Month: July 2014

Stop Upgrading and Start Improving

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Why is tech moving backwards?

Okay, obviously most tech is moving forwards at astronomical speeds.  You compare technological advances over the last fifty years with technological advances over the previous several millenia and it’s not even worth starting the stopwatch.  We are making newer, better, faster gadgets faster than we can figure out what to do with the old ones.  It’s a good thing, as tech magazines and websites and tech advertisers will be the first to tell you.

But then you look at something like Google Glass.  Here’s the height of technology being developed by a giant of the industry, but the idea of strapping a computer to your face didn’t get shot down in the spitballing phase?  We’re a country where automobile accidents are one of the leading causes of death, and Google wants to enable Mikey McMerkerson to livestream the NFL draft or the latest episode of Nasty Housewives of Nashville or whatever else while he’s cruising down the freeway at ninety miles per hour?  Sure, right, they’ll say that the technology is not meant to be used while driving, and that’s fantastic and all, but their little admonition makes about as much difference as that “No U-Turn” sign in front of my neighborhood.  Sharknado, everybody and their brother knows that texting and driving is one of the most efficient ways to accordion your Corolla, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it.  I don’t even have to tell you to take a look around you at the next traffic light you come to, or to sneak a peek at the land cruiser zipping past you on the freeway.  You already know what those drivers are doing.  You put that technology out there, it’s going to be misused, and if Americans have demonstrated one thing through the outbreak of obesity and a movement that thinks eliminating vaccinations is a good idea, it’s that we need protecting from our fargoing selves.  Creating the next, newest, best bit of technology with the brightest flashing lights and the fastest clicking clickers and the longest electrical dongles is no longer worth doing for its own sake.  Comes a point when technology does not need significant improvement, and we need to stop pretending that it does.

Case in point, I had two bits of technology catastrophically fail on me today, one a fairly indispensable staple, the other a trifle, but both together have my blood boiling.  (Yeah, yeah, first world problems, whatever.)

First, the phone.  I’ll preface that about a year ago, my phone dies and it was under warranty and they replaced it.  Okay, nothing’s perfect in this world, the warranty worked, it was all good.  (For the curious, I took the phone on a long run in the summertime, and when I got back, the phone’s display didn’t want to work anymore.  Since it’s a shiny smartphone that only functions through its screen, the phone had become a sharknadoey electrical brick.)  Today, I’m using the phone to catch up on some scores from yesterday’s sporting matches and look at some facebook pictures — YOU KNOW, REALLY TAXING STUFF THAT PHONES ARE NOT DESIGNED TO HANDLE — and it just goes dark.  Total failure, identical to the one I had a year ago.  I fiddle and tinker, but it’s not coming back.  I call up the dealer and I’m informed that the product is out of warranty, but would I like to sign up for their new plan and get a new smartphone every 18 months for free today?  It will only cost an extra $20-30 per month depending on the model I choose.  Yeah, no thanks, I’d prefer it if you’d a) stand by the product that you manufacture and distribute and replace it, given that there is obviously something wrong with that model, or b) manufacture a decent goldfingered product in the first place that doesn’t crap out at, what, the nine-month mark?  But I’m getting onto the cell phone companies now, and that’s not my focus.  My focus is the phone.

I’m of that magical generation that saw the first widespread use of cellphones during my formative years.  Hell, I’m of that generation where the cool kids had pagers in high school, so the cell phones of today are nothing short of monkey-math miracles.

But are they really?  The first phone I had was one of those Nokia jobs that everybody born before 1995 recognizes, the little gray brick with a keypad and the calculator display.  It was indestructible, it could run for seven and a half days without needing a charge, it played the best game ever (MOTHERFARGOING SNAKE AM I RIGHT).  My phone today runs for about 16 hours before it needs charging — that’s if I’m not using it much during the day — and it breaks when the East wind blows, apparently.  THIS IS AN UPGRADE.  And yeah, it’ll check my e-mail and my facebook and let me take pictures and post my dinner to instagram, and that’s nice, but THAT’S NOT WHAT A PHONE IS DESIGNED TO DO.  I have been on the smartphone train for about a year and a half, and I am starting to wonder if this is the station where I get off.

