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| Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!
2007 will be a great year... Time to get pumped!
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| I realize my site has been sucking and sucking but I'm just inspired right now to put a little more ummph on this blog. No more sharing of my personal life - the juicy stuff - though... You know how it is. I'm 24. I have a girlfriend. We have our highs and our lows.... details? aren't important. I'll get into that in a little, teeny-weeny bit, but right now I wanted to write about two things: The Lakers and Poker...
Kobe Bryant
Damn... Just watched last night's game where he went 19 of 26 shooting for 52 points (in particular, in the 3rd qtr, he went 9-9 FG, 10-10 FTs, for a total of 30 points). In the history of the NBA, a player has scored 30 or more points in ONE quarter only 5 times. Kobe's name is on 2 out of those 5. We're talking freaking history of the NBA. And, the Lakers blew out the hottest team in the NBA right now, the Utah Jazz. I've been harping about this guy for years now. Before, during, and after the championships, I've come to realize why he's my quote-unquote hero...
1) Kobe represents competitiveness personified. He's so competitive that he was considered aloof among his teammates. Only now as he's maturing is he growing into a leader. In all the big (I mean big) scoring games of his career - namely the Dallas game in Dec 2005 where he scored 62 points thru 3 qtrs, the Toronto game on Jan 22 2006 where he went for 81 pts, and last night's game (52 pts in 36 mins), the challenge was winning the game. Dallas was one of the best teams in the league, Toronto was up by 18 pts in the second half, and Utah is white-hot right now. I believe all these represented challenges that Kobe wanted to overcome, and they brought out the very best in him, as a singular talent. His competitive nature--dare I say--might even rival the likes of MJ. Regardless, Kobe goes big at certain times, and when he does, it's never just to score points... It's because he wants to win the game.
2) Kobe has a will and a confidence unlike any basketball player I've seen since MJ. What does it mean to have a will? It means that you control your environment and that it doesn't control you. You dictate the terms. When he was shooting last night, it almost felt as if you KNEW it was going in... Not that you were confident it was going in, but that you KNEW like you KNEW the sun was rising tomorrow. When you see that scowl on his face and he starts hitting 3 or 4 straight jumpers, you almost wish you could put a Vegas-style bet on Kobe hitting his next shot because chances are you'd win. Kobe KNEW himself which is why he kept shooting. There are only a handful of players in the NBA who can put up a show like Kobe did last night (LeBron, Dwayne, AI). They'd be lucky to do that once or twice in their careers. Kobe does it once or twice a season. His jumpshot is seen as being "above-average", which is why I believe his will and personality take over his shot mechanics. The focus and concentration he's able to exert on each shot - and mind you this was playing against Andrei Kirilenko who's only one of the top overall defenders in the NBA - is just amazing.
3) Watching Kobe makes you appreciate the beauty of singular greatness. I've always been a fan of the individual drama occurring in a sporting event. Some of my absolute favorite players to watch are Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi, Jerry Rice, Michael Jordan. When a man becomes more than the sum of his parts, it's an amazing to see unfold... It's the best reality-tv. What we watch when Kobe puts on a show is the result of an extremely tough work-ethic, near-flawlessness to every aspect of his game, and a winning/killer instinct.
Poker
I think my values and personality are pretty clear now, so it's not hard to see why I am a Poker fanatic/addict/enthusiast. I was asking myself again. Do I play for the money? Is that what drives me? And no I can't say that's it, although a few bucks here and there would be plenty sweet.
As I've said to friends before, here is my definition of what makes Poker, specifically, Texas Hold'em, the greatest game ever conceived:
"The beauty of poker is in its strong parallel to real life, in how it is a game about consistently making good decisions in order to bring about the best outcome for yourself, ulitmately to win as many chips as possible."
Winning at poker isn't about winning once or winning twice. It's about winning consistently. Literally anybody can win a game of poker - in that sense it's like a lottery. But it takes a special person to win consistently. Winning consistently doesn't mean winning all the time. It means 2 steps forward and 1 step back, analagous to the stock market.
In poker, you aren't given all the information. Every hand is like a separate game of "Solve this Mystery." How you put the pieces together to solve this mystery (or at least come up with a reasonable guess) is a matter of putting together all the clues you have. The best players in the world are the ones who are able to gather the most information from their surroundings (i.e., opponents' actions/behavior, history of opponents' play) and see the pattern that unfolds to make the best decision for themselves.
....... Ok time for lunch, and other stufff.... will finish later....
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At Fisherman's Wharf in SF
Carmel-by-the-Sea... sunday afternoon
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| Thursday, October 05, 2006
This is not a fairy tale
There are some things you see, some things you hear that simply are unspeakable. In a hospital in the eastern Congo city of Goma, we met a little girl. She never said a word to us, she could barely look us in the eyes. When she did, her eyes told the story.
"She never says anything to men," one of the hospital counselors explained, and then she told us why.
The little girl was raped. Gang-raped. It was allegedly done by soldiers engaged in a complicated regional war that has claimed millions of lives. The war officially ended in 2003, but outbreaks of violence and rape continue. The girl is now five years old. She was raped when she was three.
I wish I could tell you this was an extraordinary event. I wish I could tell you she was the only child attacked. The hospital was full of rape victims, and the doctor had seen other small children victimized.
Because the rapes are so violent, women often develop fistulas -- ruptures in their vaginas or rectums that make it impossible to control bodily functions. A charity called Heal Africa was running this hospital, and the doctor said he was able to fix about 70-80 percent of the fistula cases, but of course some wounds never heal.
Heal Africa has opened up a residence for women with fistulas that can't be surgically fixed, at least not here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The women can't go home. Often they've been rejected by their husbands because they were raped. The stigma here is strong.
I met a woman named Angela. I can't stop thinking about her. She was raped by three men in front of her children. Afterwards they shot her, and she says they burned her baby girl. The girl is four now and has a massive scar all over her chest.
Angela's fistula was fixed, but her arm remains injured from the gunshot. Pscyhologically she's still devastated. To make matters worse, her husband kicked her out of the house.
"He heard I was raped," she said whispering. "And he just said, 'Go on your own, I don't need you anymore. If we lived together, you now might have HIV so you might infect me.'"
I didn't ask Angela her HIV status. I didn't think it was any of my business. Perhaps I should have asked, but she didn't volunteer it, and I felt like I'd already asked her too much.
The funding for the Heal Africa house comes from an NGO, but their funding ends in April. It's not clear what will happen then.
"The only thing I need is some land so I can build a house," Angela said to me before I left. "I might die and I want my kids to have that castle. I'm hoping for a miracle."
There aren't many miracles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is not a fairy tale, some stories don't have happy endings. Here the men who rape with impunity are rarely brought to justice. Women like Angela are expected to simply bear the pain.
If you would like to help Heal Africa in the work they are doing, you can log onto their Web site | | |
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