just… breathe

The way “Random Luck” works in my life is very similar to health levels/points you get in video games; it increases in time or is “full” at the beginning, and it lowers when it’s used. Honestly I could recall a few occasions of myself picking up dollar bills on the streets and then spend the next day tripping on my own feet.

I spent the first morning of 2010 playing mahjong with Apple, her sister Rainbow and boyfriend, and occasionally with Apple’s mom. I slowly realized I had a disadvantage: I was the only one who was going to lose money, because I was playing against a whole family…

Playing mahjong usually involves a lot of skills and calculation, but then since most of the time I just want to have fun (and not use my brain), I just let my luck do all the playing and that has always worked out for me… apparently I’ve been using up a lot of luck in 2009 because I was let down that night.

How good was my luck in mahjong actually? Back in high school, I hated playing with my classmates (who all were studying Pure or Applied Math at the time) because just a few turns later they could correctly predict my whole hand (consisting of 13 tiles). Despite all that I didn’t lose very often because I was lucky. One guy who wasn’t playing decided to observe how I played. He was dumbfounded for my lack of concern when I was carelessly throwing tiles I didn’t need away. After a few rounds he commented on how I always got the tiles I wanted/needed while drawing new ones, which I kind of took for granted.

For the whole night all the hands I got sucked big time and there were very little I could make up for the lack of luck with technique. But then at the very end I won twice in a row; one of them being a 十三么 (the thirteen terminal hand, as said in Wikipedia @@), the highest scoring hand, the hand that the older generation had warned us never to play because it was incredibly unlucky (but has nothing to do with the number 13), the hand that few people witnessed it to be won (the other three had to double check my hand)… So I’ve managed to save myself from being the biggest loser before catching the overnight train back home.

Don’t know if that was any indication of my coming year. Anyway, Happy New Year Jennifer.