The other bit of technology was my tablet, a Nexus 7 which today decided that life was too hard and pooped itself in a cloud of unintelligible technicolor dots and squiggles run across its display.  Again, I was using it to — brace yourself — browse the net at the time, which, I’m sorry, should hardly force it to break a sweat, let alone overload its tiny little robot brain, but there you have it.  The tablet crapping out isn’t the pulled hamstring that the phone is, but it’s an annoyance, and happening as it did on the same day — in fact in the same morning — it felt downright conspiratorial.  And again, it makes me wonder how much I need the tablet to do things that, in all fairness, I can do on the laptop with slightly less portability and convenience.

I love technology, I really do.  But it feels like more and more it’s designed to be disposable, and that’s a thing which just strikes me as completely backward.  We don’t need a brand new iPhone model to drop every year (and for that matter, we damn sure don’t need to be camping out overnight for days to get it — what is wrong with us [just to clarify, by us I mean people who actually do that crap, which does not and never will include me]).  What we need is technology that enriches our lives and that can be depended upon.  Like that goldfingered little gray brick of a phone.  How I miss her sometimes.

Off on the Wrong Tooth

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This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/04/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-514/

Here’s something new: a flash fiction with zero editing.  I don’t think this is an experiment I’ll recreate.  Interestingly, not my first flash that centers on a job interview.  The casual observer might read something into that, but I would remind you that things don’t always have to mean things.

Anyway…

As I said, zero editing on this one, just let it flow from top to bottom.  So please know there are things that I would change now that it’s done!

 

Off on the Wrong Tooth

The subtle aroma of a dead body was one you never quite got used to, but Penny was making a good effort.

The drawers of the morgue each concealed one victim after another of the person they were calling “The Dentist” in a really unfortunate blow for her profession, one which was already subject to more irrational fears than Penny felt was particularly fair.  For a woman of her stature, she’d been shocked to find grown men terrified to sit in her chair, yet they had turned out to be the norm.  After fifteen years, she’d gotten used to people being terrified of her.  She could make a routine cleaning seem as if it were the only thing standing between you and a total overnight rotting from head to toe, but only did so on those rare occasions.  Most of the time she was actually very pleasant, and tried to communicate it by wearing scrubs dotted with smiley faces or smiling puppies.

Today, though, on this particular consult, she was all business: gray trousers, gray blazer, white blouse, black-rimmed spectacles.  Penny was here to prove a point, but appearances must be maintained.  These were dead people, after all.  Using the tips of her fingers to pull the dead man’s chin down, she peered into his vacuous maw.  Vacuous wasn’t a word she used to describe mouths, not usually, but the complete absence of teeth had an effect upon her.  As if she had returned home and found all of her furniture moved a few inches to the left, the absence of teeth made her feel violated somehow.

Still, she had nothing useful to say to the faces that surrounded her, a fact that made her feel sillier and sillier the longer she kept it to herself.  The teeth were gone, yes, and some of the victims showed signs of gum decay and general poor oral hygiene, while others might have been impressive specimens, had they of course had their teeth in the proper place.  She snapped off her gloves and pushed her headlamp back over her hair.

“Expert removal,” she said, “though the tools were crude.  Probably automotive pliers, as you can see from the scarring on the gums.  No anaesthetic, either.”  She pointed at the victim’s mouth as if this would hold some meaning for the detectives.

“Automotive pliers?” the shorter man asked her.

“Sure,” Penny replied, shrugging her shoulders.  She couldn’t work out what it meant and she hoped to god they would pick up on that.  “About a five inch, from the look of it.”

The detectives shared a shrewd glance.

“What?”

The taller one raised a skeptical eyebrow.  “How’d you know that?”

Penny sighed.  Explaining the obvious was exhausting.  “The span of the bruise here.  Also, anything smaller and you can’t get enough leverage.  Anything bigger and you can’t get the proper grip.”

They frowned and nodded and wrote notes on their little pads.  That information hadn’t been in the news; asking her had been a test.

Their jotting infuriated her.  “Guys,” she said, “For the thirtieth time.  I’m a dentist, not a detective.”

