some days

"Above anything else, I hate losing."
-Jackie Robinson

I think that quote is the perfect prelude to what this post is all about. Some days, you have to recognize that you are simply not meant to win. Today, I was playing poker, and I realized that this was one of these days. In the tournament, I was looking pretty decent when we got down to 4 tables. I had a little less than 20k(a little above the average), and I thought I had a decent chance to at least make the final 2 tables. Then, I get dealt 10 10 in consecutive hands and double up the kid to my direct left two times in a row! The first time he had A9 and hit a nut flush and the other time he had AK and the flop was AKJ, with a K on the turn to trump any of the 6 outs I had left. The last hand I played was against that kid again. Blinds were 600/1200 and I had about 11,000 left when I pushed with AcQc and he called with KK. He ended up making a flush or something and winning it. In cash, I could never get anything going at all. I simply blinded myself down and tried to bluff at a few pots. The only significant pot I can remember getting into was against this huge dude named hans. I had very little money left, and I raised to 12 preflop with 99. He called, and the flop came down A Q 5. I pushed, and he called with KQ to trump me. Nothing terrible there, I just really could not hit a single hand.

This brings me to my next point and that is the fact that I absolutely hate to lose. I might not look like it, but I am one of the most competitive people that you will ever meet. As a younger kid, I can remember two distinct examples of myself being incredibly competitive. First, myself, mike nayhouse, bill schleicher, and another kid were in a winter hitting league together. We were the worst team in the league during the regular season, but we made a spectacular run in the playoffs to make it all the way to the championship. In that game, we were winning by almost 40 points going into the bottom of the last inning. The other team rallied and ended up winning it with two outs. I grabbed my bat, stormed out of the place, and started hitting a couple trees outside in a pure fit of rage. Remember, I was only probably 9, but I refused to shake hands or even talk to anyone on my team. Go to Bianco's and till this day you can still probably hear that story.

The next story also involves baseball. Once again, I was much younger, probably 10 years old now. I was on shane liska's team for summer baseball and we were going up against nayhouse and schleicher's team in a divisional clash. Back then, you could only pitch 3 out of the 6 innings, so I pitched the first three and by the end of that time, we were winning 16-0. I came out, and I think shane came in. Long story short, we blew the 16-0 lead and they came all the way back to tie it 16-16 before the game had to be called for darkness. I walked off of the field in disgust and walked all the way across colewood park before being calm enough to accept a ride home. By the time I was 14, I realized how stupid people look whenever they flip out in pure spats of anger. Actually, not until I watched my baseball coach in pony's tip a garbage can and throw it at the umpire after a "terrible mother fucking call" did I realize how silly it was. My immediate reaction was to laugh, but I was able to hold it in until later. That incident made me care a whole hell of a lot less about things for a few years until I went back to playing on a winning baseball team, that being the squirrel hill city team. Our constant winning brought out the best in me as I really did try hard every single game we played.

Even today, I am incredibly competitive even though I have been retired from baseball for about 1 and a half years now. I definitely miss it, but I've taken that competitive fire and applied it to the classroom. When I care in school, I do nothing but great work. It's helpful in that way, but it also causes me to despise things like group work(unless I feel that everyone is contributing equally). I tend to want to do everything sometimes until I feel that everyone can make a contribution similar to my own.

I hope that everyone had a good New Years. My New Years consisted of spending time with a lot of people that I care about. Every year, we have a party either at our house or one of our family friend's house. This year, the fiesta was moved to our house. Around 945, sarah and kathleen came over and I decided to go with them over to their friend's house to celebrate the new year. The party was a little weird but I was with a good friend and my girlfriend, two people that I truly care about. We watched the ball drop and then watched as some girl from MTV dropped the F bomb before the last set. Oddly enough, I didn't hear a lot about it(unlike past mess ups such as the janet jackson incident). We left later on and it was a new year's well spent. Over the rest of break, I hung out with nayhouse and bradburn a lot and saw a ton of people that I hadn't seen in awhile at pizza hut. Last night, myself, mark, and dave, the future PSU roomates had a good night out. I went to mark's first and we played some video games before going over to dave's place to meet his parents. My impression of his parents was that they are nice people, but they are definitely more strict than my parents. From there, we went to the dollar theatre in west mifflin and saw man of the year, a flick that I've caught twice now at the dollar theatre. Dave was thrilled when he found out that we had only spent $1.50 to see a movie. Afterwards, we got some wendys and just sat in mark's car and talked about everything for two plus hours. It sounds gay, but it was a really enjoyable time. I'm excited to spent the last two years of my college life with these fine gentlemen.

Since I've been claiming for a long time that I have been working on my poems, I'm going to post one of them online for you. Remember go to humblevoice.com if you want to see the rest of my poems and even post some of your work yourself. Hopefully, you'll enjoy.

Truth is
By: Matt Hartman


Truth is,
I don’t want to hear how your useless
metaphors translate into “life lessons” or how
the key to life is “in the calm of a night’s flower”.
NO, I know that I have the key to life
inside of me and I don’t need your allegory of the abstract
to tell me how to live my life.

Don’t worry,
I once searched for ghosts too. As a little boy,
I would frighten myself walking down the desolate street
thinking that I too could see lifeless forms
in white sheets(that was until something real scared me).

I know,
I am guilty of it as well; I think we all want to
believe that we can be scared by the hallucinations of our
mind or that we can find the answers to our problems
from above. We know we are just fooling ourselves, history
has shown we cannot build skyscrapers standing on stilts.

So then,
Instead of conjuring up some grandiose myriad of useless words,
wasting your time trying to come up with the“perfect” symbol,
I recommend writing the first thing that comes to mind;
writing about why the grass grows or why it snows on cloudy days.


mh