Thursday, March 30, 2006

oh man. i had something cool to write about that had been simmering all day, soaking itself in the back of my mind, ready for a delicious typefest before bed, and now, with hanging out with Jenna and watching ANTM and cutting in new slices for the Design Trip quicktime... i just can't remember what it was. so much for my memory.

but worry not, where one story shall ferment a bit longer, i'll stay in my games kick and reminisce about the summer of '01. yes, before an unsheduled stop at the twin towers penthouse, and even before summer proper, i was hanging out with the gorgeuosly prudish Chithra and the totally egomaniacal greg barlow (in his defense, he has the smarts and talent to back it up, but the attitude puts some people off), when somehow the game of scrabble was brought up. i had never played before, but was confident that my vocabulary and chess strategy would be enough to compete. Chithra started with an okay placing of ham. i connected to the h with some stupid word, and then barlow, (also a linguistic master in his own right, but more importantly, a player of the game since a young child with the rest of his brainy family) built two words, placing axe down from the m to also make ma, hiting the x on a double letter, and doubling chithra's and my score. and just like that it all came together. i recognized that scrabble wasn't about how cool your words were, but how you placed them on the board to maximize points. i started playing better but ultimately lost to barlow, though i thought i won because of an addition mistake for a while. but i had caught the bug.

cut to the summer, after and incredible trip to italy with my family, i chose to comeback to campus a month early to live in a house with some very cool peeps. including joel sanders in the duplex next door. he too was a scrabble aficionado, and we started going at it. then we learned about the cherished scrabble players dictionary, the bible of allowable words, which includes some archaic nonsense that doesn't seem gramatically right but helps you score higher. joel and i, playing at least twice almost everyday made an incredible insightful decision: instead of playing by actual rules of challenging words, we played with the slightly more pussy "open dictionary" policy. this meant we could go in and check if we thought we had a permissible word, and not lose a turn. the magic of this, is that you can confidently play what you think is the better choice, but more importantly, you learn more admissable words. especially those two letter words that allow your to form long chains of connected plays. a necesity in any good scrabble players arsenal.

that glorious summer of porch chillin' and free sandwhiches (half the people in the house worked at the deli up the street) instilled in me the basic strategies of scrabble, and i am happy to share them with you. always look for a way of making more words, and use high pointed letters as the pivots (the ones in both words, down and accross) to really get the max play. guard your esses and only use them for good word doubling, as they are easy to attach at ends of words. if you have an ess and a blank, chances are you can probably get a bingo, a 50 point bonus for using all 7 tiles on your rack, so don't settle for less. watch your placement, don't put down words that open up an avenue to the tripple word score, let your oppenent give that to you. if you are lucky enough to get the high point tiles, j q x z and k, don't just squander that pointpower, use them on premium squares to juice it up, just don't get stuck with them at the end. think about your next move, don't leave yourself a rack that has too many vowels or repeats. and finally, nobody but the obsessives have time to memorize wordlists, but you should know the 23 acceptable two letter words, and the few q without the u words like qat (a shrub) or qaid (don't remember, maybe an arab chieftan?). find them on scrabble.com and just leave them in your scrabble set, it i'll make you a happier player.

so after that summer of games and games with joel, which i one a bit more of, but which i would sometimes, like three or four ocassions, cheat and change my tiles if he left the room (i confessed it later in the school year and have not done it since), i was suddenly a scrabble living room master. i would meet barlow that fall, randomly having my travel set, and i was ready for my revenge... but the tile gods were not with me, giving him all but one ess and both blanks, and me the hawaiian curse of mostly vowels. as he totaled the massive spanking, he casually dropped that he really didn't remember the last time he had ever lost at scrabble. well, i bit my tongue, knowing his hubris would fuel a glorious comeuppence through my newly developed skills

it took a while, we played again that winter, but with a newbie (this crazy nerd christos, who was a chess wiz, but didn't know he was swimming with scrabble sharks) in front of him leaving all the juicy openings, he won again. at the beggining of spring, a four way game had the same result, too many other variables. finally, graduation weekend, at the eclectic reception (my antifrat house which i joined senior year, ill touch on that later) after playing some eclectites that i knew were good, i had barlow all to myself. except i was not armed with a copy of the official dictionary, all we had was an unabridged random house, so i was unsure of some of the better tricks up my sleeve, like ae, a three toed sloth, or aa, a lava flow. but i continued on, playing well and staying within reach, when i got the q a bit late in the game. i played a low score to try and get a better position, and sure enough, i had qua (as in, like sin qua non or something like that) on the triple word. only i didn't know if that huge unabridged would have it, but i had to take a chance. and sure enough, cocky barlow, who had won mostly from his vast intelligence, but not from a real devotion to the nerdier aspect of word list memorization, could not fathom this would be an actual english word, and challenged. bam! i handed him his first loss.

he still brings it up to this day (okay, fine, not as much now, but you'd be surprised how much), my cheapness of knowing and using this basically dead word.

booya mutherfuckers. revenge is a dish better served nerd. i loved that summer. thank you joel sanders.

