A Very Big If: The Second Anniversary

The Dutch language has a word that is not easily translated into other languages. The word is gezellig, and its closest counterpart in the English language is “cozy”. The Dutch might use the word to describe, for instance, the experience of drifting on a barge down an Amsterdam canal with close friends after a good dinner, watching the sunset.

If this Dutch word sounds familiar, it might be because I invoked the word a year ago, to commemorate the first year of this adventure (and subsequent blog). And I am summoning it again for the second anniversary, as I struggle to describe my gratitude and awe for the profound changes that have swept my life over the past two years.

Recently, I was sitting in the yoga studio in the fifteen minutes before class, reading a sociology textbook about social dilemmas for my new job while enjoying a chocolate mousse baklava and listening to Jamaican steel drum music from the street performer outside.

(If you’ve never heard of chocolate mousse baklava, you’re not alone; it was concocted by a yoga instructor who moonlights as a pastry chef, and often delivers his leftovers to the studio. Every so often, a brand new exotic dessert appears in the yoga studio’s lobby, free to all. This is the sort of thing that occurs frequently in my life.)

And I immediately thought to myself, how strange and unpredictable is this life. It wasn’t that long ago that I was trapped in a cubicle blighted by monitor glare and the smell of printer toner. And now here I was, reading a book I would never read, eating a dessert I’d never heard of, about to engage in an exercise I never thought I’d do.

The word gezellig may not have an English translation, but I have clearly deciphered its meaning over the course of this adventure. It has been two happy and wonderful years, and beyond belief, I still have no real idea when this adventure will end. There is the small twinkling of hope that the sabbatical is not a sabbatical, after all; that somehow, uncannily and unpredictably and indiscernibly: the sabbatical has become my life.

We’ll see.

The Sociologist, The Ecologist, & The Game Designer

At the Bellagio buffet, my friend Matt and I deposit tuna nigiri on our platters.

“You’d better load up your plate, dude,” I tell him.

“Why?”

“Because in a few years, there won’t be any left.”

He was utterly crestfallen.

The sad fact is that tuna is a severely overfished species. We are the last people on earth who will ever eat wild tuna, as opposed to farmed tuna. Sushi chefs in Japan are already experimenting with horse meat, which would have been considered a heretical notion as recently as a few years ago. But overfishing is not just a problem for the world’s fish, but for the world itself; the particularly human tendency to overconsume perfectly renewable natural resources is hardly limited to tuna.

My new job, working with a sociologist and an ecologist from Princeton, is designing an experiment that studies human behavior in an overfishing scenario. Overfishing is obviously not in the interest of the common good, but it is in the interest of the individual good (of fisheries, sushi restaurants, and tuna lovers). The activity itself poses a social dilemma: whether it is better to cooperate with others (and be good stewards of tuna stocks), or to defect (and keep all that delicious tuna for yourself).

The experiment takes the form of a video game, which is where I come in. I originally pitched a game about ninjas defending a village from bandits, but we found it difficult to map this scenario onto the traditional structure of the classic overfishing social dilemma. So the new game is about the symbiotic relationship between parasites and hosts, with parasitic organisms cooperating and competing for the lifeblood of a host organism. I’ve been reading up on cellular biology, reminding myself of the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, the function of mitochondria, and the components of cytoplasm.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about the job so far is the contact with experts from other disciplines. I’ve really enjoyed learning the vocabulary of sociology, and becoming semi-conversant in the discipline. (I never knew what a nonrival good was until a month ago.) And conversely, I’ve enjoyed exposing these academics to the finer points of game design, everything from asynchronous play to presentation layer to the all-important sense of fun.

This project is unique among my prior works because I am working in the realm of very pure design - there are no marketing types, no conventional wisdoms, no trendy jargon. Just the job of designing something beautiful and fun. With the added benefit of making the world a slightly better place.

It’s good to be a game designer again.

The Yoga Personality Test

I have a theory that your favorite yoga poses say a lot about your personality: you like what you are. For instance, my favorite poses are the Warriors, Crow, and Tree, and I have an affinity for all three of those entities.

I haven’t really tested my theory enough to gauge its accuracy, but there it is.

