Juiced

the best laid plans ...

By Rachel Kranz

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It’s my first WSOP event for this Series and what do you know, I wake up late.

Well, actually, I wake up early, a few times, my body doesn’t know whether it’s in Senegal or New York, but then instead of responding to the 9:30 a.m. alarm I was expecting, I open my eyes to a clock that reads 10:15. My little travel alarm must be broken, and the new clock that I’ve ordered, the one with the sweep second hand that will allow me to exercise in five-minute intervals, hasn’t arrived yet, even though amazon.com promised it would.

The $1,000 event I’ve registered for is so big that there are two Day 1s, so I could easily have given myself a second “adjustment day” and planned to play tomorrow. I’m too eager to get started, though, even though I have all these routines I want to set up that I could probably use some extra time for. But, as we’ve already established, I’m stubborn. I want to Do It All.

As it happens, my routines pretty much all depend upon amazon.com. I’ve had them send me a juicer for processing all the fresh fruits and vegetables I bought at Whole Foods, which my naturopath has promised me will help me lose weight (“You are too acidic,” he explains in his lilting Haitian accent, French but not French. “You need more raw foods to become more alkaline.”). They’ve also shipped me a tiny trampoline for a daily aerobic exercise routine (yes, it’s good for weight-loss, but I’m thinking of it more as getting oxygen into my brain before a, hopefully, 14-hour day). I’ve never juiced a thing in my life, and I now have about 90 minutes to get ready for an event that doesn’t exactly leave me feeling cool and confident. What would be the sensible thing here? What would you do?

Juicing, I’ve decided, is my personal challenge of the trip. Well, what I do is make juice. Juicing, I’ve decided, is my personal challenge of the trip, and I’m not going to let even a single tournament day go forward in its absence. I am going to figure out how to do it, I am going to prepare two thermosfuls of fresh juice, and I am going to drink them throughout the day, come hell or high water, which turns out to be more a dumb cliché when my sink clogs. Apparently, the juicing process is designed to squeeze all the juice out of the apples, cabbage, carrots, and kale that I am diligently pressing into the juicer, and when that process is done, guess what’s left? Pulp, which for some reason I think is okay to wash into my hotel room’s bathroom sink as I am frantically trying to clean the juicer.

My sink, understandably enough, does not think it’s okay, and it lets me know that in no uncertain terms by engaging in a campaign of passive resistance that works just as well on me as it did on the British government in India. I’m pretty much ready to do anything the sink wants if it will only start swallowing up the excess water and not get me in trouble with the hotel management.