of supposed healing conducted with knives or swords instead of more forgiving needles. Part of it is time, I suppose, which (in a shocking move) does not heal all things, nor even dull or improve them. Sometimes things move sideways. Sometimes they get worse. Those that have told me time will make this all better probably would have put all their money in the stock market ten years ago too. Or a house five years ago.

But today provided its own little counterpoint too, a bulwark against the raging storms that graced the area for most of the evening. For one, I went down for my first scheduled shift volunteering at Elijah’s Promise, starting at their “A Better World Cafe” location that is a few blocks from my new place. It was awkward as heck at first, mostly because I don’t think they get a lot of walk-ins without introduction… it seems the bulk of their volunteers come through a local church or organization that makes an overture on a broad-based level. Or maybe it was just that today I was the new kid, and the thing about being the new kid is that on the day you’re the new kid, you’re the only new kid and everyone else already knows each other. Which I’m well familiar with, so it quickly melted into a viable situation, especially after I proved continually eager and energetic. People got friendly and by the end of it, I’d talked to all the regulars and staff about wanting to become widely involved, at least until I found a job and probably even thereafter. People seemed excited and I walked out of there feeling like I was on the verge of a new little community. Or the slimmest start thereof. Baby steps, right?

I came home and did my dishes and watched a movie and talked to Ariel and felt myself boiling. I wasn’t even angry at Emily by the end of it so much as the whole situation, the waste, the time invested and lost, the years of developing a sense of personhood and time expenditure and perspective on life that is not only lost, but ripped out in such a way as to render me incapable of developing a new one, or caring to. I don’t know how people survive this. I don’t. I don’t see it. Granted, some of the things may affect me disproportionately, like how much I uniquely invested in Emily and how mentally committed to the idea of marriage I have been my whole life. But still. I think I’m still finding new ways to realize what’s really been taken from me and I don’t quite have the capacity to deal. It’s flabbergasting. I think about it and get so I can’t even breathe.

I was in about this state when I looked out the window at the pouring rain and decided I didn’t care whether I got sick, I was walking to debate practice instead of driving. The disproportion of effort is absurd – a five-minute drive versus a half-hour trudge through windy, rainy conditions. But I am committed to trying to walk and that doesn’t just mean in the good times. I also find I care so little about what happens to me in light of what has transpired that it becomes very liberating. I walk without fear. What’s someone going to do to me? Rob me? Rape me? Kill me? I’ve been through the worst. I fear nothing to come in future years. The rest of life has the dull sheen of days rendered unimportant by their larger context.

Debate, though, did its job. It picked me up. It provides a context where I have to be a point-person, I have to check my business at the door and get down to the business of working with a team and making it better. I’m in this weird situation where a lot of these debaters read this blog and know exactly what’s going on with my life, but it’s an elephant we all collectively put aside in the interests of forging something better and brighter for all of us. And it’s hard to talk about 7-year marriages with college-aged kids. It’s hard for me, it’s hard for them. It’s hard to talk about it with almost anyone who hasn’t had one, or lost one, or been through exactly this. The whole fucking thing is just hard.

But not during practice, not at debate. At debate we enter a world where logic makes sense, where the rational arguments hold the day, where opponents are clearly labeled and the goals are straightforward and certain. Debate offers a rubric and model that, however capricious it sometimes seems, puts life writ large to shame. And we all love it. We can revel in being nerdy, in priding ourselves on speaking and knowing and arguing, in trying to improve and make each chosen word more persuasive than the last.

The walk home was energetic – a senior on the team has taken to parking in Highland Park and thus a contingent of people he’s driving home walk with me most nights back. I was almost sad it wasn’t raining still, suited up as I was in gloves and parka and hat. I am ready to defy the rain as I have defied gravity so far. I should be face-down in a ditch somewhere, but I’m still standing somehow. Why, I’m not really sure. The why can come later, if at all. For tonight, I’m still here.

