• The national debt is gigantic. The Census Bureau sent me (and everyone else) a letter saying only that that the census paperwork would be forthcoming.
• One of my co-workers won our dead pool with Corey Haims. I had thought my choice of Mike Tyson was inspired, but he yet lives.
• My regular bridge partner is moving away sometime in the next month or so. I have learned an awful lot playing with him. I’m afraid I’ll lose ground after he leaves, all these nifty conventions wasting away in my bag of tricks.
• I liked the new Alice in Wonderland movie more than I thought I would. I saw it in IMAX 3D, it was visually spectacular but that might have just been the format. Anyway, I enjoyed it and I was glad that it was not a butchered retelling of the original but a riff on it.

This is the cover of the Valentine’s Day card my fabulous bridge-playing, artist friend made for me:

I played with my long-suffering regular partner last night and tonight. Last night was shaky, but we managed to come in second. Tonight I finally felt like our new defensive conventions were working, but nothing else was and the result was pretty damn bad. At least I can comfort myself that I may finally be getting the hang of our new defense. (It only took four bad sessions.)

In the book that convinced me we should stop using standard signals, the author, Marty Bergen, claimed “most players take to (odd-even discards) as easily as ducks to water”. Up until tonight I had been taking to them like a hydrophobic duck — lots of flailing. Of course, simultaneously switching to upside-down count and attitude wasn’t helping matters.

Last night I asked my teacher about a particular situation and whether or not my signal should be count or attitude or suit-preference. In the course of the discussion he made the remark, “You should give your partner attitude.” My reply, “I always give my partner attitude.” His response, “I mean with your cards.” He knows me so well.

The above subject line is from an e-mail I received from a friend of mine regarding her performance, but it sums up nicely my thoughts on my own. (She had far better excuses for any shortcomings than I did.)

I knew going in that tonight was going to be a rough night at the tables. I was prepared for confusion as a result of our revamped defense and I was prepared to make lots of mistakes defensively. I was not prepared for the fact that I would also bid like a moron. The one highlight of the evening was a small slam which I was alone in bidding and making, but most of the rest of it was a disaster.

I am consoling myself by kicking some butt in an online poker tournament. Bridge is endlessly more difficult than poker, still it makes me feel better to be able to play competently at something. As I said before, I still have years ahead of me of needing to raise the bar every time I feel comfortable with the level of bridge I’m playing so there are many nights like this to look forward to.

Mark Twain and I have something in common.

This morning I cashed in most of the coins in my Maneki Neko. I say most because not every coin in the bank was intended to be spent, most notably a half dollar my brother gave me in change when I visited him at a restaurant where he was working. That half dollar, appropriately enough, is actually too large to be extracted from the intact cat. The total came to over 120 USD. The clerk, who was the quintessential grandmother type, told me I was a “good little saver”. It’s distressing how nice that blatant untruth was to hear from this complete stranger. I wish I didn’t want approval as much as I do. It’s as if whenever someone says something nice to me I feel this gaping need inside of me, I immediately want them to say more nice things. My desire to please is sickening at times.

Speaking of which, my regular partner and I are overhauling our convention card once again. This time it is mostly for defense, most notably we’re abandoning the gray area of “standard” discards. At tournaments one is often asked by the opponents what sort of discards the partnership is using. Our answer up until now has been, “Standard,” which really doesn’t mean much as it boils down to a nebulous mix of attitude and suit preference signals. It was an unsatisfactory answer for the opponents (except insomuch as they could rest assured there wasn’t all that much information being transmitted). As for me, I spent a lot of time on defense trying to decipher which kind of signal I was receiving (let alone the message). It was apparent we needed a new system; now we have one and my job just got exponentially more difficult because now I have no excuse for missing a signal and in the meantime I have to make sure I’m sending the right messages to my partner with every card on every hand.

In bridge advancement is a halting series of struggles to attain a certain level of competency only to remain there just long enough to see how much further one has to go. I have years and years of this process to look forward to, lucky me. Of course, once in awhile, someone says something nice to me and that makes it all worthwhile … well, maybe not, but I do love the challenge and it serves to feed my competitive streak.

I’ve just come home from a small game at the club. It was a very satisfying way to spend the last evening of 2009. The single most significant development in my life in the past year year was taking up bridge. It is kind of hard to believe that a year ago I had not even the foggiest idea of how the game was played, especially at the moment when I’m coming off a week in which I spent over forty hours at the table (the truly frightening thing is that I can’t yet say that I’ve found my limit, though I suspect I’m close).

