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For a couple months. Not that this will be that radical of a departure from my recent level of output, but I’m going to take a couple months off from everything poker-related. The Italy trip has been canceled: Team Israel decided at the last minute they didn’t feel like going. This left me without any set plans, so I went to Vegas for a couple days and am now in L.A.

Fortunately, one of my roommates from Argentina and his roommate from D.C., both of whom I’m going to be living with at Harvard Law this fall, are just about to start an around-the-world trip of their own. So at the last second I decided to join them. The timing couldn’t have been worse though: they’re heading out tomorrow and I still had some unfinished business, so I woke up at 6 a.m. today to knock off my “to-do” list:
1) Call up my accountant to see where I’m supposed to send my checks (and then send them)
2) Set up a retirement account so that I can put money into a Sep-IRA
3) Call up my New York doctor to find out what inoculations I’ve received and wait for him to get back to me so that I could then
4) Go get the inoculations I still needed and
5) Go fill a prescription for anti-malaria medication
6) Book a month’s worth of flights and lodging within Asia
7) Pick up everything one needs to go backpacking (backpack, backpack poncho, human poncho, sleeping bag, pillow, carabiners, locks, insect repellent)
Send in my letter of intent to Harvard Law and a tuition deposit
9) Bitch at the people at Chase for rolling my 100k C.D. into a new 7-month C.D. at .25% despite my telling them not to (they have no recollection of this and now if I pull my money out it’ll cost me 1k. Fuck Chase)
10) Call up my credit card companies to find out why they’re rejecting all the flight purchases I tried making (answer: no reason, try again) and tell them I’m going to be in Asia for a couple months
11) Do laundry
12) Pack up all my excess stuff that I thought I’d need in Italy and Vegas and mail it to my parents in Virginia
13) Get my shit in order for a 20-hour trip to Malaysia

The problem with making all my plans at the last minute is that sometimes I end up having to get my taxes in order and plan an Asia trip while running a ton of errands all in one day. Right now I’m completely brain-fried and am just killing an hour until I can pick up my prescription. After that I’m going to unwind with dinner at Osteria Mozza (again, one of the best restaurants I’ve ever been to) with my friend Jesse and then I’m going straight to the airport. My itinerary looks something like this:

1 day in Kuala Lumpur (which I’ve actually already been to and didn’t particularly like)
2 weeks on the beach in Bali
2 more days in Kuala Lumpur
A week in Cambodia to visit the Angkor Wat temples
A week in Thailand to see The Bridge over River Kwai and Erewan waterfalls
Another week in some Thai beaches to go to the Full Moon Festival at Ko Pha Ngan
A week in Burma traveling down the Irrawaddy

After that, I’m going to break off from my friends and go to India for a month-long yoga retreat. I think I really need to do stuff like yoga to get looser and minimize the risk of future injuries such as my labrum tear. The retreat (ayurveda.org) looks bomb, with tons of massage and stretching throughout the day. I am concerned though that the constant yoga philosophy with which I’ll be inundated will be too much to bear and that I’ll be biting my tongue the whole time so as not to say “PLEASE STOP BABBLING ALL MYSTICALLY AND JUST SHOW ME HOW TO GET MORE FLEXIBLE!!!” Maybe I’m not going in with the right mentality, but we’ll see how I like it when I get there.

So that’s 2 and a half months or so of traveling, during which I will be without my laptop. No poker, minimal catching up with Google Reader in internet cafes, just my friends and I backpacking and staying in hostels which I’m entirely too wealthy to be living in. If you call, text, or email me, I might not respond for a while. I’ll be off the grid.

As for my reading list, I brought a ton of books as I anticipate being bored in India quite often. I’m bringing:
Brothers Karamazov (300 pages to go!)
2666 (800 pages long, why do I constantly do this to myself?)
The Counterlife (a Jew can never have too much Philip Roth)
Emergency (Neil Strauss’ new book)
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (a solid re-read that I randomly have in my backpack after stealing it back from Tom in NYC)

My friends are bringing books and when we’re done we’ll probably swap, so I should be set.

Anyway, that’s the last of my internet usage for a while: I’m going to go pack my stuff now, go to Mozza, and then I’m off. I suppose I’ll be back in the states around mid-June for the WSOP, but I’m not entirely sure.

A year ago or so, my brother told me that Jim True-Frost, the actor who plays Pryzbylewski on The Wire is married to a professor at Harvard Law and that he and his wife were auctioning off a night of karaoke for some charity event. I told him to bid whatever was necessary as long as it wasn’t insane and $500 later I had a night of karaoke booked. Due to scheduling issues we didn’t manage to set it up until last month.

My brother, five friends of his, and I met up with Prezbo, his wife, and another Harvard professor and his wife. I was sitting at our table talking to a friend of my brother’s who I’d just met (we’ll call him Andy to protect his true identity). Prezbo approached to introduce himself and as he did so, he knocked a beer off the edge of the table and onto Andy’s lap. Prezbo immediately started apologizing and said “Oh shit, I’m sorry, here, let me get you a napkin.” Andy, somewhat taken aback by this sudden introduction, just starts protesting “No, you really don’t have to do that” and as Prezbo left in search of some napkins Andy just looked at me and went “Prezbo just spilled beer all over my lap. How cool is that?”

It really is a testament to The Wire’s amazing quality that meeting the actor who plays one of the many intriguing-but-not-central characters can be so exciting that when you get beer poured all over you by the guy your first reaction is that he just did you some sort of favor.

As it turns out, all 4 of the adults were very nice and laid back, which helped defuse the tension that I imagine automatically accompanies an event in which you pay money to hang out with somebody. We asked Prezbo about life on the set (he didn’t meet Idris Elba until late into the 3rd season because they always had different schedules, the guy who plays McNulty is actually British, etc.) and then we all got some pictures with him and called it a night.

The first two pics are from when Prezbo and I were recruited to look tough and pose behind the other HLS professor as he did his rendition of “Word Up.” The other two are super small because I’m an idiot when it comes to figuring out how to get pictures off my camera to be regular sized when I upload them to photbucket without distorting the hell out of them (any useful tips in comments would be appreciated).

I am too damn tilted trying to figure out how to rezise these images (Wordpress annoyingly doesn’t have an auto-resize), so I’m just going to put the two links to the pictures here instead:
http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w239/FoxwoodsFiend/SDC10175.jpg
http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w239/FoxwoodsFiend/SDC10177.jpg