Miles walked today: 3

I am doing my dishes
for the first time
taking care not to nick, chip, scratch
the shiny new colors
as they turn in my yellow-gloved hands

The sink is smaller now
the light harsher, more grim
but my hands are just the same
holding the plates and bowls with care
that you seemed to disregard

It is stormy outside
like that day in the Badlands
the picture you chose to define it all
your new paradigm, status, independence
a day with me, and we were happy

I can see your reflection
in the plate’s concentric circles
glinting light off the o’erhead fluorescent
like the cloudbent sun on your glasses
that tumultuous day

I hope you’re happy now
but you’re not, and I’m not sure I mean it
it’s something people say
when they mean it and don’t
and I understand, oh I understand

I love you and hate you
like these dishes
you helped me buy

Your parting gift
as you turned your head, walked away
toward a future you long pictured
but never bothered
to truly see

A sequel to For the Last Time.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Today had a good energy, at least at the outset. I want to capture that feeling, that sense of purpose and excitement that I began the day with, without compromising this post to say how I feel right now. The difference was made when I hauled out the camera to upload the photos I took this afternoon, held and beheld some of the implications of the camera in my hand, and almost had to throw up. I should’ve given this camera away, not kept it, gotten the new one. I have been too magnanimous.

It is impossible to write about the energy then without reflecting on the roiling anger and frustration now. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that this cannot be the simple story of a simple walking tour in search of furniture. Perhaps we shall begin again to try to go back to that moment, for that moment was real and is captured, in part even on film. Just as the moments captured so often before on film are also real. Before before. No matter how poisoned or sullied they all have become, how washed in the hot blood of betrayal. This is not getting any easier.

A line is a good way to begin again, no? This morning I decided it was time to get some furniture. Oh, I have plenty of furniture, don’t worry about that. But I lack some living room accouterments, specifically a couch and a nice comfy reading armchair. I have been wrestling with the idea of getting Craigslist to fulfill these needs, daunted by the twin threats of bedbugs and my own lack of a truck or ability to haul seriously large furniture toward my domicile. Surely Craigslist is infinitely more affordable in its offerings, but would the delivery and warranty of a new couch be worth the extra cost? I have yet to decide, but thought walking to various furniture stores in the region might help set my mind in order.

Thus, I headed out on a clear fall day, clear and getting colder, but not yet frigid. It was frigid a few days ago and I got sick, but things are much improved and reminiscent of good days in San Francisco. My first stop was in Highland Park, just around the corner from me, a place so close I’d been surprised I hadn’t noticed it on my first few trips into the quaint downtown in my new town. 212 Raritan. As I approached, I became more and more certain I should’ve seen this as a furniture store until, just then, I saw it was… now a bookstore. In fact, the same bookstore I’d idled in a few days back. Nighthawk Books. Formerly a furniture store, now quite different. So it goes.

So I turned around and crossed the Raritan, this time meaning the River and not the Road. The view across the river looked like this:

And my own walk across looked like this:

There are these strange buckets of flowers that drain naturally onto the pavement of the bridge below, permanently soaking the shadowed areas of said cement with something between a puddle and a pond. The flowers are bright and cheery, but the water is annoying enough to make me question the effort at beautification. Or at least prompt a larger effort at drainage.

In any event, the walk was bright and sunny and I soon concluded I didn’t need the extra (third) layer I’d brought just in case. Periodically I stopped to observe how New Brunswick looks in the daytime as I approach it.

For example:

Note the Rutgers banners lining the lampposts all along the avenue. It’s almost required for any place of business in either NB or HP to carry a logo or sign or some indication of their support of the institution. I’m not sure if it’s because all of their income comes from students or people directly related to the university or what, but it inculcates a good bit of school spirit for my adopted debate program, if nothing else.

Anyway, I kept trudging along, eventually passing the train station wherefrom I may someday commute:

On my way to the designated cluster of furniture stores whose addresses I’d carefully copied, I was almost tripped by a consignment shop with little bits of furniture out front. My eye was caught first by a nightstand, then by a small chest of drawers, and five minutes of negotiation later, I’d acquired two pieces of furniture I’d not set out to get. Still, it seemed like a good omen and I was very satisfied with the price. I promised to come back with the car by day’s end to pick things up and quick-stepped toward the cluster.

The first of the places proved to be under renovation, recently vacated by its furniture-bearing former occupant. So I was 0-2, but with the unexpected bonus of the place I hadn’t researched. The next place was intimidating just to walk into, but I persevered anyway, overwhelmed by lavish displays that seemed sorely out of place in the largely immigrant neighborhood in which the store was situated. I felt the fabric of a couple couches, somewhat wistfully, well aware that the lack of price tags indicated the old adage… “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” I hightailed it out of there before the staff could ask me what kind of an impostor I thought I was.