The short detective shrugged and stuffed his pad in his pocket.  “Awfully observant for a dentist.”

The taller one nodded.  “We all have to moonlight.  PI jobs don’t pay the bills, I get it.”

She ran a hand through her hair, tugging her headlamp off and tossing it on the exam table by the dead man’s foot.  “You got the wrong number when you called my office.  Just like the dozen times before this time.”

“Not a lot of Penelope Krelbornes in the book,” the shorter one said.  “Hard mistake to make.”

Yet they’d made it, and kept making it.  She’d rebuffed them so many times it was getting comical; she had finally agreed to consult on a case so that she could convince them she was Penny Krelborne, DDS, and not Penny Krelborne, PI.  How was she to know that this would be the one case she could solve?

“We’ve got a list of suspects,” the taller one said.  “Anything else you can tell us?”

Penelope threw her hands up.  “Jesus Christ, guys.  I don’t know.  The one with the worst teeth?”  She collected her bag and stormed out.  And they didn’t call her again.  Until they caught The Dentist and called her up to give her an award for meritorious service.

**

“And that,” Penny finished, doing her best to mute her pride, “is how I accidentally caught a serial killer.”

The interviewer narrowed his eyes at her, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose in a gesture that made her think he might have the kind of grip strength to strangle somebody.  She didn’t think he was violent, that was just the way she thought now.  He cleared his throat.  “But you do still practice, right?”

Penny bit the inside of her cheek.  All her credentials, an incidental murder solved, and it still wasn’t enough for this man.  Were women ever going to get a fair shake?

“Enough to tell that you need a new crown on your lower lateral incisor.”

He blinked, and removed his glasses.  “You really solved that case?”

With great resignation, she nodded.

He shrugged.  “You’re hired.”

It’s Over

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Remember in the Looney Tunes how Wile E. Coyote would go chasing the Roadrunner all over creation? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? (If you don’t, please feel free to exit the ride.) And then the Roadrunner would take a turn really quickly or leap a great chasm and the Coyote would miss it and just keep running straight off the end of the cliff, but as long as he didn’t look down — as long as he wasn’t aware of his mortal peril — he was okay. I think I can identify with the poor guy.

The first draft is done. It’s over. Finished. Put a fork in it. Aaand I pretty much hate it. Like, I’m fairly certain it’s among the worst things ever written, and I’ve read Twilight.  For all the reviewing I do at the start of every writing session, for all the time I spend thinking about the damn thing, I feel as if I’ve had a bit of Luke Skywalker tunnel-vision (stay on target) on it for the last month or so, and I’ve been so focused on catching the Roadrunner I hadn’t noticed that I’d gone over the edge of the cliff.  But now the chase is over — Roadrunner escaped, naturally, otherwise I’d be looking at a perfect draft — and it feels like there’s nothing left for me to do but look down so that I can get on with the business of falling to my death.

Is this how it’s supposed to feel??

Four months have gone into this project.  Four months of writing over 900 words a day, five days a week, and I NEVER MISSED A DAY outside of the week I took off when my daughter was born.  The commitment, back when I first made it, was a ludicrous one; the fact that I followed through leads me to believe that I’m actually living in a parallel universe right now, like somehow I skewed off from a reality wherein I should have crashed and burned and wound up in this altered state where I diverged and finished the mission.  It shouldn’t have happened so cleanly, so efficiently, so very on schedule.  That’s not how I operate.  IT’S ALL WRONG.  And yet I have it.  Backed up in three different locations, saved in three different formats, it’s now for all intents and purposes done.  I expected to hear choirs of mothertrucking angels on LSD, I expected an euphoric lightheadedness, I expected to literally step onto a beam of sunshine and sail off into the ether when I finished this thing.  Instead, I feel like I’m about to step in front of a firing squad.

Don’t get me wrong.  The sense of accomplishment is there.  It’s impossible, I think, to write ninety thousand words and not feel a sense of “well, I definitely did that” about it.  And I do feel good about the story I’ve written… in general.  I’m pleased with the way the conflicts unfolded, with the way (most of) the characters developed, with (a fair chunk of) the prose.  But there are holes.  Good god almighty, are there holes.  Let me count the ways.

