$1.05 Surcharge

Earlier today, I made some tentative plans to get together with some guys and play EDH this Sunday. It's funny the things you take for granted. Or maybe it's just me. Something simple like having free time and using it to do something I'm interested in, and being able to make uncontested plans without consequence... when I was in a relationship, that's all I wanted to be able to do; my own thing, without having to report to anyone or make sure there weren't any other plans I was violating before I went ahead and said "yeah, let's play Magic on this day at this time, that'd be fun." That was the thing that was missing from my life, and now I've got it back.

So there's that.

Like I said, funny the things you take for granted. I think sometimes life gives you what you want because you're supposed to have it. Other times, it gives you what you want because... well, it'll take any sucker's money.

YATTA!

One of the best ways to ruin a movie (or a book, or any kind of story) is to have the ending spoiled. It's almost like there's no point wasting time with the details when you already know what's going to happen at the conclusion. The reason I say this is because, like any person on the planet, I have a reasonable degree of uncertainty in my life, and just like anyone else, I try as much as possible to reduce that uncertainty at every turn. I often find myself thinking "if I just knew how ____ was going to turn out, everything would be okay."

No. No, it wouldn't. That would absolutely suck. The ending would be ruined, and there'd be no point in even trying to get from point A to point B, especially if the ending is (or seems from the current perspective) unfavorable.

Which brings me to my next point: I do believe that the story is written and has an ending. Why? Because I believe in Destiny. I'm talking Hiro Nakamura style Destiny. Why a capital D? Because it's something awesome that you should strive to achieve, and in fact have to strive to achieve, because the concept of Destiny doesn't preclude free will. You've got choices to make, and you have to make them, but they're all leading up to something. "Save the cheerleader, save the world." The world isn't going to save itself, you still have to make decisions and take action, but when you do, things will happen. You're working towards an end, even if you don't know what the end really is. 

Man, if you haven't seen Heroes (or at least the first season), you're really missing out. One of the things I loved most about that show was that they devoted an entire episode in the first season to what was coming five years down the road, and as a result, the characters who've seen it set off to try and stop that apocalyptic future from happening. In so doing, they change a few small details along the way, but over the course of the seasons, you can see the characters slowly start to become the people they had seen in the future regardless of their intentions. In essence, they could alter the path, but couldn't change the ending. 

If you're wondering how destiny and free will can coexist, I don't blame you. I could probably spend another entire post on that subject (and perhaps I will someday soon), but I can sum it up for you like this: it's the same way Jesus could be fully God and fully man. Yeah, try and wrap your brain around that. Doesn't really make sense, does it? No. You either buy it or you don't. Yeah yeah, I'm a Grade A apologist for sure. But hand in hand with the concept of destiny is the notion of purpose. Some people are soldiers, some are medics; some are meant to fight the battles, some are meant to tend to the wounds of those who fight. Me? I'm just here to entertain the troops. But again, I don't think the importance of entertainment should be downplayed. To quote the wise teacher Roger Rabbit, "A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have!" We're not always facing down physical enemies. But I digress.

My point is, life is a journey. Part of what makes it interesting is not knowing what comes next. So if you find yourself wishing you had all the answers and the rest of your life was mapped out, just think of the last time a movie was ruined for you. You don't want to know the end. Half the fun is in the process of getting there. Take each step one at a time, and you'll get where you're going, whether you know where that is or not.

Honey I'm Gonna Make It Out Alive

The following is an account of my thoughts prior to boarding my flight to Lynchburg this past Saturday. Just so you know.

It is 4:21 AM, on November 10th. I'm sitting at gate B1, a little more than half hour before my scheduled boarding time. This is usually about the time when I start to consider going to bed for the night, so I shouldn't be tired, but I think the fact that my brain knows I won't be getting a substantial amount of sleep any time soon is making me more fatigued than usual.

Sitting in an airport terminal is an odd experience; not unpleasant, necessarily, just odd. For one thing, I've only flown... let's see... five times before this one (twice to Disney World in high school, once home for Thanksgiving break freshman year of college, once to Jamie's wedding in the Dominican Republic after my senior year of college, and once to DC for Dave and Olga's wedding just this past June). I'm far more experienced taking the train than I am flying, and I will admit that I do feel more comfortable knowing the train has a pretty slim chance of plummeting from the sky at any given point in time. In addition, railway security is far less invasive than airport security, due in large part to the fact that there is none. You just grab your bags and hop on the train, and you don't have to worry about them confiscating your pocketknife.