A classmate of mine just recently began taking yoga, and has not developed any show-off moves. But during one class, she busted out a flawless Side Crow on her first try. Bear in mind that I’ve taken over three hundred classes at this point and I still can’t even come close to pulling off that move. My jaw was agape.

Afterwards, she was lamenting her lack of skill at basic poses like Triangle, and I was all like, “B-but you can do FREAKING SIDE CROW, girl! DAAAMMMMNNN!” She had no idea what she had just done.

I don’t know what Side Crow says about my classmate, but consider my curiosity piqued.

The Yoga Beatdown

Practicing the things I’m bad at allows me to become even better at the things I’m good at. That is the lesson I’ve learned during the six months following the departure of my favorite yoga instructor.

As I’ve written previously, my favorite instructor left six months ago to pursue a new love and career on the east coast. Since then, I’ve been rotating among a cadre of various surrogates, concentrating on strengthening the weaker aspects of my practice, shoring up my fundamentals, and acquainting myself with different yoga styles.

It’s been a very productive and educational hiatus from Anusara, the branch of yoga that my favorite instructor taught. I feel stronger than ever, more flexible than ever, more balanced than ever. In short, I feel that I’m ready for whatever comes next.

That would be a class taught by the spiritual successor to my favorite instructor, a woman who was trained by the same master and teaches an advanced Level 2-3 course. For the record, my old instructor taught a Level 1-2.

As soon as the new instructor saw me, she brightened and smiled. She said, “I’m going to write Elsie an e-mail and tell her I saw you. I’ve been meaning to write her.” There’s something quite nostalgic and touching about the idea that even at this age, my teachers are still communicating with each other about my progress as a student.

Class started well enough. Among my specialties are the Warrior poses, because my favorite instructor couldn’t get enough of them, and I practiced long and hard to emulate her form. Sure enough, the new instructor noticed my Warrior One, which is a decent facsimile of the old instructor’s, and said: “Awesome.”

Things quickly went downhill from there. I wrote earlier that this woman was waiting to introduce me to my new pain threshold, and my words were highly prescient. I found that I couldn’t perform a good half of the poses, and I wasn’t alone: students were flopping out left and right. Every pose was either new or a difficult variation of an old pose. At one point, she asked everyone to perform one that no one in the room could duplicate. And then she smiled and said, “We’re just doing this one so everyone can laugh at themselves.” Simply brutal.

The next day I felt a profound fatigue in my body, still present at I type this over twenty-four hours later. My ultimate goal is to take this woman’s class three times a week. I am by no means ready, but I plan on coming back next week.

I would be surprised if she weren’t expecting me.

The Walk

The arrival of spring had endowed Runyon Canyon with thick, new greenery, rendering the park nearly unrecognizable. I had to stop to gather my bearings at multiple points, because I found the newly wild and fecund path to be unfamiliar and strange.

The trail has recently suggested itself as an allegory of the years of my life: the easy stroll of my childhood, leading to the fierce ascent of my twenties, and then the stunning, revelatory vistas of the present day. Fittingly, I used to get winded hiking the park, but now my lungs and legs can easily traverse the hill without upset or complaint.

Runyon Canyon is an off-leash park, so grinning canines roamed the park with glee, willfully ignoring the voices of their masters to sniff at other dogs and root in the dirt. The air was thick with orange butterflies, twirling around in pairs. A hawk circled in the sky above me, the air crackling under the force of of its wings, as it swooped so low I could reach for its tail.

I walked into the park exactly an hour before sunset, which meant that as I climbed to the peak, I saw the entire city from above, thrown into sharp relief by the fading light. The first street lamps had just lit up, jewel-like in their color and radiance. At the top, I paused to remember how overwhelmed I was by Los Angeles when I first moved to the city as a film student, and how tame and pretty and small it seemed in the twilight.

By then, the sky was plummeting into a dark lavender. As I began the climb down, negotiating the sand and rocks and brush, a tall, young woman climbed past, smiling at me. It was a particular kind of smile that I’ve come to recognize from female strangers: the kind of smile that suggests that she knows something you don’t.

At that moment, as with the others, I had to wonder what that something could be.