And so, to paraphrase a friend of mine, in the coming year may all your trumps split evenly and may all your missing honors be onside.

My long-suffering regular partner and I had a horrendous game tonight in no small part due to several terrible bids on my part. I didn’t realize just how bad until the results were posted, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised considering I had reversed when I shouldn’t have, made a quantitative invite to a slam that I shouldn’t have, took a flying leap into a club contract that I shouldn’t have … I’m sure there’s more that I’m blocking out at the moment. One bright point was when I found myself in an apparently hopeless contract and instead of playing to accept down one or simply trying to “feel” my way through it, I analyzed the only way in which the contract could be made and then played for it successfully. I’ve previously noted here that my playing is suffering even as I’m studying that aspect and it was gratifying to feel like I could reason my way through that particular hand.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Watson’s Classic Book on the Play of the Hand, which is the bible for such matters in bridge. Still as the process continues I am playing worse, much worse in fact. It is if I can no longer see the forest for the trees. Today I misplayed a slam, down two when I should have made an overtrick. I am more than a little frustrated, though my teacher claims it is natural for me to be playing worse while trying to learn to play better. I’m going to have to defer to his expertise, but it doesn’t feel right. I am in a foul mood.

I’ve played a lot of bridge this past week, most notably at a small NLM sectional in Delaware. My team (consisting of my regular partner and a pair from that club) won the Swiss teams event on Thursday night. We played fairly well in the other events, placing “in the money” (which, in this case, meant silver MPs). On Friday afternoon we took too long at lunch, and reached the parking lot to find the car blocked in the combined effect was that we were late and ended up playing in the regular open game instead of the tournament that afternoon. We placed third in that, but no silver points that afternoon.

On Friday night I played at the regular game at the club. I got accused of cheating. The accusation had no merit and the director quickly sorted it out entirely in my favor. The whole incident left a bad taste in my mouth though, mostly because to be accused when I was doing nothing wrong, nothing even questionable, made me realize such a thing could happen at any time. I even felt some apprehension about attending last night, though I’d already committed to it.

This is a STaC week at the club, so more silver MPs. My regular partner and I snagged just shy of another one (.98) in last night’s game. We played fairly well, but another pair (that eventually won) seemed to consistently keep us from getting a top score. My partner made another of his bizarre overcalls, this time with a singleton. It kept the opponents out of a cold grand slam in that suit. Imagine my surprise when I decided to lead from my doubleton in that suit to give him count, and he showed out before me. It was hard to stop laughing long enough to ask, “No spades, partner?”

Last night was another bad turn at the bridge tables for me. I didn’t play very well, though reviewing the hand record made me feel a bit better about my bidding. Part of the mediocre finish was due to a bit of bad luck with the movement, we played a good pair who found two slams which no one else bid. One of them was cold, one of them would have gone down had I made a different lead. It was one of the two leads I considered and I made the wrong choice. The second blow was that the team who came in last for North-South decided to leave before the last round, which was the round in which we were to play them. The presumably good boards we would have gotten against them, and that everyone else sitting East-West presumably did get from them, would have been helpful. These two things in concert with my shoddy performance were deadly.

I don’t know if there will be a game or not tonight at the club, but if there is I will likely play again. I made plans to play tomorrow night with the partner I met last week. On Thursday and Friday I’m playing in a NLM sectional with my regular partner. I hope that I perform better than I did last night. This week is shaping up to have a lot of bridge in it, though last night when I got home I actually wanted to play some poker online as a reprieve. At least with poker I can blame a bad result on luck.

The “Check Engine” light came on in my car recently, after checking the usual suspects did not provide an answer, I took it into the shop today. A very expensive repair and a tune-up later, the light is out, the car’s engine sounds better and the mechanic claimed I’d see even better gas mileage now. I’m trying to look on the bright side, but it seems I’ve bought a lemon — a lemon I like and enjoy driving, but a lemon nonetheless.

I’ve spent a couple of mornings going through the boxes I have in storage in a friend’s basement. It has felt like excavating someone else’s life, a strange experience. Things have changed so much just since I moved into this apartment, I hardly recognize my former self or selves, as the case may be. The disconnect is disconcerting. I have, however, been enjoying going through the books and getting them cataloged. Also I located a bookmark that I had been looking for, it is clear plastic filled with a clear fluid in which a small plastic goldfish can be made to “swim”.