For another thing, I get a strange feeling as I sit here, a feeling of... not sadness, exactly, but loneliness I guess. I mean, I am here alone, so I'm sure that contributes, and I'm headed to a land far away from home. But that land is Lynchburg, which was my home for a good five years (nine months out of each of those years, anyway) and I'm going to visit some of my best friends in the world. I feel like I should be out of my skull with enthusiasm. Then again, it is 4:30 in the morning, the sun isn't up, and I'm all alone. Once I get down there, I'm sure I'll feel a little more comfortable. The air in here is a bit stuffy anyway.

There are maybe a dozen people in the whole terminal spread out across the different gates, and a lady just came over and sat down in my row. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, and she's a good six or seven seats down, but with so many empty rows, it makes you wonder why she would sit in this one. Probably because it's prime real estate, as close as you can get to the gate while still facing it. Or it could just be the pheromones I'm exuding. I am quite irresistible. I dunno, I just generally prefer to be as far as possible from strangers.

A girl just walked up to the little desk in front of the gate. There's still about 20 minutes until the scheduled boarding time (4:55), and in my experience they almost never board on time, but this does provide a ray of hope. I'm questioning now, though, whether I'm just writing for the sake of writing, or whether I'm actually providing any valuable insight. Frick, I guess if I was concerned about that, I wouldn't have this blog in the first place.

My Sherriff badge made it through security. I was a little concerned about that, but not concerned enough not to risk it.

People are starting to gather at the gate, and now there are people behind me. I know they probably aren't looking at my screen, but the notion that someone could possibly be reading what I'm typing as I type it freaks me out, so I'm gonna shut this down for the time being. Catch you on the flip side.

It's Not Over Until The Last Creature's Turned Sideways

"You must have a lot on your mind."

The words of Anthony tonight when I got home as we discussed my increased blog output in recent days. That wasn't a complete sentence. Sue me.

One of my favorite things about Magic is how many comparisons you can draw between the game and real life. "Well yeah, you can draw comparisons between any game and real life." Sure. But Magic, like real life, involves equal elements of skill AND luck. Most sports, for instance, revolve mostly around skills and techniques that have been honed and perfected over a long period of time, but don't require tremendous degrees of luck. It usually comes down to purely how good you are at the sport or how well your team functions as a whole. A game like Monopoly, on the other hand, which certainly contains an element of skill, is mostly determined by the luck of the dice rolls. With Magic, not only do you have to be a skilled player, know the game, the techniques, the strategies, the tactics, be able to weigh the possibilities and the outcomes, but you also have to rely on the luck of the draw. Sure, you can increase your chances at having a good draw by building a good deck, but again, just another parallel to real life, where you can increase your chances of success in a given scenario by preparing yourself for it. Even then, no matter how prepared you are, you still have to play with the hand you draw. Plus, unlike sports (and like most aspects of life), there isn't a key physical aspect that needs to be mastered. The closest game I can think of to being as much like real life as Magic would be poker (another card game, incidentally), and even then, you don't build your own deck, so it's not quite as tight of a comparison. Plus, Magic is cooler.

The remainder of this post may not make much sense to you depending on your level of understanding of Magic, but then again, this particular post is probably more for my own benefit. If you do know Magic, and I know at least a few of you do, then maybe it'll mean something. I just know that even if I could spend a lot of time trying to explain it I still wouldn't do a very good job, so I'll just throw this disclaimer out there now.

My main point here is this: if you scoop, you have no chance of winning. "Scooping" is conceding because you know you've already lost. The problem with doing so is that even if you're dead on board, your opponent might not see it, and you could be one turn away from victory. If he misses something and gives you one more shot, you've got it. But if you scoop, then you've got nothing. You can't make it easy for him. This is why I wait until the last, lethal points of damage are coming at me before I say "yeah, you've got it."

Like I said, there's an element of luck to Magic. Topdecking, or drawing exactly the card you need exactly when you need it, is not by any means a skillful maneuver, but it's often necessary, and it happens frequently. If you give up, you lose your chance to topdeck. If you rage quit because your strategy keeps getting disrupted, you won't live long enough to topdeck that Boundless Realms and landfall for 12 bird tokens to keep you alive for a few turns. If you say "well, this game is locked up, I just lost" when your opponent miracles Entreat the Angels for 9 tokens, you won't have a chance to put Verdant Embrace on your Emeria Angel and start popping saprolings into play to gain enough life off of Leyline of Vitality to stabilize. Don't quit the game until the game is over. Dig for an answer. Put all your resources and all your focus into finding a way to get back in the game. Lock the board down so you can survive long enough to draw Vigor and go on the offensive. Because no one blocks your creatures when Vigor's out unless they have to to survive.

