Me and LiTHe Blås

LiTHe Blås is a student band at the university of Linköping. For all those of you who have some idea of what a student band is, but you're not from Sweden, chances are you have the wrong idea. For all intents and purposes, a Swedish student band (at the universities) is essentially a frat-house with instruments, silly-looking uniforms who on occasion perform and/or march.

For comparison, I give you the St. Olaf College (Northfield Minnesota) band:



... and then (part of) LiTHe Blås:



I was a member of this band from '97 to '01 (when I studied, or pretended to study, at the University of Linköping), but although I'm no longer technically in the band, you never quite retire from these things. Amazing friendships develop and most of the people I still hang out with today are people I met in the band. And being with the band, in the band, is fun. It's very difficult to describe just how fun, because unless you've been in a similar organization yourself it's almost impossible to get a good idea of it. And if you have, well, then I don't need to describe it. So suffice it to say that it's a lot of fun. I can't think of anything else I've done in life where I've had anywhere near as much fun as some of the times I've had with this band.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because I just got back from a five day tour of northern Germany with other various old members of the band. 47 of them. I'm exhausted, and I don't think there's any major part of my body where there aren't at least three things aching severely, but it's also been years since I laughed as much as I have in the past week.

It's alive! ALIVE!

After two and a half years of blogging for CardsChat.com, it was time for me to move on. There was no drama involved, no disagreement between me and site owner Nick about quality or quantity or artistic freedom or, honestly, anything at all. It was a disagreement between myself and making a blogging commitment. At this point in time, having what essentially comes down to a writing job just isn't working out for me. It's not that I don't have the time, necessarily, it's that I don't want to have to have the time, if you know what I mean. When writing for CardsChat, I felt guilty if I didn't post an update at least once a week, and as things in my life get more and more hectic, that feeling of guilt and "I have to" kept coming on more and more often.

I talked to Nick about it, and he, being the cool and surprisingly mature-for-his-age guy that he is, completely understood and had in fact already anticipated that I might go this way. So we're good. And that makes me happy.

At this point, I don't know how often this blog will get updated, or what kind of stuff it will contain. I used to write almost exclusively about poker; I'm going to guess that the poker-to-other-stuff ratio is going to go down a bit.

I dunno. And I feel pretty good about not knowing and right at this very moment, not caring. I do like to have readers though, so if you read this blog, let me know about it and I'll be happy. If you tell others to read this blog - either through links or any other more traditional way of word-of-mouth - I'll be even happier and much grateful.

In closing, a final thank you to Nick at CardsChat. Getting to write about poker, even if it was difficult to muster the motivation at times, has made me a better player and a better writer all at once. I'm very grateful for the opportunity, and for the encouragement.