The Bachelor Party In Vegas

A few notes on last weekend’s trip to Vegas:

1) I really enjoy getting the morning craps lesson from the casino for two reasons: a) there are a lot of bets that can placed on a table, and it’s useful to receive a refresher course, and b) the casino usually drops the minimum bet way down for a half hour after the lesson, in order to keep players around. In our case, the Excalibur dropped the minimum bet from $10 to $3, which makes a huge difference, as I generally like to play with a stake at least twenty times the minimum betting unit. Craps is a very social game, and this particular session was no exception - we stood next to some vocal North Carolina fans, and across the table was a man who splashed chips everywhere while loudly demanding cigarettes.

2) The Daniel Boulud Brasserie at the new Wynn casino. I liked this restaurant. Boulud specializes in unpretentious French food, executed well. I’d go into more detail, but this isn’t a yuppie foodie blog, so go elsewhere if you want to see what vapid rich people are conspicuously consuming. The main attraction at the restaurant is the Lake of Dreams waterfall show on the patio outside. On an evening with good weather, one can sit with a drink before a waterfall and lagoon encircled by a thicket of tall pine trees, everything mood-lit by a shifting palette of colors. Every half hour, the lake comes to life with a different art installation. The shows include everything from a giant dancing kite to a giant animatronic frog lip-syncing “What a Wonderful World”.

3) Ka. This is the Cirque du Soleil’s Asian-inspired circus act, which is notable for both its $150 million rotating and spinning stage, as well as its notable inclusion of an actual (albeit muddled) story, a first for the Vegas institution. The show is breathtaking for the first twenty minutes, but the pace is relentless, and eventually overwhelms. The acrobatic highlight of the show is a set piece in which the heroes are pursued by ninjas swinging and flipping across a vertical rock face. But I found myself taken by the quieter moments of the show: the dream-like illusion of performers swimming beneath the surface of the ocean, and a virtuoso display of shadow hand puppetry, projected large upon a screen.

4) At the Hard Rock Casino’s nightclub Body English, my friend Matt found himself with an involuntary loss of motor control, due to an ill-advised number of shots, and found himself suddenly needing to pause the festivities in order to return to the room and change shirts. His brother Sam found the idea of a celebratory hiatus unacceptable, and came to the rescue, literally offering the shirt off his own back. And so the two brothers doffed their shirts. Inside the nightclub. Many heads turned, and giggles ensued. This may very well have been the first and only time I have ever heard a bouncer raise his walkie-talkie and bark, “Security! I need some muscle on the floor! Right now!” We were already on our way out, so I will never know how that particular conflict might have been resolved.

The World Ends In Early December

Today, Huili and I spent a few hours during our daily conference call finishing the latest iteration of the Pillow Crisis outline. This time feels like the last time, although I am positive I have written these words before. Nonetheless, the outline has improved with every subsequent draft: all unsolved theorems have been proven, all the jigsaw pieces fit together, and the song rocks.

Huili flies from London to Los Angeles in late April. During his visit, we will both take the train up to the setting of our movie, San Francisco, to visit all of the locations in the film, and block out the action sequences. The fact that I have written an entire movie set in San Francisco should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my antipathy for the soulless pretention of the world's greatest outdoor mall, but my reasons will become quite apparent when the screenplay is released to my friends and family.

As a celebration of our completed outline, Huili and I dug into our archives to determine the date we began work on Pillow Crisis. Our curiosity was an entirely morbid one, as we've been working on this movie, off and on, for four-and-a-half years, a fact that never fails to pull us to the brink of despair. The exact date? December 3, 2003.

Which makes Pillow Crisis a Sagittarius, an astrological sign I find highly appropriate, given what the movie is about. The main character of Pillow Crisis is also a Sagittarius, having been born on December 6, and her astrological sign, believe it or not, has been a consistent guide to her personality.

All this pleasant synchronicity gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the movie's prospects.

A Crash Course in Strippers

For the record, my associates and I did not plan on visiting the strip club. The idea arose spontaneously during our tenure at a nearby Las Vegas nightclub, at which I had consumed iced vodka shots. The next thing I knew, we were riding in a stretch Escalade, interior rainbow lights flashing in time to generic hip-hop. The limo deposited us at the entrance of a well-known gentlemen’s club headquartered in New York City.

