Twelve

I recently read some letters written by adults to their young selves. The first thing that struck me about the exercise (which I toyed with a while; might publish it, might not) is how difficult it is, assuming you don't let yourself give spoilers and you consider carefully how your 12-year-old self might have interpreted what you say. A 12-year-old is already well into a period of drastic, rapid change in life, with little or no experience. Nothing I could tell my 12-year-old self that he could have understood or known how to apply would have been anywhere near adequate preparation for what he would be going through. Just gotta live through it, kiddo, stormy as it often is, but while I'm here I can tell you some general things that might comfort and encourage you while you do.

And if we can't even do that very well for ourselves in hindsight...theoretically, we ought to be the ideal parents for our past selves. You know your 12-year-old self hundreds of times better than your parents ever could, and even the parents who are best at communicating with their kids still have to deal with having busy lives of their own. And I doubt any parent and child can ever really see the other outside of their roles. Parents love, manage and protect their children, but it doesn't follow from this that they know their children all that well, especially by the time the child gets to middle school. But in this hypothetical exercise, we have none of those barriers. It's not absolutely transparent, since our memories are distorted in various ways, but no parent or friend or spouse can ever know you anything remotely like you yourself do.

So we ought to pay attention to what grownups would tell their tweenage selves, because they above all would know. What do they tend to say? Most of the essays I read included one particular theme: you're a good kid, believe in yourself, don't let the nastiness of the world you're becoming aware of beat you down, hang in there, it's going to get better. No surprise there. I wrote those things when I tried the exercise, too. Being twelve is just hard.

I do think that our society gets so focused on preparing kids for the prosaic real world we know that we fail to prepare them to be happy or fulfilled. We prepare them to compete by teaching them to judge their worth wholly by comparison with others, to never give themselves credit merely for trying their best or being a good person. Because we have to have STANDARDS, you know. You can't just be happy, peaceful, content. You have to aspire to be someone richer, smarter, prettier, more athletic, more virtuous (by someone else's definition, invariably), more lovable. It's all a game that you either win or lose. You know who thinks that way? 12-year-olds. There's no age at which people are more jealous or insecure or competitive or desperate to be seen well than middle school. Those kids are learning the lessons of the society we brought them into, all right - in fact, they're learning them too well.

Project: Orlando

As longtime readers here know, my initial plan for 2012 was to (mostly) take the year off of Scrabble tournaments. Not from burnout or lack of enjoyment - just wanted to focus on some other things this year. Like music, which I've done a lot of lately.

But this year the Nationals, the annual premier tournament in North America, has added for the first time a division using the larger international word list (CSW - the smaller North American list is usually called OWL or TWL), and I decided last weekend that I really didn't want to miss that, so I signed up. I haven't been practicing the words much this year, so from here until a few days before the tournament will be a cram session. Can already tell I need the refresher - too many words and hooks and anagrams have slipped beyond my easy reach. But I'll be ready enough by August 11, when the tournament starts.

I'm not studying with any particular focus on the CSW-only words - by this point, CSW *is* my native book. I keep the # symbols on, doesn't seem to hurt anything and I do still play some OWL, but I don't pay much attention to them anymore. I usually know whether a word is in the smaller book or not, but it's nice to play CSW and not have to care. Outside of Austin/San Antonio one-days, I can't imagine when I would play another OWL tournament, though if it's just a club or friendly game I don't mind. (And as always, any tournament I direct will have a CSW division if four or more players sign up for it.)

The words are only part of what I'll need. There are the other parts of the game, the strategic elements, though my abilities there haven't really changed in the past few years and won't in the next few weeks. The biggest thing in an event where you compete all day for 4 1/2 days is staying relaxed, focused and confident so your mind can do what you've trained it to do. But trying to force yourself into some heavy-duty mind and body regimen, if you're not already living that way, to accomplish this doesn't make sense to me. I'm not the type to go to these things and ingest nothing but bean sprouts and mineral water and be in bed by 8:30 every night, then wake up and do calisthenics for an hour at 5 every morning. More power to you if you can do that, but it's not me. I do plan to try to go a little more lightly on the heavy meals (especially lunches) and beer, try to get more sleep (hard to do at tournaments, though), get a swim or two in, maybe try doing some studying during the tournament and see if it keeps my neurons better greased. I'm plenty Zen enough at tournaments even as is, so I'm not worried about that. I'll enjoy seeing everybody, as always.