(i'll end by saying that we stopped playing as much at the end of the month because joel was tired of all the shit he was getting for being too much of a scrabble junkie. oh joel, you silly rabbit, trix are for hookers).

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

there was a good chunk of time when, after i came home from school and had our familial lunch, my dad and i would play chess. the fragil strands of mememory can't undwind perfect details, but i belive it started when i was nine or ten. most of the time in those early days, he would point out hints, putting his thick fingers on his threatining piece, "watch out," and of course he let me take back my move, keeping my queen alive.

sometime after that, again exactness eludes me, one year, two? i got my first actual... tie. yeah, my dad was tired, wasn't paying attention, and bam, i force the tie. it felt so good. a few weeks later, i got my first bonifide win. priceless. the hints and my takebacks then stopped, and while my father kept winning for a bit, he had to work for it.

and then it happened, slowly of course, but quite definitively... i started to win everytime. it wasn't easy, i had to bust my brain, but sure enough, unless my dad concetrated to a way too intense degree, i would take it. soon after, even if he did concentrate, i would win.

and some days i look back and realize that i owe a tremendous amount of my problem solving skills to that early arrival at the second most complicated game on this planet. if framed my brain to think about the big picture, analyze the situation, and figure out the creative
path to victory. my amazing memory (not always amazing, but usually), my ability to figure things out with very little information (sometimes making me look a bit psychic), my pattern recognition, i owe all this to the game.

but really, i owe it all to an amazing dad who took the time play with me. thanks dad, for the terrific afternoons that made me what i am today.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

doesn't it feel just like yesterday when we were very young children playing out in the lawn as the adults prepared a delicious meal. dusk would settle in as the fireflies came out to hover omenously, child hands sluggishly chasing them just a bit too high for their reach...

and as supper would continue with the familial din humming at its usual pace, the crowd would jovially prod the younger set on what they wanted to be when they grew up.

"i want to be a fireman" or "i want to be a ballerina." maybe the slightly older boy could even throw in a paleontologist just for shits and giggles. It all made sense. the formula was easily solved, the overarching pattern seemed worthy and correct.

but oh how that naivete breaks, and the heavy burden of cynisim weighs on us all sooner or later. for me, the meandering riverroad that is my life has been heavily demarked. options came and went here and there, but mostly i just rode the wave.

my brain could handle a broad array of skills. indeed, sometimes it felt like anything could be grasped and mastered if only i cared enough to put in the time. so i dabbled. i tasted this and dipped in that. i had momentary obsessions that could consume me only to fade as fast as they were once strong. i skied through life, a blur of dissatisfaction and boredom mixed with intense moments of utter joy or paralyzing depression (or is it desperation?).

i always felt like a writer, but my output streaked out, short spurts, very few golden nuggets between vast deserts of procrastination or fear of the debilitating blank page. It started in high school, really. while voraciously consuming trashy novels, moments of Athenian inspiration would burst out of my head, getting me amped and jittery, unable to go to sleep, drunk with the possibilites. but high school ended with very few true moments of musal rape, and the track was layed out before me, to college.

amidst a cloud of smoke, i notched a nice array of scalps: some acting, a story in a publication (ultimately censored for slander), all star captaining of soccer, the next plateau of guitar skills, foosball guru diploma, loosing that darned v card... but my motivation was mediocre at best, i still just did enough to just get by. my profound laziness riding on brains that knew exactly how little to do to still be okay.

and deep down i knew what so many of us, the progeny of the american upper middle class knows, cultivating their connections and "skills" in the small liberal arts campuses of the east, that we'd rather not slog away at soul sucking nine to fives, that we would gladly whore ourselves out to the sacrosanct iron fist of creativity.

and how the pretention can run amok, making fools of us all. who is to say that the bricklayer does not have more fun than the screenwriter, that the court stenographer actually lives a happier life than choreographer? no one, but it was too late, i was bit too young. upon graduation, my aimlessness only pointed in the vague direction of "something slightly creative."

