UPDATE: my mildly interesting friends and acquaintances

I play poker for a living. I'm actually very serious about it, and put in a lot of hours per week, but I usually refrain from talking about it unless people specifically ask me. My close friends are smart enough to know what it's about, and the rest of my close friends expect me to fail, so what's the point?

This dude is sort of like me, except I don't look like a complete douchebag, I rarely use a laptop, I usually play in clubs and casinos, I'm almost always drunk, and I don't have a hottie girlfriend who's ridiculously more attractive than I am.

This got me thinking about what most of my circle of friends/acquaintances do as a form of employment, and there are some intriguing and funny jobs and talents among them.

I'm on the low end of the "interesting friends" spectrum, but I have sort of an odd mix of close friends and casual buddies:

PANDA WATCH/UPDATE version 3.0: The engineer who was working in conjunction with the DoD decided that his job sucked (due to too much foreign travel), and has accepted a postion at another company for which math and engineering skills are a must. He is one of those intuitive mathlete types.

PANDA WATCH/UPDATE version 2.0: One of my best friends has recently accepted a position with the state's attorney's office in Baltimore County, and he is on his way to perhaps becoming a prosecutor, or a judge. I guess this means that I have to be even more careful around town now.

The funny part is that this kid was the former lumber yard worker. It was a job he was working in order to get a different perspective, make a little scratch, and be able to tell humorous stories about the sketchy, but still hard-working, dudes at said lumber yard.

We here at Letter Never Sent will continue to list him as a lumber yard worker, however, because we're still a bunch of jackasses.

Another one of my best friends (HollywoodJosh) recently accepted a position at a nice casting agency in California. Maybe he can help me become an actor someday (yeah right!).

another pro poker player
- this is my friend CoolHand Luke. For those unfamiliar with being a "professional" poker player, so to speak, I guess it's convenient that he has a blog. It's also one of the reasons I don't post more poker stuff: he already does that better than I would. Luke moved out to Las Vegas a year ago, where he dominates and crushes the hell out of his opponents, playing almost exclusively online (huh??!). I am exponentially more extroverted than him, often to a disastrous degree.

The poker world needs more hotties like Erin Ness ( right).

a lumber yard worker / assistant to the State Attorney
- what's sort of funny is that this smartass friend of mine is doing this until he finds out whether he passed the bar and can practice as an attorney UPDATE: Baltimore County State's Attorney's Office, bitches!

one of the best rock drummers in the world who plays in a band that has released a top 5 record
- I wrote about him recently. The Who's Pete Townshend recently said that if he were to reunite the Who, Jon Theodore would be his only choice good enough to be the band's drummer. Sick. Jon's band is releasing a live CD next week.
Spin magazine on the Mars Volta:
"The most exhilarating rock band on the planet."
"The Mars Volta render every other prog-metal-jazz-whatever band out there wholly unnecessary."


a Secret Service Agent
- this is so secret, I can't even comment on it. Excuse me while I go back to my van that says Flowers By Irene on it. I will say that agents, as young as my friend is, are super-rare.

an actor who dated celebrity hottie Christine Taylor for a few years in high school (while she got her first big break with Nickelodeon's Hey Dude)
- you know who she is... played Marcia Brady in the Brady movies, reporter Matilda Jeffries in Zoolander, was in Dodgeball, The Wedding Singer, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Friends, Seinfeld, etc. If you've never seen her in anything, you're either ridiculously uncool, or you just stumbled onto one of the 3 internet connections in all of Central Africa. My buddy is a far more talented actor than she is, despite the fact Taylor's agent must be phenomenal (her being married to Ben Stiller can't hurt either). He starred in several huge soaps for a few years, and was featured in an episode of ER as a motorcycle crash victim. I have no doubt he'll be in big movies or TV series someday.

a raging conservative attorney who works for a ragingly liberal DC law firm

2 bartenders

a video game programmer/developer
- the kind of guy who helps make games that destroy the lives of millions of unashamed dorks (like me; I've wasted time in years past playing games like Simm City and Age of Empires). Who can forget Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog (no one). I would love to do what he does, but I would make an awful developer because I suck at math.

a private investigator

5 chaps who are in medical school
- I'm not saying this just because my father is a doctor: to complete med school and become a practicing physician, you have to be a badass. No ifs, ands, or buts. Actually, there is: you're not a badass if you went to med school on an exotic Caribbean island (at that point you're just fun and intelligent). I know someone who actually attends a Caribbean island medical school.

a friend who earned a degree in Astrophysics from an elite university and currently works with the National Academy of Sciences
- if you knew him, you would still be baffled by his choice of major (I would be less surprised by History or English, given his humor and writing style). He is none other than our own The Monitors (responsible for "The Aviary" and "Donnie Darko" thus far).