Back to the grind for February

This week I ended up with a lot more free time than usual, and I spent that time wisely relaxing with friends and my girlfriend. There isn't much more you can do for your body that's more beneficial than laughing, relaxing, and  spending time outdoors - and a day at the beach with my girlfriend and one of my best friends satisfied that to a T. I'm always reminded of how lucky I am to be living in one of the most desirable locations in the world; close to the beach in California. I'm often reminded on days like those how much the mind craves nature, and how we've gone from a species that utilized it's entire body and mind together on a daily basis to a species that utilizes it's mind to accomplish tasks rather than incorporating bodily physical movement as well. Climbing the cliffs to watch the sunset on the beach with 10-15 foot waves crashing below is something that really reminds me how small I am in perspective. 

This type of time off also offered me an opportunity to spend some time with one of my life's great loves - poker. I was lucky enough to meet the right people in the online poker community to make a decent amount of money from an online card game in my early college years to support me, and ever since I've always wanted to eventually be able to play around the world in live tournaments, having it all pay for itself. This, of course, is an ultimate goal -- version infinity, the best it can get. I am working on version 1.0 of this goal by playing small stakes SNGs online at Cake poker in my spare time and hoping to build up a small bankroll to play micro MTTs on. This brings me to the point of this post, I want to outline my goals for February. 

Volume: 40 games/week

Bankroll Management: Only registering for games at the $1-2 level, a mix of 10-person STT SNGs and HUSNGs until a bankroll of $150.00 is reached, then mixing in $3-4 HUSNGs as well as SNGs

This blog to me is a place to discuss goals that I feel need to be published in an effort to push myself to complete them, and poker is definitely something I've said I'm going to buckle down on a lot, but never really done. I've also tried blogs before, but those were strictly poker-only and didn't feel very natural writing on. This is a volume of my life, and I will approach it holistically.

Piece #1: Inspiration From Devistation

For my first piece I'm going to share with you guys, I've chosen the spot that sparked the conversation that lead up to all of this. A friend took me to this place in Santa Rosa and I couldn't believe how colorful and generally brilliant this place was, have a look at the pictures for yourselves and tell me; what do you think it all means? What does it mean to you? I see this as art, not defacement of property (even though we did technically cross a fence to get in)

This one if the main shot that really just blew me away, look at all the individual tags and expressions 

When I look at this place I see people in cooperative competition to represent their artwork by outdoing the current stuff out there, all the different fonts and colors, symbols and words all fit very eloquently as a backdrop to a collapsed roof in this abandoned winery.

The Why's and Why Not's

Hello all,

Welcome to my personal blog about the exploits of my life and my views on culture, graffiti, poker, business and life. I don't have any specific goals with this page but I hope to keep it regularly updated. In an effort to provide everyone with a little context and background for my perspective, I'll tell you all a little about myself. I'm a 21 year old student of Anthropology at a local junior college, waiting on responses from Universities at the moment. I'm living in Northern California in a moderately small town and work in a generic food-service job in a nearby town. In my free time, I enjoy gaming, hiking, working on a website I hope to launch at the end of the year that I'm pretty psyched about, and my biggest passion besides my education; poker. I played poker "professionally" (I use this term very loosely) for a couple years in between jobs and am constantly working towards making this a lot more viable option of an income source. I will, of course, provide as much context as I can so that my stories and posts will make sense. I may change names, dates and other small details to conceal the identity of those involved.

Now that my identity has been outlined a bit, let's get right down to it. I'm sure you're sitting there wondering why I called this blog ''The Anthropology of Graffiti" if I don't plan on talking about graffiti exclusively, or even primarily. Well, I'll tell you a little story...

I graduated from high school in June of 2009 and within 72 hours of receiving my diploma I boarded a plane out of Oakland headed towards Christchurch, New Zealand with my father for my graduation gift. I was extremely excited, and couldn't believe I was finally headed to the place I had wanted to travel for as long as I could remember. This was my first out-of-country experience and at this time I had no idea what Anthropology even was let alone knowing it was something I would eventually major in. Fast Forward about 30 hours and a deadmau5 album on repeat for the good majority of it later, I decided to get my Internet-Fix after our first day of walking around the town and use the hotel's free computers to surf the web.

While I was aimlessly clicking my way through facebook or whatever online forum I was browsing at the time a man sat next to me and began browsing. After about 20 minutes of us glancing back and forth from each others screens avoiding eyes he asked where I was from, I told him California. His reaction was rather surprising, and consisted of him asking me tons of questions about how California living is and especially how the graffiti looked in my area. He explained to me that he was a graffiti artist who lived in Australia with his wife and child, and that he had just "done a run on these Kiwi's". He told me that Kiwi's (New Zealanders) and Aussies tended to "battle" back and forth by coming in groups and tagging trains, buildings and basically everything they can get paint to stick to in a couple of days before flying back to Australia. I was dumbfounded that someone could consider this their passion or even profession, although I did think it was cool. In the midst of my ignorance, this guy shows me some of the works himself and his crew had done on the current trip they were on. He showed me picture upon picture of art, not what I had thought was graffiti. He changed my perspective on graffiti in just a dozen or so photographs. He showed me images of train-length dragons painted by crews of guys in a matter of minutes, not days.

Years later that guy and his art still resonated through my mind when I was taking a class on Folklore and we watched a video called Style Wars on Graffiti in NYC (Link to view: ) and it finally clicked with me that Graffiti is more of a representation of our society in it's truest form than anything else I could think of. Essentially, Graffiti is each of our generations honest opinions and struggles, and I'm talking everything from hatespeech scraped into a bathroom stall to Banksy's newest piece, it represents us. I find this is a fitting title to this blog, as I will be writing about current events, my opinions, and my honest thoughts.

Welcome to my blog, feel free to comment and ask questions, I look forward to hearing from you.