Damn, Katrina

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I can't even imagine what people in that area are going through. I bitch and whine when I don't have Internet access at home (just at home, mind you, with access the whole time at work) for a few weeks and some people won't be able to even return to their homes for months. And even then many won't even have a home to return to.

Thanks for the responses from Zaikon and Jordan for comments on my somewhat annoying, self-absorbed navel-gazing yesterday.

I do think part of the problem is setting appropriate goals, and adjusting the current ones. I'm blessed with the very welcome dilemma of having blown through all of the financial goals I set myself for the year, but I haven't really re-tooled my thinking of late, and have sort of been floating around, seeing what happens.

Part of the difficulty, though, is the fickle nature of poker, and how to judge progress towards non-financial goals. It's easy enough to say that I want to make x dollars and be playing at y limit by a certain point, and to track and measure the progress towards that. It's harder to set meaningful benchmarks as far as playing "better" poker, or learning "more". Realistically I know that I am, as that's underpinning the progress towards financial results, but it's still pretty amorphous, pegging that one down.

I also need to simply shut up and be happy with the assorted good things I'm blessed with. Feeling slightly malaiasey that my reasonably lucrative part-time job isn't as fulfilling as it once was, or as I thought it would be, is pretty freaking ridiculous.

As far as setting new goals, that one I need to ponder on. I'm tempted to fall back on the "Build the bankroll to x so I can play y limit" approach, but that's not really a different goal, it's just plugging in bigger numbers. I'd like to play more tournaments, but I usually don't have the time to invest in many of the bigger MTTs. I've been good about rolling poker profits into assorted long-term investments such as equities and mutual funds, which I'll likely continue to do. In some ways I guess it's more a matter of just coming to terms with the somewhat inherently unsatisying nature of playing online poker than anything, accepting the bad with the good.