In Vegas for a month now

I've moved back to Las Vegas, and am living in a room of a house me and some friends are renting. I was very thrilled at the $300 a month price for us, although I was even more jealous of a kid I met at a casino who is renting one room of a 2 bedroom 2 bath condo with a friend of his and their total rent is $500, which means that his cost is $250 a month; cheaper than mine! (I got his contact info and told him to call me if he ever needed a new roommate...) At least the sour economy doesn't hurt kids like us (who would be broke anyway) nearly as much as many other people who are losing jobs they've had for a while and count on.

I've been playing a lot of cards, but since I have so little starting capital, I can't afford to play very high stakes (1/2 NL live, 4-8 tables of 50NL online), so I've been playing as often as I can, both online and in casinos, getting a ton of rakeback online, and using my live casino food comps for double cheeseburgers I can stick in my fridge! I also live right next to a Walmart Supercenter, which is fantastic because I can get cheap groceries and prescription drugs (Walmart sells generic prescriptions for $5 now...)

I've been running a bit poor (or maybe I've been playing worse than my best--it's often hard to tell...) but since my expenses are so low, I've been able to keep up. But that's a problem, because I am trying to do much better than my expenses, so that within a few months, I can start taking shots at 2/5 live and 100NL and 200NL online, where I can actually make real money, as opposed to scraping-by money. After all, the lease on this house is only a year, and I'm not going to be able to live this cheaply forever!

I've also been eating a little healthier and exercising every now and then, but that's just not good enough. I undo any good I do on those days with all the crap I eat and laziness on the other days. And I also know that getting in a set routine of healthy living will not only help me physically, it will make me happier and help me focus at cards better, so it is something I really should be doing every day. It's very important to me, and I have no excuse!

I also learned an interesting fact about happiness--happiness is nurtured far better when people are constrained. That is, when you are in a specific situation, whether or not you originally liked it, if you cannot change it or do anything different, you are much more likely to learn to accept it and manufacture happiness about it. If you have choices, you are more likely to be unhappy because you will always be wondering about the other choices you did not pick.

The practical application of this knowledge is for me to get in a set schedule of exercising, and always eating healthy, and playing poker on a specific schedule. Setting up a routine for everything in my life will not only allow me to get them done, it will take away the daily and hourly CHOICE of whether or not to do those things. I won't have to feel bad when I am not exercising or playing cards, because I know that I have a good schedule that I am sticking to, whereas at the moment, I always feel guilty when I am not being healthy or trying to make money.

That's what's happening right now, I'm sure I'll have more updates in the future...