YAY for me...My first Blog!

My first blog entry!
I consider myself a very addictive person when it comes to my interests and hobbies. For the most part, when I find something I like, I become immersed in it!
Music was and is my first love. When people ask me what kind of music I like or what my favorite type of music is I tell them my favorite is LIVE music. The first concert I ever attended was Janet Jackson. I went with my Mother, and I remember loving it. I got into a lot of Rap/Hip-Hop throughout my middle teen years and then I found Pearl Jam. There was something about that band that made me listen to music a little differently. I was completely obssesed with that band for a good part of my high school and early college years. To this day 4/8/94 remains one of my most memorable concert experiences ever, and still stands as one of the top 5 shows I've ever attended. This was also the day that Kurt Cobain died so it is also memorable for that of course! I remember my freshman year when the guy living across the hall from me in the dorm would blast hardcore heavy metal whenever I played Pearl Jam on my little rinky dink stereo. He of course had about $500+ invested in his stereo...what an ass! Anyway, around the time I got out of the dorm system at Monmouth University (in NJ), I moved into an off campus house with a couple of friends and one friend of a friend that at the time seemed to me to be the biggest hippie I had ever seen. Sadly, I made fun of him as soon as we moved in because he was a huge deadhead and Jerry Garcia had just died that summer. I posted on our living room wall the cover of Rolling Stone magazine with Jerry's face...underneath I just wrote in big black letters...DEAD. I still feel bad about doing that. The funny thing is that I credit this guy for getting me into my favorite band of all time...PHISH! I loved to just hang out in his room and listen to all of these different, interesting sounds coming out of his speakers. My first show was October 1996 at Madison Square Garden, and I was (pardon the pun) hooked! I went on to see a ton of shows over the years and got into many of the so-called "jambands"!
Poker has become my next hobby/fixation... I am one of the millions that caught on to the wonders of the World Series of Poker in 2003. Although, I do remember watching a bunch of the older WSOP's on ESPN whenever they were on. But as they say, if it were not for the hole cameras in 2003, I probably would not be as in to poker as I am. So I have been playing poker for a long time, because my friends and I used to have many poker games at each other's houses before the Texas Hold'em boom. I even remember at age 10 playing poker with one of my oldest friends David. We would play 5 card draw, but it would be like triple/quadruple draw and would have all kinds of "wild" cards. I have since been playing mostly No Limit Hold'em online at Ultimate Bet, and I have played in Vegas and Atlantic City a handful of times. Luckily, many of my friends are also big poker players as well so we have a poker night at one our houses every month or so.
I have focused on my hobbies in this, my first blog entry, mainly because that's probably what I will be concentrating on, but I'm sure there will be much more than that in the near future, since I am also a huge sports fan. Football season is about to start so that should be fun!