and once again the path found me, and in post-productin i found a home. almost four years later, a skillset to boot. a part of society, actually contributing. and yet also floundering, unsure where my river would lead next, and whether or not it was time to finally grab hold of the wheel

well, it took about two years of therapy, 25 years of distracted floating, and one small idea to get it out of me...but i am finally in a place at my life where i want to grab my own rudder, and start working towards something i want, not the next thing that falls in my lap. and just last night, the epiphany hit, like the classic lightningbolt, like the Goddess of War herself, shooting right out of zeus' head... i want to be a director. i verbalized it, and it rang very true. i couldn't belive something could fully grab me enough to actually exert all my effort into trying to make it happen. but this sure felt right. i couldn't sleep at night, ideas swirling through my enlightened dome.

and now, a day later, the fear of failure has started to creep in, the mountanous journey daunting me with the classic perils and difficulties. which is why i had to write it down, to remember the strength and conviction it first brought out of me, the hot pulsing raw energy pumping through my veins, the sheer night-before-xmass excitment about starting a new leg a of my life, for once, with direction. with the ecstasy of self-wrought purpose.

remember.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

My good friend from college emailed me about a month ago:

From: "Lauren Abrahams"
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 23:34:37 -0800
To: "Dustin Stephens"
Subject: how

the hell are u????
tell me whats going on or call me.
how ridiculous is all this??? life, i mean...

I was in a weird mood, and what came out is probably the third best letter i have ever written, and probably the best email. I had forgotten about it because it took Lauren a month to write me back (the pressure to try and punch back with, but in rereading it, i feel like it deserves a wider audience.

Oh shit. I don't fuckin' know.

You're question, so open, slighltly silly, a tad existential... It happens to come at one of those times where I can't even find a place to answer it. I guess the beginning is always good.

How ridiculous? Very. Like, just off the top of my head, so ridiculous that the definition doesn't fit and you need the next level word, or you have to Joycefuckit with classic just hipster enough combos like uber or tetra so you're cooler than using super.

I having been breathing eating growing crying sleeping pissing shitting for over a QUARTER of a century. Been talking and walking a bit less than that. Reading and imagining for just a bit less than that. Ive been lying wondering worrying for... You get the picture. I really wanted to do the list faithfully and get to masturbating but I just don't have the patience.

Point is, you blink, and its almost four full fucking YEARS since you graduated a bubble fairytale world. And yes, in three months you’ve acually been out of college longer than you spent there. Officially. Don’t even get me started on the proximity of the high school tenner.

And what do you have to show for yourself? A bit wiser. More technically trained, your resume actually shows a profession. You have your black belt, been down the pink AND the stink. Less drugs, less drinking. The wide net of friends becomes an even wider net of aquantances, real friends slowly paring down, the road towards The Big One And Only Pair beginning to show. More money, some luckily, some from the sweaty brow and jewish tendencies. Some still in the shadows, the weight of a legacy not quite pushing down yet. One heart broken, surprisingly cracking your own more than you thought it would. Maybe another altercation like that currently in play, the dice rolling still, unsure when to mete out their joy, or to allow the house to take it down like always. Days of bliss, days of sadness, days of unrest, days of depresion, days of stress, days of leisure... days and days, mostly, all blending into the puree of memory, the nutritious mix of experience.

...but the aftertaste, that weird feeling that makes you wonder what eating really is... That’s the constant conundrum. For life will be good, and life will be bad, but why we keep glutting ourselves is really the rub. (maybe we have nothing else to do).

Yes you caught me at one of those times of wonder, where the loss of one hour of sleep is cheap compared to the attempt to write something... Je ne se qua... Funny? Smart (and not just for snobs sake, but with some actual substance we hope)? Cool (how it sickens me to be a slave to the cheap thrills of hipness)? Or Worthy? Worthy of me when I actually care and put effort? worthy of a beautiful incredible person with high standards, worthy enough to break her time (and professionally) engrained jadedness, maybe create something to feel that lifepleasurespark that lets you see the schooner inside the flourescent jagged "magic puzzle" that is life.

I saw your profile on friendster a bit back and thought of you. I havent put a testimonial on this one, and even though I no longer really use these social networking sites as much as when their newness was addicting, I felt the urge to write some trashy line like: if you ever have a chance to have a threesome with lauren and a hot N.A.P. (nubian amer. Princess), don't for the life of you, turn it down in a fit self righteousness.