The next place, just a bit up the road, was so intimidating I didn’t set foot. Not so much because the items looked overpriced, but rather they looked frilly. And overpriced. The whole place seemed assembled by a rejected Disney princess who was consoling herself on her dismissal with an abundance of floral antiques. Not a pretty sight. There may have been a couple reasonable looking lamps, something else I’m in need of, but it just wasn’t worth the risk of being attacked by the overall atmosphere of stepping into the middle of a dainty doily.

And thus I booked it home, passing back under the overpass on the way to the bridge:

And arriving home to pick up the Prius:

(My place is the front-right corner of this building, ground floor.)

I paused just briefly to reflect on the lush greenery of my new neighborhood:

And then drove through the middling traffic to retrieve my new wood items. But not before jotting down the address of one more place, a discount furniture place in nearby Edison that seemed to have relatively reasonable prices on nice new living room material. After the quick pick-up in NB, I headed once more back across the Raritan, followed the directions, and wound up in an industrial area of my greater region only to find a for-lease sign on the building I’d been directed to. Yup. Three of the five furniture stores I’d sought today were permanently closed.

When my Dad came out here a few weeks ago, he’d been impressed by how much wealth and success and prosperity seemed reflected in the entire east coast and especially parts of central Jersey. He’d commented on it repeatedly, noting the construction and newness of many of the buildings, especially those associated with the school or the hospitals nearby. But it takes an exercise like today to realize that things here aren’t exactly peachy. I see plenty of commercial real estate boarded up, lots of subtly shuttered places here and there with Princeton phone numbers vainly calling for new enterprise. But the turnover of so many places still listed on the internet map as functional locales with numbers and even websites, this puts it into relief. Maybe furniture is disproportionately affected by the recent change in economic climate, which would certainly make sense, but maybe it’s most everything.

By nightfall, I was home and unloading my new nightstand and drawers, not yet to the point of sudden rage at the indignities of this particular camera and all I have been made to endure. I was exhausted, a bit of a backfire to my new plan of walking a lot and improving my general fitness. Heartened to see that the last of the dishes had shown, that things were coming together, if ever so slowly. I still lack soft furniture on which to flop. I still lack a feeling of being home.

Miles walked today: 3.8

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

This past weekend was a good one. As always, you can check out the Rutgers Debate blog for details on how things went for the team. They neither disappointed nor went over the top this weekend, though they were frustrated with their octofinal decision. The disappointment was somewhat mitigated by watching Brandeis run to victory… I gave their floor speech before their 9-4 Opp win.

On Sunday, the much-ballyhooed “APDA Mini-Cup” was held at Harvard, featuring a Harvard-heavy pool of eight teams comprised of fifteen former elite debaters and one current one. This evolved from an earlier idea to hold a year-long “APDA Cup” that would be one giant tournament taking place over the entire season and culminating in one final weekend of out-rounds. Despite widespread interest, that never got off the ground last year, so this idea was implemented instead, perhaps as a lead-in to a future year-long Cup. To sweeten the pot, there was a $1,000 cash prize allotted to the winner, garnered from local teams who wanted the event to be a success (and apparently got first crack at the tapes of all the rounds in return as well – it’s like a basic incentive argument in an APDA round).

Anyway, I was paired with BU’s Jake Campbell, one of the nicest guys ever to grace the circuit and a mutual believer in the power of crazy philosophical opp-choice cases. We wound up in a Harvard-light pod, consisting of a GW team, a Brandeis team (Zimmy & Joel), and a hybrid of two 2010 National semifinalists (one finalist – and TOTY to boot) from Harvard and Amherst. The format was round-robin with the top team advancing straight to Finals.

I really enjoyed our rounds – hopefully they will post the videos sooner than later and I can feature each of them on the blog a la my posting of the Stanford rounds over the summer we moved out to Jersey. I wrote two cases for the festivities, but we only ran one, being handed Opp by GW and flipping Opp against the full ‘Deis team. We ran the table, though each round was by exactly one ballot, so we apparently just squeaked in to a 3-0 record. I had felt pretty confident about all of our rounds, which was apparently warranted and unwarranted. They’ll also be posting the RFD’s (reasons for decision) online, so I’m really curious to see those.