I understand most of that last paragraph was likely indecipherable to at least a few people, so I'll distill it down to this: do not quit. If you've got something you're after, keep at it. Persist. You may not have a chance, but if you quit, you certainly have no chance. Sure, it may come down to luck... but who knows, maybe luck will be on your side. And yes, that exact scenario did happen the other night during a game. I almost quit in the face of overwhelming odds, but I played it out, and I won.

Yeah, Magic is a game. It's designed to be fun for the players and profitable for the designers, and it is both of those things. But I think anything that can help sharpen my perspective and outlook on life is more than JUST a game. There are other aspects of Magic I might touch on in the future, like knowing your opponents' play styles, playing around counterspells, head games, slow rolling, etc., but one of the most basic and universally applicable principles is that of never giving up until you're absolutely certain it's over. If you wanna win, you gotta keep playing, and that's all there is to it.

Staying Pleasantly Warm

A few posts ago, I mentioned detailing my adventures in 2011, and I'm not sure if I ever called it by name, but I was gonna title it the Tale of 2011 Trilogy and tell it in three parts, because that's what a trilogy is and every story with a heightened sense of self-importance is told as a trilogy, whether it needs to be or not.

Well, I began writing part one, and kept writing.... and kept writing, and kept writing, and kept writing. Boy, was that sucker long, and I didn't even finish it. And that was only the first installment. And then I realized that, as dynamic and life-changing as 2011 was for me, it wouldn't really be that interesting for someone who didn't live it unless I could apply some kind of relevant insight. And then I happened upon the inspiration for my previous post, which allowed me to distill 2011 into a few paragraphs and avoid getting bogged down in details that no one really cared about, like the time we went to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and I used my time-tested seating arrangement technique to get the girl I liked to sit next to me. Actually, that's probably a bad example because that technique, which I developed and perfected in college, never fails and therefore could probably be useful to someone somewhere, but you get what I'm saying.

Inspiration comes from the strangest of places though. Today's comes from my trench coat. It's missing, and it's very distressing. I loved that coat. But if we rewind the clock once again to 2011, we'll see that I was so busy having my world turned upside down and then right side up again that I only had time to write one blog, for which the inspiration was my flannel shirt. Interestingly enough, that shirt had been missing for some time up until a few days before I wrote that post, the loose theme of which was the sense of relief and contentment I felt at having found my shirt after giving up on the search a long while before. And the funny part about it was that the shirt had been literally (and I mean that in the literal sense of the word "literally," not the figurative sense that's been spreading like a plague throughout our culture) underneath me the entire time, stuffed in the couch cushions.

So here I am, missing my trench coat. I was a bit concerned about it before, but upon remembering that I eventually found my flannel shirt, I relaxed a little bit. My coat will probably turn up. I'm confident that it will; not 1000% positive, mind you, but confident. And if it doesn't... well, life goes on. For as much as I want my trench coat, I don't need it. Yes, I loved that coat and it will always have a special place in my heart even if I don't find it, but I have other jackets and other frankly warmer coats.

Don't get me wrong. I really hope I find it. But if not, at the end of the day, I'll find something to keep me warm. This one's for you, trench coat.

I Believe In Harvey Dent

The year was 2009, and the season was fall, as it is now. I was not back at school like I had planned to be. I was, every night, going to my job as a janitor for a few hours, then coming home to sit on my bed with my computer for a few more hours, going to sleep, and then doing it all again. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, but it seemed like there weren't many options. I had no friends in the area, and Chris was out virtually every night with some friends from middle school he had just reconnected with, and though he invited me to come do stuff with them a few times, it just wasn't really clicking; they weren't my type of people. So there I was, a janitor, confused as to where my life was going (seemingly nowhere), and with no social life at all. My favorite thing to do at the time was play Magic, which Chris and I spent most of the nights that summer doing, but with him gone every night, I had no one to play with. Combine all these factors, and I wouldn't say I was depressed, exactly, just... going through the motions with no sense of purpose, and with no end in sight.

And then, one day in February of 2010, Chris said to me "so I'm getting Nick and Anthony into Magic." And just like that, there was a ray of hope.