This would be my very first visit to a strip joint. Inside, I found a central stage and two-story parlor filled with tables. Lapdances were in progress at various tables. Women danced onstage. I was briefly fazed by the amount of nakedness on display.

Once I made my way to the bar, the first thing I noticed was that the strippers were approaching me more frequently than my friends, at a rate approaching four to one. Was it my legendary personal magnetism at work? In point of fact, no. It was a confluence of other, pragmatic factors: 1) I was wearing the most expensive outfit, and one stripper drove home the point by opening my blazer to examine the label, 2) I appeared to be the kind of individual whose hands would behave during a lapdance, and 3) I’m not such a bad-looking guy, which may mitigate the sleaze and guilt factor for the employees, especially when compared to other patrons of the establishment.

Many of these individuals of high standing and character were seated at the center stage, yelling at the ladies, throwing crumpled dollar bills on stage, and being scolded for unsanctioned touching. When the strippers aren’t working the room, they dance on the stage. Stage dancing serves as marketing for lapdancing, a trailer for coming attractions. An announcer calls out specific individuals as if announcing a sporting event, and the ladies burst forth from the curtains, ready to perform. Some are shy, dancing at the periphery with their clothes on. Others shake everything they have in the faces of the audience.

One performer hopped to center stage and dropped a series of exotic and unusual dance moves. My friends asked, “What the hell is she doing?” I was probably the only male in the place who knew the answer: yoga. She moved through a highly non-traditional sequence, hitting all the tough poses, from shoulder stand to upward facing bow. Each pose was unwavering; her transitions were fluid and precise. As impressive as the tits were, the yoga was much more so.

I took a seat at the stage and watched the dancers for a bit. And I while it was very titillating, I thought it was a very different kind of titillation than one finds out in the world. The difference was subtle yet significant.

For the past year or so, I’ve become a humble student of the language of female desire. From eye contact to body language to flirtation to touch, my ability to read a woman has become a small point of pride in recent history. There are very few things I find more captivating than the authentic expression of female desire.

Unfortunately, the strip club is the very last place on earth where you will encounter such expression. Strippers trade in the SIMULATION of female desire, amplified and accelerated to such a degree so as to strain the very limits of verisimilitude. Fake come-ons, fake smiles, and of course, fake body parts are in abundance. The women move closer, they show more teeth, and they touch more frequently than would ever be plausible outside the club. In the world, I make a particular kind of eye contact with a woman, and I know that I am being signaled to come closer. In the strip club, I make eye contact with a woman, and I know that she will be at my side within the next five minutes, all voluptuous pupils and tinted fragrance and soft skin. Fake, but also stronger and faster.

But in order to fully participate in the fantasy the girls are selling you, you must conveniently forget two facts: 1) the strictly transactional nature of the shedding of clothes and subsequent controlled touching, and 2) that the clothing removal and controlled touching are both the beginning and end of the experience. My problem was that I am too smart to forget both. This is not an instance of self-aggrandizement - I’d probably enjoy myself more if I could forget these things.

What is supremely unforgettable is: when you are dealing with non-stripper females (and I lead the kind of life in which the non-strippers outnumber the strippers, thank god) no such constraints exist, and the possibilities for excitement are far greater. To provide a strictly G-rated example, a girl once went wobbly and dropped her things on the floor because I was standing perhaps a bit closer than was absolutely necessary. As hot as a lapdance, if only because it was real. Additionally, if you have the game (and I am not necessarily claiming I do, though I am not necessarily claiming I don’t), the women are no less attractive.

But I am still a male like any other and even I am susceptible to the brute force attack of feminine wiles deployed by strippers. A lovely young pan-Asian woman rubbed my nipple through the fabric of my French-cut shirt, looked me in the eyes, smiled, and said, “You analyze too much.” Ironic that of all the women who could possibly form such a penetrating insight into my very being, it would have to be a stripper. Proof that I can be read as easily as I read others, and that strippers know how to read as well as writers. I might have given her my money on the spot, had one of my compadres not immediately enlisted her services. (Her rate, by the way, was double that of some of the other strippers.)