Finals was somewhat disappointing for me, though I guess not for the others, all of whom proved to be BU debaters. We were matched against the only current debater and his partner from two years ago and were given Gov, though we would have grabbed it if we could have, since Jake had wanted nothing more out of this tourney than to run the case we did. It was supposed to be a round about whether ethical systems ought derive from human nature or not, but wound up being a round about how differently people interpret human nature and, ultimately, that most people think everything in human history has derived directly from human nature, which certainly isn’t my understanding of that concept. So it goes. We dropped, 8-3, setting up this weird Lincoln/Kennedy type thing where four years ago I lost to a Harvard team in BU Finals and then just lost to a BU team in Harvard (Mini-Cup) Finals, both running crazy opp-choice cases on Gov. Unlike the BU tourney, though, I don’t have the solace of knowing I put on a real showcase Final Round. I also don’t have my half of a thousand bucks.

It was still a great weekend and it was awesome to spend so much time with Stina and Dav and Zimmy throughout, as well as to see Drew on Friday night. When I finally got home, bleary and punch-drunk from a hilarious car-ride home with Dave and CBergz, I slept for half a day. But then I got up and it was soon time to listen to the Giants-Braves game on the computer and, as I often do when I want to focus on an audio-only experience, I decided to play a little online poker. I’ve mostly avoided things that can loosely be termed as video games since Emily returned from Liberia, preferring to focus on dealing with our stuff and then trying to focus on moving and dealing with my new life in Highland Park. But since the time was already budgeted for the game and I couldn’t watch the game, I found myself a tournament.

Within minutes of entering, I was facing a tough dilemma with KQ and a high-card Q on the board. I decided to push in all my chips, save one, a fun intimidation move that’s shy of going all-in and is the kind of thing that would never happen in a live game. The other guy called and flipped up AQ. So I had my chip and was going to be out of the tournament, with the 100-chip big blind coming around the next hand. I sighed and berated myself for overvaluing my hand, trying to determine whether to sign up for another tournament immediately since it was only the second inning and my same entertainment interests applied.

Then a funny thing happened. I tripled up on my 1-chip auto-all-in. Okay, great. I was still forced all in with my 3 chips on the small blind. But then I quadrupled up. Twelve chips. And two hands later, I went all in and quadded up again. Forty-eight chips. Soon I was forced in by another big blind, but this time I tripled up once more and could finally see over the top of the big blind. There was something almost like hope, after this many consecutive wins.

Five hours later, I finally got knocked out of the tournament, 22nd out of 2,666 entrants, having at one point amassed 223,000 chips. The ballgame was long over, long since won by the Giants. I’d listened to the whole post-game show and its litany of champagne-sodden interviews with understated players. I’d listened to hours of music on Pandora, rising and falling with the moods of the music I used to like. And I’d made about sixty bucks. A far cry from the multi-thousand-dollar top prize, but a miracle after facing such an early elimination on the decision to hold back one chip instead of go all-in.

It occurred to me somewhere in hour four or five of the 381-minute run through the tournament that I might make more playing poker that night than I stood to gain in the APDA Mini-Cup. Which I found kind of hilarious, because while poker is a hobby I’ve periodically been successful at, debate is a profound passion where I’m extremely confident in being in a top echelon. Of course, 99.9% of the debates out there don’t pay at all, while every poker tournament save for a very few low-level ones pay something to the winner. So the Mini-Cup changed the incentives in some strange way. Or at least my perspectives on them. It never would have occurred to me to compare a poker payoff to a debate round without the random financial carrot tacked on to the showcase event.

Perhaps the larger issue is the one that Russ pointed out when I shared the results of the tournament with him, just before sleeping hard this morning as well. He observed my one-chip miracle as a metaphor for my larger emotional state of being. Which, remarkably, for all my emotionality of late and patternistic vision in general, hadn’t hit me at all. Of course as soon as I read it, I had to begrudgingly admit that he had a real point. I was at death’s door and found a way to survive again and again when the odds were clearly against me. I was already mentally resigned and found a way to carry on. I wound up doing quite well.

It’s the doing quite well that I just can’t be sure about. Except, of course, in the context of debate. It’s funny to look at the Mini-Cup performance as almost the reverse of the poker run… I had soaring confidence about rounds I was just barely winning. And then grand anticipation for a case that sort of ran aground. Which I really shouldn’t put too fine a point on, because I had a great time debating. And it was nice to be judged by so many current and former (but still far younger than me) debaters. There’s a feeling of invincibility that dinos often bring to the circuit, of having paid their dues and being above reproach. Events like the Mini-Cup are good if only for their ability to remind former debaters that they are still capable of being judged. And when the seasoned aged dinos judging me are people like Jon Bateman, who I judged in National Finals five years after my own last Nationals, it really puts the whole thing into perspective.

