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After giving the matter a lot of thought, then getting rejected from Yale, I’ve decided I’m going to go to Harvard Law. I used to think I wanted to go to UVA, but since I have no intention of doing any corporate work (which is what I’ve been told UVA is good at), I think that UVA can’t provide as many opportunities as HLS can.

Given that I’ve decided to go to HLS, it looks like this year is the year to do it: my brother’s going to be in his last year of law school starting this fall and I have a few friends that are going to be 2Ls or 1Ls, so if I were to defer a year I’d have one fewer year with all of them. Given that I think it’s extremely important to have as many people you’re close to with you at law school as possible, I’d be making a big mistake deferring.

So now the time is rapidly approaching: in a few months I will no longer be a pro poker player. I might still load up some empties and wait for action while I’m doing my reading, but I’m going to want to experience minimal poker-related stress while I’m trying to focus on my studies. I guess I might play an hour or two of 10/20 or 25/50 a day max, but it’s hard to stay really good at poker when you’re not putting a lot of time into it.

I did experience a bit of a bad beat at the Harvard Admitted Students Weekend (which just happened to be running while I was visiting my brother anyway): I went to a discussion of financial aid and found out that I’m not eligible for a debt forgiveness program that Harvard offers to people who take low-paying jobs after law school. I was planning on doing low-paying public interest law anyway, so I thought that I could get 100k in debt forgiven. Instead, it looks like I’ll have to pay the full tuition because if you can afford to pay for law school they won’t forgive your debt (so you can’t take on debt with the intention of having it forgiven if you don’t need the debt in the first place). During that meeting I also got a text from 2 different friends telling me they each lost me about 50k (I’ve got some standing pieces of various people versus certain opponents), so I managed to go on a 200k downswing during the course of a 45 minute panel discussion.

Also, to everybody who left a suggestion in comments regarding where I should go before Italy, I just wanted to thank you for your input. Instead of going to the oxygen retreat or Cabo, I went to Austin. Boring, I know, but my brother wanted to come here for his spring break so I decided to tag along.

Jason Segal was hysterical in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Paul Rudd’s inoffensive enough that I figured that going to see their movie would probably be good for some laughs. Instead, it was one of the least pleasant movie experiences of my life. There are a few very funny moments and some chuckles here and there, but Rudd (who is the central focus of the movie and gets all the face time) is actually somewhat painful to watch. The whole time I was watching the movie I just wanted to leave.

I don’t know why anybody would think that a movie about an unlikeable guy with no friends trying to make friends would be a good idea. Rudd’s constant awkward attempts at being cool (self-consciously trying to come up with funny nicknames, trying to use slang, etc.) when he’s actually a big loser provide most of the “comedy” for a long period of time. It’s awful. Rudd’s character reminded me of a worse version of Michael Scott from “The Office” (I know, I didn’t think that was possible until today either).

Sometimes it’s good to incorporate some awkward moments into a movie to make the audience a bit uncomfortable, but when that’s the go-to move throughout the entire movie it just becomes unbearable. Oh, also the idea of “hey, we’re starting to become friends and getting to know each other late in our adult lives, there are a lot of parallels between this and dating, but it’s funny because we’re just two straight guys hanging out!” gets pretty tired pretty quick.

Just had to vent. I will now return to my regular “one post every month and a half” blogging routine.

I had a return flight booked to New York but I didn’t want anybody to know I was going to NYC so I could surprise a few people (mission accomplished). So I lied about Thailand. Please forgive me.

Anyway, the real story is this: I have to be up in Boston this week because I have an admitted students weekend, my brother is competing in the semis of the moot court competition so my parents are coming up, and I won a charity auction for the right to do karaoke with Jim True-Frost, the guy who played Pryzbylewski (sp?) on the Wire (his wife is a Harvard Law professor so he volunteered his time for a law school event). My return flight from BA was to NYC. The plan was to go to NYC for a day (yesterday), go to Boston for 5 days (on the train heading there right now), come back to NYC for a friend’s birthday, and then fly to the Wat Bang Phra festival and get a tattoo. But it turns out the festival, which according to the articles I read is in late March every year, already happened a week ago. So now I’m not going to Thailand.

This does present me with a bit of a problem: I’m going to Italy April 1st with Team Israel. My friend’s birthday party is the 21st. I have to figure out a way to kill time for the 10 days in between. I don’t want to be anywhere cold (which rules out where all my friends live) and I don’t want to go abroad because being alone for 10 days in a foreign land just seems depressing. I was thinking of some kind of 10-day organized activity (a meditation or relaxation retreat, a survival training camp, a boot camp, or some such thing). One limitation is that while my shoulder’s recovered enough that I can do a lot of lifts in the gym, I’m pretty sure it can’t handle something rigorous like yoga or a boot camp. So, I’ll leave it up to you in comments to suggest some way for me to kill the time. Warm weather and beautiful locales preferable.