The most interesting encounter of the night came when I was standing at the bar, watching someone else’s lapdance across the room. A voice came from my side:

“What are you looking at?”

I turned and saw a young woman who, for once, was not smiling. She was staring at me with a certain amount of intensity, and her delivery was deadpan. Immediately, I knew this one was a bit different.

Me: I’m watching somebody else's lapdance. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy one for myself!
Her: (laughs) So where are you from?
Me: Los Angeles. Hollywood.
Her: Ah. I live in Santa Monica, but I was raised in Dallas.
Me: Really? I was raised in Dallas. Which high school did you go to?

Note that we were having a very normal conversation, the kind of conversation that would not be out of place at a college alumni gathering. Never mind the fact that her biography was almost certainly a complete fabrication. One of the things that struck me about this stripper was that she was slipping in and out of character very easily; that is, I could not tell where the stripper ended and the girl began. The effect was one that suggested complexity and intelligence, and I found myself wondering what her non-professional life was like. But I have a lifetime of experience with girls who slip in and out of character, experience that says STAY AWAY FOR YOUR OWN GOOD; so her advantage was nullified by my own. The banter continued:

Her: What brings you to Las Vegas?
Me: Bachelor party.
Her: Who’s the bachelor?
Me: He’s over there. But I've got to warn you, he’s a pretty tough cookie.
Her: They all are. What about you? (Meaningful pause.) I want to take this dress off... for you.

Now I had to admit, that was a pretty good line, and she completely blindsided me with it.

Me: (smiles) Well, I’m probably the toughest cookie in the room.

And I’m no slouch with a good line, either. A moment. She looked at me, appraising me from head to toe. She ran her hand down the lapel of my blazer, adjusting it. And then, looking me in the eye:

"I like what I see. But I have to move on."

And that was that. She turned on her heel and walked away.

First of all, “I like what I see?” The stripper stole my line! And secondly, everything I’ve learned in the past year or so told me that this particular moment was genuine, or as genuine as an exchange between a stripper and a customer could be. Nonetheless, I dismissed it as part of the act, only to be corrected by my writing partner Huili the next day on our daily conference call. Huili’s power to read people outclasses my own at times, and I know this because I learned much of what I know from him.

“You shot her down twice,” he said. “Unambiguously. There’s no reason for her to keep up the act at that point. I think she was giving you a genuine compliment.”

And that is how I walked away from the gentlemen’s club with something no one else got that night. And how my money remained safely in my wallet.

Minus the thirty dollar cover.

Life Happens Faster Than I Can Blog

Big items that all deserve their own posts but won't get them just yet due to the lack of time:

1) I just finished the first draft of Lobsters vs. Butterflies: The Movie today. I have two months to whip this thing into shape for the good people over at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who are once again holding their open screenplay competition. Last time, I placed in the top thirty. This time, I'm entering a better script.

2) Princeton University has hired me to help them design a sociology experiment disguised as a video game. I just finished the first draft of the design document. I am now not only a game designer again, I am a designer of "serious" games. Given that the last game I worked on is about killing lots of people of various non-Caucasian ethnicities, I welcome this new shift in my career.

3) I am getting to the point where I can do a handstand without a wall serving as my safety net. I have muscles in my arms and shoulders that simply didn't exist two years ago.

4) I am about to start taking archery lessons. This is very bad news for all the baby deer. Heed my words, baby deer. Your cruel dominion over this world has come to an end. I will no longer tolerate your malfeasance, and I will not hesitate to defend humanity against the likes of you. You have been warned.

5) I am going to Vegas next week to celebrate the impending marriage of a friend. We're talking dinner at a Michelin one-star French restaurant, the kung-fu ninja Cirque du Soleil show, one dollar craps and blackjack, free drinks, and a suite at the Four Seasons.

6) I thought "A Crash Course in Women" would be an easy means of tiding my readers over during this incredibly busy period. Wrong. It turns out that for every entry in the series that is published, two are scrapped. The whole reason I began writing the series was because I felt that the story was unfolding faster than I could record it, and that I needed to get in front of it. Now my blog is stuck on part four, and my life is up to part nine and counting. My poor blog.

7) Life is pretty cool. And by cool, I mean totally sweet.