Tuesday, January 06, 2009

New Year, Same Job? and you're never too old to live.

2009 is here, and one of the biggest decisions I need to make, it's if I want to continue without a "real job". I'm going to enter my 13th year playing poker, with some breaks from playing here and there, specially when I finished my masters degree at the beginning of the 2000's. There have been really good times, "the golden age of online poker", but as today, at least for us here living in the States the games are tougher every day. I left teaching at UTEP like 3 years ago, but I wonder if it's time to come back to teach at the college level, to look for a new path of make a living, be a movie critic or something, even to go back to school and pursue a PhD. Even if I do something different, I would still be playing some poker part time, hell, I have been playing poker part time (no time? hah) for a long time now; one of the funny things it's that I used to play plenty more when I had my full time lecturer job at UTEP, for some reason, having more free time, made me play less. Then I was very good in my job as a professor and I was very good playing poker, but I have to admit I was usually pretty tired since I used to do also some other projects like the Math Olympiad (still do), the Abel project (dead now), the UACJ (still going). The free time on my last 3 years have allowed me to spend a lot of time with my family, travel a lot, and that's priceless. My kids now are almost 6 and 4 and we have also another decision to make with them, homeschooling them or not?, and obviously since we need time to do that the 2 decisions are connected, Diana has also her own plans about what would she like to do and whatever we decide, our life is most probably going to change. Should we move from El Paso? If so, where? Should we come back to school? Diana for her masters, and me for a PhD or maybe even a masters in a very different area, Am I too old for that? Nah, the last question is easy, you're never too old to live. YOU'RE NEVER TOO OLD TO LIVE, don't ever forget that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great read Mr. Cossio! My name is Kenny Bier, I contacted you once before on P5. I was wondering if you'd be nice enough to drop me an email at kennybier@yahoo.com because I'd like to discuss some poker with you. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Hi David,

I'm going to suggest that you take a real job. I suggest this largely because your recent posts indicate that the full-time poker grind is really getting to you (you posted a run-of-the-mill bad beat story for heaven's sake!)

I think that if you weren't "forced" to play, you might do better and enjoy it more.

--matt