Lol blogaments

So I decided to start a blog. We'll see how it goes. I'm not clear of my goals for this, so I'll just let it carve its own path. A bit of context about myself. I am a 20 year old male living with my parents in a small town in northern California. I go to school part-time, work part-time at Starbucks coffee company (ship the 9$/hour), and play semi-pro poker online (this is probably a pretentious claim, but it is what I aspire to be). I have a girlfriend that goes to school here as well, and works at a local golf club as a server. She is very intelligent, both emotionally and analytically. I genuinely enjoy my time with her very much. Not too mention she is beautiful. I am fairly close to my immediate family. We have just decided to get a dog and I will be picking him up tomorrow.

The main inspiration for me creating this blog was to record my journey through the world of poker. So lets set up some more context about my poker career. I started playing about 2 years ago, small home game etc. I sucked of course, but I hated losing so I started using the one advantage I had when I could harness it; my brain. I bought some books and learned basic strategy. Had moderate success at the home games, then decided to start playing at the casino. Since I was 18 at the time the only place I could play was at a shitty Indian casino an hour away, but I did not let that deter me. Over the next year I spent countless hours grinding the 200$ NL game there. I had huge swings toward the end, some 7+ buy-in up and down. While I did all this my life began to deteriorate around me, and I became a degenerate. At some point I realized this, and tried to quit but meh.

Eventually I lost all motivation to go to school or live life in general. Luckily at this time I totaled my car (rear ended on freeway on-ramp). This made my life a bit inconvenient living where I was because I had no car. My parents suggested that I move home and I acquiesced with little resistance. At this point I played a fair bit online and made a decent profit playing the 90 man turbo KO sit-and-gos on Full Tilt. Probably somewhere around 1500$ (seemed like a lot at the time).

I soon found my current job at Starbucks and felt myself healing as I started to have actual social contact with people. It was an amazing feeling. I decided to quit poker for good (lol) and just work at Starbucks and start school again. I soon realized that I was going to be making next to nothing at Starbucks (probably have average about 700$ a month with tips). After working there for 6 months I decided to give online poker another shot. I missed the game and my new girlfriend seemed tolerant of it.

So I deposited 600$ (insurance settlements FTW) and started grinding 25NL. I ran ridiculously bad, tilted, ran worse, and tilted more. Soon I just tilted it all off in frustration. Looking back I realize that I was genuinely running bad, but I also had serious tilt and focus issues that made it virtually impossible to weather any sort of downswing.