Then again, maybe I just like the concept of judgment in all its forms. Or less than people perceive, as my current Rutgers debaters found out from spending a weekend hearing crazy stories from ‘Deis of old. Who knows? More and more, I think that Judgment may end up being the key watchword for my life. Part of a larger theory about everyone having a watchword – a singular concept that sums up the dilemmas, tests, and challenges that seem to recur in their life. As though we all were put here for one reason, one purpose, and our respective uniqueness makes bridging our gaps harder than might otherwise seem necessary. I’ve perused this concept before, though perhaps never in public. My Dad’s word is Survival. My mother’s is Motivation. Emily’s, I think, is Expectation. Mine… mine is almost certainly Judgment.

Don’t spell it with an extra e.

Miles walked today: 3.5

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

We box a lot of stuff up in this life. We take surprises and things we’re not sure why we’re keeping and treasured mementos and donations and nestle them against three-dimensional paper structures whose only purpose is to contain such items. We take tape, that which sticks to everything, and seal it tight against the exterior in hopes that the unwrapping cannot be done until the duly appointed time. And then markers or ribbons or bow or fancy colored paper, something to adorn the outside, to remind us of the importance of what’s inside. And then we shove it away, or place it gently in the closet, waiting for the time for it to be opened.

Most gifts are received with joy, or at least some tempered display of enthusiasm. I’ve received no shortage of flak in my life for reacting to unpacking gifts with an obvious reflection of the precise feelings the gift evokes in me, regardless of the expectation of the giver. My commitment to honesty includes not complimenting haircuts and outfits I dislike, not jumping joyfully at gifts I detest, not holding back my ire or confusion or elation when the feeling is prompted. My wife was generally unfond of this trait, it seems, though she enjoyed the story about giving me bowling shoes for a birthday and me getting to the midpoint of unwrapping between paper and box, seeing that it was a shoebox, and crying out “You got me shoes?” before realizing their specific ilk. It always sounded endearing when she told it, but maybe she was just trying to show how hard it was to live with me.

Tears are also hard to hold back, and probably nothing I’d try to even if I could. Unlike honesty, they’re an innate biological reaction. They well up and spill, enlisting one’s chest and eyes and larynx in the cause, throwing the whole world into pathos. Stinging, overwhelming, blinding. It is hard to see the point in anything when crying, both literally and figuratively. Crying blots out the sun, opens up the soul.

It’s opening up boxes that brought on the crying this afternoon, unsurprisingly. You see where this is all going. Just weeks ago now, even days, I packed myself little timebombs and improvised lachrymosizing devices. Tamped them down and sealed them over and put them in a neat light brown stack that looked nothing like the danger lurking within. They fit so easily into a U-Haul, into the living room, could’ve even gotten through Security if necessary. Waiting, patiently, as only the inanimate produce of human accumulation can. Ready to look and feel just like the day they went in the box, like all the days before.

There’s a reason I’m not fully unpacked yet, perhaps not really even close. I’d managed to forget the reason for a while, forget how hard it is to keep knifing into tape and unfolding flaps when angry jacks pop from every box. My friend Pete Lee made a movie about this, a movie about love unfulfilled and the power of a box to store emotions. You should watch it.

We all should watch it, in the colloquial use of that phrase. Every time we sit down to folding, shaping, constructing another corrugated cubic vault. What traps are we laying with the trappings of the packing industry? At what cost have 3M and U-Haul made their billions?

There are still fifteen or twenty packages sitting in the living room. Some folded and defeated, broken to their innocent component parts in a stack by the fireplace, waiting for the thresh of the recycling process or the chance perhaps to cloak more daggers. I lack the energy to engage again tonight. Sit they will, the broken and the heavy, knowing nothing of the water they are bound to loose in the future. Surer than a rain-dance, an overweight cloud, the path of least resistance. Each item seen, lifted, placed, restored, all with the asterisk of the droplet it evoked.

There’s no crying in baseball. Maybe I should see how the Giants are doing.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Boston, it’s been a while.