I’m pretty sure any semblance of a voice that I had in writing the thing dissolved after the first act.  I wrote the beginning of the thing with great swagger and confidence, having a grand old time and chuckling to myself at how clever my bits of prose were.  Everything after that was crawling over broken glass through a minefield.  No room for eloquence. No time for embellishment.  Just raw, ugly, get-the-work-done-and-stay-the-fargo-down boring writing.  I feel like after the first twenty thousand words or so, the thing reads like an instruction manual.  In German.  If you’ve been reading for a while, you might remember that I used to post my favorite passage that I’d written in the day.  I’ve not posted a favorite passage in over a month.  THAT AIN’T COINCIDENCE, COWBOY.

The ending sucks.  It’s really terrible.  I mean, I guess I like what happens but the way I told it, the way I framed it, the way I presented it feels all wrong.  It’s like a Picasso painting, all funny angles and misshapen bits and awkward forced perspective, except I didn’t do it on purpose to make you think, it just came out that way because I’m awful and OH GOD WHY DID I THINK I COULD DO THIS.

Loose ends.  The thing has so many unresolved bits, so many loose ends and characters and plotlines left flapping in the wind that it’s like trying to count the untied shoelaces in a kindergarten class.  And don’t get me started on Velcro, god knows if I could’ve used Velcro on my story it wouldn’t have turned into the Gordian Knot of snarled action that i is.  The thought of tying up those loose ends makes my fingers hurt.

Just thinking about it is enough to make me want to curl up with a bottle of whiskey and drink until the whole thing goes away.  Maybe the best thing that could happen is that I black out and destroy my backups and we forget this whole thing ever happened.  That could work, right?  I honestly hate the draft so much right now.  I hate it for being so bad.  I hate the time I spent on it for being wasted in producing such a monolithic pile of dogsharknado.  And mostly I hate myself for actually thinking this was a thing I might be good at, because I can look at virtually any part of the draft and realize that IT CLEARLY ISN’T.

And yet.

The fact that I hate it gives me pause, because it means I can tell the good from the bad, and that’s worth something, isn’t it?  And the fact that I care that it’s awful is encouraging, because it speaks to a dissatisfaction that is calling out for improvement, and that’s worth something, isn’t it?  I mean, if it were awful and I didn’t hate it, then I might as well just pack it in right now, yeah?  But I don’t feel that.  I hate it and it’s awful but I don’t feel done; in fact I can’t wait to get started on the task of fixing it up so that it doesn’t suck quite so bad.  And that’s worth something, isn’t it?

Mixed feelings, no doubt.  But the draft is done, and that can’t be taken away from me, and that’s a pretty major fargoing accomplishment.  So as much as I hate it, I’m going to cling to that for now and be happy with it.  At least, I’ll try to be happy with it.

Good talk.  More to say about the first draft later, but for now, it’s time to give it some room to breathe so that I don’t feel the urge to accidentally delete / destroy / burn it.

Happy Trail (No, not that kind of happy trail)

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New running resolution: find a way to run on a trail at least once a month.  This is going to be a difficult one for me to keep, for a couple of reasons.

First, and most importantly, is the time it takes.  The nearest trail to me is about a fifteen minute drive.  Now that’s not much, but when you consider that my time is as precious as dolla dolla bills between kids and writing time and occasionally spending some time with the wife, fifteen minutes out and back in addition to the time it takes to actually complete the run makes it a not-insignificant factor.

Second, on a more practical note, is that it’s very very difficult to get a run in by myself lately.  The vast majority of my runs over the summer (and by vast majority I really do mean all but maybe two or three runs in the last six weeks) have been completed from behind the stroller, pushing his highness the sprout around like a sheik on a fancy rickshaw.  (Is that how you spell sheik?  Spellcheck is telling me it’s wrong either way.  Technology!)  Trails are not stroller-friendly, at least not the type of trails I’m talking about.

Third, and most sillily (yep), I have to drive to the trail.  This sort of goes against my zen minimalist philosophy of running, which is that you just step out the front door and go.  Add in a drive to a running location and I might as well be shelling out $20 a month to pound a treadmill into oblivion.  Okay, that’s not a perfect comparison with driving to a trail, but this is really the way my mind works.

