i've been away from home for the past nine days -- a week in vegas, and the last two days here in duluth, minnesota, my second (third?) home. vegas was ridiculous in many ways, but the most personal is that i can't remember a week where i've talked as much. my crackpot explanation is the hyperoxygenation of the casinos, but i was just talking a mile a minute seemingly the entire time.

a lot of that probably has to do with what i was talking about in the last post. i'm fairly confident in myself right now: i don't seem to be evincing any depression (merely moments of usually music-induced romantic emo wistfulness), i feel sharp, and the 7+ pounds that the parasite or equivalent drained from me in ecuador even has me feeling physically confident. funny how that part works.

but anyway, all this talking led to a really weird phenomenon: by the end of the week, i was sick of myself (i can only imagine how everyone else felt, but it was a good time to temporarily burn that bridge since i will barely be seeing these people for the next 6 months given the rest of the traveling and fall at columbia.) i kind of wished i would just shut up, but things somehow kept coming out of my mouth. it was sort of ridiculous; i guess the me who was sick of me and the me who was talking were in different areas of my brain, or something like that.

the other thing that happened in vegas was that i played craps. this was really surprising to me, because of course craps is a negative-expectation game with no skill involved, but everyone seemed to have a lot of fun playing it, and after all it's only $0.07 per $10 bet to play. so i did it, and it was fun, certainly worth that price of admission (and, almost irrelevantly, i won $70 in the process.)

craps is super fascinating: you can make all sorts of bets, but basically in most situations everyone is rooting for the shooter to not roll a 7. if a non-7 comes up, various people will win money; if a 7 comes up, everyone will lose (generally a lot of) money. so what you're paying for is this instant group of friends, this instant place where your goals are aligned and so you fit in. these people, of course, are not in general people you (or i anyway; i happen to be pretty discerning) would be friends with in real life, but for those moments around the table you have instant friends. which is worth something -- after all, your happiness function is really just a series of momentary happiness functions, so achieving those local maxima is a worthwhile goal.

and now i've arrived at duluth. the week or two i spend here every summer has basically never been catastrophic and is usually very good at the momentary happiness (and occasionally good at the non-ephemeral kind.) it strikes me that this is the first week i've spent here without stephen also visiting in a while, but so far the early returns are quite promising. 12 more days here, and then i'm off to nashville (a city and state i've never been to) for work and bridge, with four free intervening days to explore a capital or a national park or a few more states or some combination of these.

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