the Poker Game of Life

So i just got back from the market. Here are the things i purchased

- Supplements: more psyllium and flax seed oil, women's vitamins (this at the behest of bob greene who last week on oprah talked about how sometimes even though we are healthy we do not get all of our vitamins and minerals. Dude if oprah listens to him i will too. Plus i have been feeling very like lacking in betakeratin or something, i dont' know).
- 2 bags frozen vegetables
- fiber products: whole grain bread, fiber crackers
- snacks: almond butter, nuts
- other: bag mixed greens, soy milk

so I realized that i essentially live off of frozen foods, vitamins, and fiber products. I don't know what this says about me as a person. do i have no taste buds? today has been an off day. I went to meet with my advisor who did not show up so i had this whole like 40 minute round trip bus excursion for nothing. awesome! and then on the way there i had the dreamgirls song stuck in my head and every few minutes without even realizing i'd burst out in falsetto "dreamgirls will never leave you!" i only realized i was doing it when i was crossing the street and this girl gave me a really wierd look. And then i realized i blurted in her face without thinking "dreamgirls will neeeeever leave you!!" stupid beyonce.

This is going to be a totally off topic tangent but today in my social development class we were talking about the whole nature vs. nurture argument. Are our genes stronger than our environment or vice versa? Anyways the prof was telling us how there is a mathematical breakdown for what percentage of genes we have of our relatives. I mean it's on average, but still. So we share 50% of our genes with each parent, 25% with each grand parent etc etc. Then i started thinking about my various blood relatives. Do you ever look at your family and think "am i seriously related to these people??" It kind of scares me sometimes. Anyways so then we had read these articles that talked about how in an ideal world if our environments offered us every opportunity imaginable our genes would guide us to things that we are genetically inclined to do. So then one girl talked about how this is a pretty ridiculous notion because in reality we are all deprived of something that our environment did not provide for us. I began to think about how i should have been a dancer, and who knows, perhaps genetically i could have been a great dancer, but damnit my environment did not allow for this. Le sigh And then i was looking over and this girl had like one of those big bags of reeses peanut butter cups, the little ones. And an hour later she at eteh whole thing!! who jsut eats the mini cups from the giant bag liek that???

annnnyways that was not what i intended to discuss tonight. Tonight i wanted to discuss the poker game of life. about a week ago my friend pinged me and said "would you call me selfish." Well the obvious response was "not to your face" which would then lead into a long 10 minute conversation where we could only respond in phrases from the movie Clueless. But this time he really meant it. Anyways on his quest to better himself the rest of us started thinking about ourselves, our issues, self esteem and all that crap. Apparently people think that i am very difficult to analyze because i keep my cards close to myself. Well upon hearing this i was shocked. Never have i thought myself to be the kind of person who undershares and 10 years later peopel say "i know nothing about her." On the contrary i felt that i was always too much of an oversharer and that i need ot hold back sometimes. This led me to my extended metaphor.

Ok so in the poker game of life i have always felt that i was that person who can't bluff. I was that person who would say "ugh guys, i got a pair of 2's, i'm out!" On the other hand Bobby is the kind of person who bluffs like he has a straight flush but really he has a pair of queens (no pun intended). Ivan on the other hand has a full house in his hand but all he sees is the one pair and consequently he says "ugh guys i hate poker! all i have are two 4's!" now i didn't really go beyond these three peopel but it was quite astounding to me how my impression of myself as teh oversharer in the poker game who can't bluff, in fact is quite the opposite of what others think. They view me as the overly cautious player who perhaps doesn't lie but doesn't tell everyone what she has. Isn't it true that we are so close to ourselves that we can never really see ourselves. This all reminds me of the time in junior high when my friends and I played this game called "Slam." The way the game is played is each person puts their name on teh top of a separate sheet of paper with one side saying "good" and one side saying "bad". You pass the paper around teh circle and each new person who gets the paper writes good things and bad things, whatever comes to mind. We obviously made the rule that you had to write at least one good thing cuz we weren't that mean but i think what was more interesting to all of us were teh bad things that we would say about each other. Mind you, we had all known each other since preschool. So in the end we foudn otu alot about ourselves and how others view us, and i still have that paper to this day. I feel liek this whole "would you call me selfish" thing is kind of like that, only with a lot less crying.

So i suggest you ask a friend today "would you call me selfish?" or whatever other question happens to be bothering you. who are you in the poker game of life?