Today is slated to mark my first return to the city I lovingly call The Beans since a 2006 trip to compete with Emily in the Boston University tournament four years after our graduation. Wouldn’t you know that this weekend will be my first return to APDA-style competition as well? I guess I’m not allowed in Boston unless I’m going to debate.

The Harvard tournament never traditionally smiled on me much in my four-year tenure, though Zirkin’s and my trip to semifinals in 2000 would have been fine had we not run into perhaps the least enjoyable case I ever hit in my life in said round. Other visits included missing Saturday by oversleeping in ‘98, getting tanked by a capricious judge all the way to being the bottom 4-1 in ‘99, and visiting the 1-2 bracket in ‘01. Remarkably, it’s not expected to rain the whole weekend, which may be a first not only in my experience of the Big H’s tourney, but in its entire history.

Here’s hoping that Harvard goes better all around for my young charges from another big red letter, the R. And it wouldn’t hurt for Jake Campbell (BU ‘10) and I to have a little luck on Sunday too. For details on the competition, you can read this.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Since a certain person who will remain nameless recently took a significant bite out of financial crime, I find myself facing wholly different circumstances on that front to go with my different circumstances on every other front. While part of the plan is to try to get a job that can offset things until I move somewhere affordable like New Mexico, part of the plan must also account for the possibility that I will be unable to get a job that works with my schedule. And even if I do, I don’t want to be spending a lot of reserve cash on this year.

As a result, I’ve made it a goal to spend at an annual rate of $20,000 this year. Which would be fine in our old housing situation, or in Nuevo, but is pretty difficult when I splurged on rent to live in a nice place in Highland Park instead of the sketchier parts of New Brunswick. I’ve been trying to think of spending in terms of a daily rate, to really break down what a budget looks like day in and day out. It’s by no means the first time I’ve tried spending on a budget, but perhaps the first time in eight years that it’s mattered this much.

In a daily spectrum, $20k/year is $54.79 a day. So what does my daily expense chart look like?

$6.33 a day for everything else. Whew. Given that that includes food, this is looking like a tallish order. I managed to spend pretty cheaply in today’s trip to Stop-N-Shop, but the budget was blown by a necessary restocking of Emergen-C stockpiles brought on by the recent not-quite-so-miraculously-avoided illness. I’m already at the coughing (final) stage and the symptoms have been mild throughout, so I’m counting myself pretty lucky. At least I managed to find the latently elusive Lemon-Lime flavor. A whole new generation of debaters’ voices will be spared!

While the rent is obviously a mammoth share of that chart, it’s the insurance options in the 2 and 3 slots that make me the most bitter. Perhaps because it’s never done a bit of good to carry car insurance in my life, other than fulfilling a legal obligation to do so. Perhaps because my urologist is being pretty cavalier about my kidney stones (”I don’t know what’s causing them… maybe you’re eating too much dairy? Who knows? Fill this prescription and call me in six months.”) Perhaps because the whole concept of insurance as a bet against oneself can still send me into writhing anger if I sit in a room and think about it for ten minutes.

Emily would be quick to point out that the insurance is cut-rate because it’s still through her student plan. Which doesn’t make me feel any better about the onrushing mandate to purchase the insurance at market rates that’s waiting to swallow the country. Maybe rather than being thankful for being required to purchase insurance that defends against calamities, we should look at why there are so many precipitous financial calamities designed to befall people in our society.

Which reminds me that I really shouldn’t be whining about having $6.33 a day for food and extras (”extras” on top of cell phone, internet, and Netflix, mind you) in the context of the world at large. $6.33 a day is more than most people see for slave-labor style jobs that “free markets” are forcing them into. In the context of everything, I’m still awfully lucky.

Well, mostly. Even people in slave-labor style jobs probably feel capable of being loved.

Miles walked today: 1.2. Hey, I’m still a bit sick.

Follow-up: I of course just realized that I completely forgot about gas/electric, since I haven’t seen a bill from those guys yet. Yeah. Luckily heat’s included in the rent here (although it’s not on yet, so the space heater I’ve been running while sick isn’t included), but gas/electric for cooking and lighting is probably at least a couple bucks a day and maybe more at times. Maybe I should allot myself $25,000 a year? That seems like a lot. But it also has this ring of realism to it, given that I still need to buy a couch.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.