I took BART to and from the city today. Since it was a spare-the-air day, and transit was free for all or part of the day, lots of people did the same thing. The train into the city wasn't too bad, but on the way home, all eight cars were standing room only.
For the ride home I stood against a pole by a door, and occupied the time by reading a Mark Stantz trip report on my phone. (If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it; it's not really relevant.) As we were passing under the bay, an older Hispanic gentleman with tanned skin and a head of wavy white hair motioned to me. I walked over.
"Your hair, it is very beautiful."
"Thank you!"
"Very lovely. Did you do it because you wanted to be different?"
"Actually, yes, I did."
"It's very beautiful. You must be a wild woman."
"It's been said." I smiled.
He asked my name, and told me that his was Rodolfo. He reached his hand out as if to offer a high five, but instead he grasped my hand in his and smiled up at me. The conversation seemed to come to and end, and so I reached for my phone to start reading again.
A few seconds later, he started singing to me in a melodic but untrained voice. The song was in Spanish, but it was clearly a love song. The other patrons on the crowded train seemed completely unfazed by this-- in fact, none of them seemed to be paying even the tiniest bit of attention. I briefly considered enlisting one of them to help me out of the situation by pretending to be a friend, but Rodolfo seemed more sweet than creepy.
When he finished his song, he reached for my hand and kissed it.
The West Oakland stop came and went.
He touched my hand and smiled at me again. "You are the most beautiful..." He lifted his hands wide above his head, and looked heavenward. "Thank you god!"
The next stop was mine. He kissed my hand again as I turned toward the door, and smiled up at me one last time. "Thank you. You have made my day."
For most people, Vegas is a vacation-- a wild getaway to a weekend of gambling and drinking and strippers and things that happen and stay in Vegas. It's bright lights and partying, bachelor parties and free drinks. It's the real city that never sleeps, the one where you can bet as much money as you have any time of the day or night, while cocktail waitresses in skimpy outfits bring you and endless river of booze.
For me, Vegas is annoying strip traffic, stupid tourists, obnoxious drunks, ugly strip malls, bad mass-market food, bad plasticized entertainment, horrible weather, and crowded airports-- Disney for grownups, with a shiny corporate-built facade carefully calculated to appeal to the masses, and no character or substance. The whole thing is paid for by people who are bad at math. It's also poker and video poker and lots of my friends and free hotels (last weekend a comped suite at the Palazzo, much nicer than the comped room I had the weekend before) but even with the good stuff it gets tiring pretty quickly.
Two weekends ago I went to Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker ladies' event. After three money finishes in a row, this year I was in the car and driving away from the Rio 45 minutes after the tournament started. It's poker, c'est la vie. I played well, and some hoser got lucky. At this point I've done this so often that paying $25/minute to enter a poker tournament doesn't really faze me, and I could barely muster the tiniest bit of emotion for losing all my chips sso quickly after the tournament started. Most of it was regret at not having an opportunity to vacuum up chips from the horrible players at my table. I just couldn't feel the crushing defeat that the hometown heroes do when they take their big shot and miss... it's just another poker tournament.
Last weekend I played a private satellite to the WSOP, and made the mistake of winning. Normally I would have used the entry to play Saturday's nolimit event, but I had a date in town with me and there was no way I was going to abandon him for the weekend after dragging him all the way to Vegas. Knowing that I couldn't play on Saturday and would have to come back, I even made a valiant effort to not win the seat. The cards wouldn't cooperate.
Friday night, for the third weekend in a row, I head to Vegas. I'll rent yet another car (probably a PT Cruiser identical to the last two I've had), stay in yet another free hotel room, and play more poker. Going to Las Vegas is starting to feel like a multi-hour commute rather than a trip. I'm sick of it, and I really want to just stay home for a weekend. Unless something really unusual happens, though, this will be my last Vegas trip until... sigh, the end of July.
(If by some strange miracle I manage to cream 3000 opponents and win this weekend, I'll probably feel obligated to play the main event in a couple of weeks. If that happens, I'll be willing to suck it up and go back.)
That's a lot of alcohol for someone who rarely drinks. The top shelf is all scotch, and basically all "the good stuff". the bottom right is the overflow scotch, the stuff that's more mass-market and less interesting. The bottom left is a few random bottles of non-scotch-- absinthe, tequila, gin, and a couple of other things.