If you think it's stupid that my ray of hope came from the notion that I would once again have someone to play a nerdy card game with, then let me stop you right there, because you obviously don't understand the importance of entertainment and escapism. You can open your mind and keep reading, or go back to working yourself to the bone to get that bonus that's FIFTY TIMES your annual salary so you can retire when you're 40 and then die of a stress induced heart attack shortly thereafter.

Anyway, Chris managed to interest Nick and Anthony enough in Magic to keep them playing, and we found out that one of Chris's co-workers at K-Mart also played. Like I said, I had never really had much interest in hanging out with these people, but I was so starved for some Magic action I didn't care who was playing. Which was good, because, long story short, I discovered they were actually pretty cool and we became friends. So by spring of 2010, I had a social life again (and yes, while we spent a lot of time playing Magic, we also did other things) and wasn't just stuck in the endless rut of janiting and sleeping.

We move next, then, to January of 2011. A few days after the most fantastic New Years Eve party I've ever attended, I was displaced from my house. I moved in with Chris, who was living in Troy at the time, and... to be honest, I don't think I've ever felt more hopeless in my life. Without a real home, I felt like there was no way I could ever make anything of myself. I still had my job as a janitor to sustain a meager income, but it was now much farther away, and I had no reliable way to get there. Plus, Chris's house was freezing cold, especially at night in the living room, where I slept on the couch.

Then, some friends of Chris's from college hosted a party at their house. I spent the night there, since it was warmer than Chris's place. One of the occupants of the house offered to give me (and Chris, who at the time was my janitorial cohort) a ride to work. I came back that night, and asked if the residents wouldn't mind me spending another night there. They said they didn't care, I could stay as long as I wanted. So I stayed another night. And another. And another. Ultimately, I made arrangements to just live there for the foreseeable future (until the end of the school year, when they would all be graduating and moving out). I slept on their couch every night, and even had a space where I kept my clothes and few personal belongings. And the aforementioned friend continued to give me and Chris a ride to work virtually every day (and when he couldn't, Missy stepped up).

And so began the best post-college time of my life. It was like an extension of dorm life, except without the stress of class projects to weigh me down, and at that point, I felt more free than I ever have. Sure, there was the looming problem of what I was going to do with my life once everyone graduated and I had to move out of that house, but I figured I'd let Future Bill worry about that and just enjoy the ride. And, for the record, I enjoyed it very much. Oh, the tales I could tell of life at the Orphanage (as it came to be known)... perhaps another day. But those days were truly glorious.

Our next stop is only a few months advanced, late April/early May 2011. By that time I had made the decision to move in permanently with Chris, so while I had a place to live, the impending end of the carefree Orphanage days was on my mind as well as another goal that seemed simultaneously impossible and inevitable (a mental state with which I'm oddly familiar). I sat on the front porch of the Orphanage in the rain one night, alone, listening to my little red MP3 player, pondering my predicament. I suppose there's no real way to dance around the details here... you see, two days prior, I had just spilled my guts to the girl I liked, and she had shot me down. She told me she liked someone else. She was out with him that night as I sat on the porch, trying to wrap my brain around the fact that the thing I wanted most in the world at the time was likely going to be completely out of reach. She too was living at the Orphanage in those days, and I expected her to be gone the entire night, but thought I might get to hear the story of her escapades the next day.

She came back that night, and three nights later, we were dating.

I still had to deal with paying rent and affording the necessary commodities on the hourly wages of a janitor working not much more than 15 hours a week. But then, a few days after moving into the house, I got a call from a radio station I had sent my resume to almost a year and a half prior. They needed a new part time employee, and I wanted to work in radio. I took the job, and three months later, through a series of events that I would have sworn only happen in the movies, I had my dream job. But you probably know that story.

"Is he gonna make a point someday soon?" Yes, and it was best said by Harvey Dent: "the night is darkest just before the dawn" (of course, I know he wasn't the first person to say it, but he's the most culturally relevant right now). If the structure of the blog fulfilled its intended purpose, then you may have noticed that I've been operating within the bounds of a pattern here, with a hopeless scenario followed up by deliverance, sometimes out of nowhere.

I know I'm not exactly a wise old man, but the last few years have taught me enough to know that you're gonna have some bad times in your life. But when you do, remember it's the little things that will keep you sane, things like a card game, or a ride to work when you need it, or a phone call when you least expect it. And most importantly, keep in mind that those bad times aren't the end of the line. As simplistic as it sounds, you never know what's gonna happen next. I guess that's the real point. Sometimes bad things happen for a reason, and you could be just moments away from the greatest occurrence of your life. So no matter how hopeless it may seem, just keep plugging away. It's going to get brighter.