New Orleans Postscript

If the writing on the blog posts about my trip to New Orleans seems a bit disjointed, then you hopefully have an understanding of how exhausting and roller-coasterish the trip really was for me. While I really liked our hotel (the Ambassador on Tchoupitoulas), my room was noisy as hell as of about 8-9am every morning and I came away with severe sleep deprivation. There's also something about spending all of your time in a dark smoky casino that really wipes you out. I felt like I was constantly on the verge of getting a cold, and the wild temperature fluctuations in New Orleans both inside and out of the casino did not help. So, I'm asking for a little latitude while reading it all because I didn't capture the experience nearly as well as I wanted to.

For example, I wrote yesterday's post while sitting at the airport waiting for my flight, which suddenly started boarding and I had to wrap it up quickly. I entitled the post intending to talk about my amusement that we were warned before the Ladies' Tournament on Sunday that we were not allowed to use the "B-word," when normally we are only warned about the "F-bomb rule." In a show of how stupid the women thought this change was, we all immediately began saying fuck as often as possible because nobody had warned us that we couldn't. In my haste to get the post up before I boarded, I completely forgot that part of what I'd intended to write.

Other things got lost along the way as well, including my desire to really talk about what New Orleans is like now. At first glance all seemed fine, with barely a trace of any lingering effects from Katrina. It was only upon closer inspection and as we slowly ventured out from the cocoon of the corridor from hotel to casino and back that we would stumble across businesses that appeared to have been closed for 2 years, restaurants that are padlocked as if in ghost towns, and seemingly endless construction on every single street. The city is picking itself up and surviving, but progress is slow. I'm sure if we'd had time to drive through the Ninth Ward or some of the areas outside of the higher ground parts of the city, we would have seen even more evidence of this, and I'm sorry we didn't get the chance.

I meant to take photos, but just never got around to it. For starters, we weren't allowed to use any electronic device in the tournament room so pictures of the actual playing conditions weren't possible. There was really no point in taking pictures inside the casino, and the one night we really got to go out in the French Quarter I quickly became far too drunk to bother with a camera. I've never been a big picture taker anyhow, but having forgotten my camera cord and being unable to take pictures of the actual poker made me just give up altogether.

And finally, when I sat down and thought about it I realized that this experience was good for me even though it may not have sounded like it as I wrote my whiny complaints about the injustice of it all. I'm someone who doesn't enjoy doing things if I can't be good at them, which means that I can very easily lose interest in a new activity rather than putting in the hard work to get better at it. Success in our weekly home game came to me very quickly after I started playing, and even to some extent in my play online. But neither of those things really matter in terms of being a good or great player on this level, and even though I claimed to know that I don't think it really sank in until I got there and had to take the plunge. The fear of it all is gone now, but has been replaced by something even bigger: the realization that I have a lot of work to do. I will probably do this again, but next time I want to be able to see measurable improvement in my game and my results. And the only way to see that is to work for it.

I remind myself that Griftdrift played in several of these before he made it deep into any big tournament, and it was only on his tournament third trip to Tunica that he cashed. Since he is a hell of a lot better of a player than I am, this is going to take awhile for me. But as the song says, "girl, you've got nothing but time."