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thatd b good if u could do that jigsaw. even just a little spiel about your experiences would be awsome.
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Alright. Well, I guess I'll have to talk a bit about my life story. I was in the last year of high school about 5 years ago. I'd been planning to go and study computer science since I was about 13. I was a pretty good hobbyist programmer, or so I thought. I was involved with a couple of open source projects, amongst them the Python programming language. Fixing bugs and coming up with patches was what I did for fun in my spare time. And I had a lot of spare time, because I was breezing through high school and skipped half my classes.
I can't remember how or where, but somehow I found Nietzsche's
Also Sprach Zarathustra. I think it was in some second-hand bookstore. His style just totally blew my mind. I also met an Aussie programmer that was just then busy divorcing his wife, quitting his job and going back to Australia to open a teahouse. He introduced me to
his "interpolation" of the TaoDeChing, which opened my mind to *another* whole new set of thinking. I decided I couldn't just go on and live my life without investigating further, so instead of computer science, I started a bachelor in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.
As usual, I breezed through all my classes. I didn't skip them either, for the most bit. I made some awesome friends. I still see most of them with some regularity now that I'm back in Amsterdam. I also got into my first somewhat long-term relationship. But I became increasingly frustrated with philosophy at the university. I was there for my own reasons, my own "research", not some academic [censored]. It's kinda funny, because I think most academic philosophers don't really get what the truly great philosophers were wrestling with. They focus on that which the philosophers wrote, not on the core of their philosophies, that which the philosophers were struglling to bring into words. That core was what I was looking for.
Anyhow, disregard that if you don't care about philosophy. I'd already made up my mind that I was going to go away. Somewhere. Didn't really matter where. Find that core. Me and my girlfriend also broke up in the process, so I didn't really have anything to tie me down either. It was only a matter of money. So I spent the next 12 months as a junior programmer at a small company. That taught me some things about a business career as well. Let's just say I was glad August 2005 rolled around, and I could finally go.
On the 4th of September, I stepped through the security gate at Schiphol Airport to board the plane to Sao Paulo. I waved to my parents one last time, and then I was truly alone for the first time in my life. It's a scary but exhilarating feeling, a feeling I would feel many times over in the next ten months around South America. I have many stories from back there, but this post is already too long. I wrote a bunch of stories on my travel blog while I was there. You can read
this one from when I worked with a puma for a month if you have the time. There's some others there, but that's probably the one most significant to me.
I was very lost when I got back 6 months ago. I tried studying again, Spanish this time, mostly because that was what I was supposed to do. Well, what I was supposed to do never worked out for me, nor did it this time. So in January I quit, this time indefinitely. I'm currently playing poker "full-time" and I'll be going back to South America in August with the money I've earned. I hope to hit around 25-30k when I leave, way more than I need to live for a year. At the end of that year, I want to be in Vegas for the WSOP 2008. I'll see how life rolls along after that. Maybe I'll go to Asia, maybe I'll go to Africa, maybe I'll stay around the US and play live poker, maybe I'll find a girl and settle down somewhere. I don't know, and that feels good.
Sorry if this is too long. I hope it helps you some.