“I can live for two months on a good compliment.”
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 got a piece of spam this morning where the sender was identified as . You want it?
BtW, we can feed that half dollar back out the way that it came, using the normal exit as an access for tools. But perhaps the half-dollar should always remain.
No thanks, I'm good until March because the clerk thinks I'm financially responsible.
I like the idea of the half dollar always remaining.