Around Argentina now I’m blogging again…

I’ve been procrastinating blogging because I’ve not been too sure how to approach a description of life in Argentina. I’m trying to avoid my typical “describe my day” blogging because, despite the fact that Buenos Aires is a fascinating place that is very very different from New York, I’ve lived here for a month. That means, of course, that one inevitably settles into a routine: it’s not all going to museums and walking around cool neighborhoods. And as much as I’m sure my readers want to know about how I go to the gym, grab lunch with my roommates, read in coffee shops and parks, and play poker during the day, I can’t help but think that an Argentina trip report should avoid the pitfalls of “same shit different place” blogging.

So, well aware that I haven’t eased the reader into my life in BA and that most of these points below probably should have been their own blog post, I’m going to just list some random observations/stories/things I’ve done.

-My first few days in Buenos Aires the internet was insufferably slow. Logging into gmail took 10 minutes, poker playing was impossible, etc. Given that we rented a nice penthouse apartment in Recoleta (one of the nicer neighborhoods), this was maddening. We called up our leasing agent and he said he would send in a specialist first thing in the morning. The “specialist” that showed up was the same handyman that had been fixing the sink when we checked in. He showed up with a list of things to do, turned off the modem and router (which I believe my roommates and I had futilely done 10 times a day), and left. The internet was, of course, no better and we eventually figured out that it was a router problem, got a new router, and had perfect internet the rest of the trip.

This was definitely symptomatic of what Thomas Friedman would call the “All that glitters is not gold” theory of Buenos Aires: it is a modern city that, due to its nice architecture, European-heritage citizenry, upscale shopping areas, and fine dining can easily trick you into forgetting you’re still living in an impoverished 3rd-world nation. So you walk around and see Hermes and Armani stores right around the corner from your posh Recoleta apartment and forget that when the internet goes down they send a plumber to try and fix it.

- Another example of this Friedmanesque theory: we met an ex-pat from Boston who moved down to BA to open a hostel. He said that he spent a year and a half trying to run the hostel but that after a while it was just impossible: corruption was so rampant that he was constantly being shaken down by one inspector or another and it was just impossible to keep the place open. If you’re not from Argentina and you try opening a business it’s almost impossible to avoid this kind of problem. He was telling us this at “Alamo,” an ex-pat bar that is filled to capacity almost every night from 10:00-4 a.m. There’s a line to get in by 10:30 every day, which is insane given that people don’t really start going out and getting drunk until well after midnight. This guy was telling us that he knows the owner of the place and that even though it’s been open for years, the owner’s struggling to keep the doors open. Looking around you would assume the guy was raking in dough, but instead he’s struggling to stay afloat.

This gave me a strong example of how it is that government incompetence/corruption contributes to the widespread poverty of a city/nation: if the owner of one of the most popular bars in the city can barely make any money and if to even reach that level of success you have to wait six months for your business license to be approved, spend years to build up your company, and then constantly worry about bribing people, why would you bother trying? When it’s so hard for foreign investors to bring business into BA, there’s obviously going to be fewer jobs to be had and less wealth generated.

-I went to Punta del Este, a beach town in Uruguay, for my birthday. My roommates and I decided rent a car and drive there. A woman at the car rental place warned us that we had to cross at Colon instead of Gualeguaychu (which would add at least 2 hours to the drive) because the bridge crossing at Gualeguaychu was closed due to some dispute between Argentina and Uruguay. The guy at the counter insisted that this was false and that we should just go to Gualeguaychu. He says he’d just heard in the morning that the bridge was open. Obviously when we got there the bridge was closed and we were an hour and a half out of our way, and what was supposed to be a 6 hour drive turned into an 11-hour trek.

I love that, whatever minor squabble Argentina and Uruguay were engaged in, it wasn’t serious enough for them to totally close off the border: they were just mad enough at each other to make people trying to go from country to country have to suffer a 5 hour delay. Once in Punta del Este, we talked with many Uruguayans and Brazilians and they pretty much all told us that the consensus is that Argentinians are cocky assholes. There’s a lot of resentment towards Argentinians because they think they’re better than everybody else, so I’m sure whatever “conflict” led to the closing of the bridge was some ridiculously trifling nonsense.

-For what it’s worth, I’ve found most Argentinians to be extremely pleasant. Except among for the very wealthy, English is barely spoken but whenever I’ve been able to have a conversation with an Argentinian person, they’ve been inordinately nice. Then again, the complaint is that Argentinians are cocky and arrogant, so maybe they just relate to Americans. The “real recognize real phenomenon” as Friedman would label this affinity if he knew anything about gangster rap.

-I’m flying out to Thailand later today. There’s a tattoo festival in some Buddhist temple (Wat Bang Phra) outside of Bankgok where every year some monks give holy tattoos that they think ward off evil spirits. I’ve always said I would never get a tattoo and I’m not a particularly spiritual man, but I think this is too cool to pass up. The clientele is supposedly a mix of rich celebrities (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt types) and Thai underworld kingpins. So I’m going to go to Thailand for 4 or 5 days, swing by this festival, and then fly out to Italy where I’m probably going to meet up with Team Israel for a month of travel.

Unfortunately, that means I have to pack up all my stuff and I might not have time to finish my Buenos Aires recap before I have to leave. The post was getting a bit long anyway, so I guess it’s good to break it up some