>Wow, that's even a little too cryptic and elliptical for me <bg>

Even I have some inborn talent ;-)

> i get bored too easy and when I gave up cocaine

Some surprizing aftereffects of dates with Mary Jane 1 or 2 days earlier tought me
not to mix that kind of fun with pugilistic efforts in my teens... Stayed with sharpening mind and body.
And the longterm risk/reward ratio even of background finance roles cured me of that biz
even before having a car license (we get car driving license later than you:
over here we try train kids to beer and wine for 2 years before giving them cars to smash themselves and others
instead of giving them cars at 16 and later on impair their skills by allowing them booze officially rather late in growing up)

>and bipolar women money became less important.

I never understood the urge to pay lots on women. My early strategy was
to have enough women on short call list to switch when non-bodily/physical urges/needs
soured spending time with them for a couple of days.
Gave them time for their gay or partly platonic other friends.

>Now I get to sit at home and play with (and in some cases write ) the toys they use at Dow Jones and S&P to figure out what money is doing and not care terribly much about the outcome as I don't have a lot of skin in the game.

some days I think such a job would be heaven sent for me:
worked on price finding (blue book for cars style) before and after the fall of the wall...
Developed first set of computer based statistical models and calculating programs
when numeric coprocessors where showing up an 40MB was a huge hard disc.

>Never knew much about the military procurement guys who sold the $50k toilet seats - military didn't trust us much. Did learn a little about the world of self-funding operations, fuzzy budget items and a whole world completely off the books. But it's a young man's game.

Got a whiff of that in my short military time: they stuffed me literally where the sun does not shine
(you have something similar in vicinty of Colorado mountains) for crypto work at first -
with a double role of bodyguarding pure geek operators and the more important suitcases and code strips
while having the skills to jump into operator role if needed.

Since there was mostly dummy work operating bulky machines and I made sure they knew I was loosing my body muscle tone,
was switched over to half official sports company and had to do odd jobs involving programmable calculators
(not even visicalc back then...) and numbers in the time not allotted for physical activity.
educating on the numbers part and on ways of how to step out of ordinary routines in strict hierarchies...

>Never knew a lot of Andropov/Putin's guys - someday someone is going to write some interesting stuff about what Chechnya and Abkhazia were really all about. That was where some serious money was made ...

English soccer teams grew interesting expatriating sponsors and others went to jail.
As I was planning to have kids in the nineties something I did not pursue -
even if getting to know russian native speakers to get me background feeling was nice for a time.