But that was really just a baiting line to get into our sexual tensions conversation... Why did we never hook up? I always feared that the reality of us carnally could never live up to the fantasy, that it would tarnish that beautiful energy that magnetized us into being more interesting around each other. So many oblique chances, each one charging up the battery a bit
more, a bit more, the danger of ruining something good also tinging the mix with the exciting element of danger...

And now. now its too late. 3000 miles and a friendship later, and the energy is just on temporal freeze, too volatile to reawaken. We'll write witty emails, talk about our current lovers, be amazed as time flies, have good food when in the same geographic vicinity, wonder why life is the way it is... Plato would be proud.

Lauren. thank you. for being my friend, for almost being my lover. for giving me the most unique relationship i have with a female. the love that could always be, so hence never really was... a friendship to cherish.

sorry for the weirdness of this rant. to steal a line from wilde, i would have made this shorter, but i just didn't have the time. as i said, you caught me in the precise moment that would expunge this strange letter out of me. made me stay up til 3am, (about last night
alo helped, god, mamet, even when basterized into an 80s date movie, is so good). and now its two days later and i will finally send this.

hope all is well, that you are enjoying the criterion collection, and that the sophomore slump of life isn't hitting you as bas as me.

your friend,

.dustin barnet stephens aguilar alvarez.


i wish i could speak in this calibre of verbiage all the time. or maybe its not even that good and i'm just being a narcissitic A-hole. whatever, life is bigger than what we think of ourselves.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

i love being a new yorker.

being a new yorker means that you get pissed when the cab driver turns on 96th to go accross town when he should have just turned on 97th, fucker trying to jack up the fare with an extra light.

being a new yorker means you take a special delight in pulling the ultradiagonal accross
the avenue and the street.

it means knowing the aural (not oral you dip shit) difference between the express and the local, allowing you to sit on your bench and smirk as the non nyer gets up to check.

it means knowing where you have to be on the departing track to come out right at your escalator on the arrival side.

to quench the ravenous drunkhunger with the best pizza this side of the atlantic, 4am style.

to make love in the shadow of the empire state building.

chilling on a rooftop on a hot summer's day, enjoying the delicious breeze, while your buddy grills you a hotdog.

catching every movie before it comes out, every play as it premiers, every band that goes on tour, all the best operas, whatever type of crazy dance you're into, basically, every single form of entertainment show conceived by man woman or child, mostly ahead of the rest of the silly world.

did i mention all the art, hansel-hot or balls-deep cultural?

or having the culinary diaspora of the entire globe feed you till your heart's content?

yes. i'll say it again, i love being a new yorker.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Like Woody Allen keeps saying, sophocles said that it might have been better to not be born at all.

there are days when i can only whole heartedly agree.

when the repetitive pointlessness of the day to day grind just pulverizes my will to keep trying, and keep trying, and keep striving, and for what? for more grind? for the illusive and only recently imagined pursuit of happiness?

it's such a weird cloud that sickness and slight depression can put upon you. it can really seem that bleak and black and white... you can forget all those great moments you've lived... the times where you were so happy you could take a chunk out of the sky...

i think i should start enumerating the long list of great times i've had. Somtheing like Dustin's Hall Of Fame Moments. Just for rainy days where you can't see the forest of bliss because of those fucking black cloud trees.

The only problem comes from this slippery act of writing. i have these crazy memories, just dying to be immortalized in print/html, but the mind fogs and exagerates, twists and morphs with time... and when typing time finally hits, the urge to up the ante with the style takes over, suddenly horniness is concupiscence, simplicity gets florid, all to succumb under the iron glove of The Cool. I wish i could just regurgitate straight as it happens, but i guess physics proved that as soon as you measure anything, just the fact that you looked chaneges the measurement. so i must accept it and try to put it down as honestly as i can.


okay, just a quickie because i really must get to bed.

junior year, i went to audition for a crazy sounding play, Rebirth In The Third Person, and read the cold reading script, and understood exactly how to read it. I just felt the character (it ended up being very close to being me), and just red with confidence, fully in the role.

but that's not the best part, the great feeling comes from the smiles. You know, The Smiles, fron the auditioneers, the people watching and watching, hoping to find that perfect fit... and the smiles they get when the see you and know... and then i know, i just feel it. I'm going to get that part. Ah, nothing like that.

so just remember that, Dustin. Just remember that there are countless more moments like those yet to come, if you just roll through some of the hiccups.
i've never broken a bone.