So it will be tough to get out there even once a month.  But, ah, trails!  They delight.  Especially for a road warrior like me, there are some things you get from running on a trail that street miles just can’t even touch.

  1. I’m off the roads.  This could be its own list, but being able to complete a run without having to worry about drivers not seeing me and turning me into road pizza gives me more peace of mind than it probably should.  I had no idea how much space that tiny fear was taking up in my mind on every run.  It just evaporates on a trail.
  2. Nature smells nice.  Even just a few miles outside of town, the air changes a bit and it feels easier to breathe.  This is probably because, on the trails in my area at least, I’m surrounded by a literal oxygen factory.
  3. Shade.  Holy god, it’s hot out.  Have you noticed?  90% of the trail I covered today was engulfed in fantastical, splendiferous, glorious shade.  On my typical routes I’m lucky if I see shade for thirty seconds at a time; today, it was the sunlight on me that was the rarity.  Again, this point alone is worth virtually the price of admission in its own right.
  4. The quiet.  There’s so much ambient noise when I run around the suburbs — even in my own neighborhood — that just isn’t there out in the woods.  I don’t feel compelled to plug in headphones to block out the dull roar; rather, I feel like leaving them out entirely.  Wearing headphones in the woods almost seems a sacrilege, like I’m bringing something profane onto hallowed ground.
  5. The workout.  Even the gnarliest of roads won’t give you a hill to climb like the ones I saw today.  My calves and quads are burning just thinking about it.  The ascents and descents are sharp, sudden, and sometimes without warning, and there are rocks and roots to hop over or sidestep, which brings me to the next point:
  6. You can’t tune it out.  I think there’s value in being able to meditate, to detach and unplug and just go on autopilot during a run, and roads are great for that.  Surfaces are (generally) uniform, so you don’t have to watch your feet so much as the oncoming traffic. Generally you can leave your brain at home.  Trails are not nearly so detached.  The rocks and roots and sudden drops and uneven surfaces can send you sprawling in a heartbeat, or twist your ankle if you’re really unlucky.  Each step has to be carefully chosen and plotted, which means you’re always scanning the ground in front of you, plotting the best course.  It sounds like it should be taxing, but it’s actually rather Zen, I think.  You have to be in the moment and incredibly focused, but there’s calm in that.
  7. Spiderwebs.  Aargh running through spiderwebs is the worst and I am pretty sure I still have spiders down my back twelve hours later SERIOUSLY WHAT IS UP WITH ALL THE SPIDERWEBS

Road runs, even runs where I really run like the zombies are chasing me, do not leave me feeling wrecked like I feel today after four miles on the trails at Clinton Nature Preserve.  It was exhausting and invigorating and it reminds me that I really do have to make an effort to leave the roads behind now and then.

Now to run an ice bath for my aching, pummeled feet…

Toddler Life, Chapter 128: Staying with the Grandparents

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Let me preface by saying that I love my son dearly. He is a searing beacon of joyfulness and hope and all things good, and it is my greatest aspiration that I could become half the man he seems to think I am.

But, I am probably going to kill him.

I’m not gonna lie, the kid has it rough right now (as rough as a kid who has everything he could hope for and doesn’t even have to clean up his own room yet can have it, I guess). He’s adjusting to having a baby sister in the house, which has got to be confusing for his tiny lizard brain. He’s also in that “terrible twos” stage where every snack he’s not allowed to have means he’s going to starve to death, every fun thing he’s not allowed to do means he will never have fun again ever in his life, and every moment he’s not surgically attached to my leg or my wife’s is a moment in which there is no happiness in the world (more importantly, the room) for ANYBODY. He is needy, he is demanding, he is a phenomenon of auditory wave production: he can, on demand, produce sounds that are either so loud they have no business emanating from a human who stands knee-high, or sounds that … god, how can it be described? Imagine a mosquito buzzing right next to year, and that mosquito is also scratching its nails down a chalkboard while playing a kazoo off-key and droning in some discordant minor key, “DADDY, WANT POPSICLE”. It’s a sound and a tone that makes me wish I did not have ears. How he learned to produce this tone I have no idea, but HE MUST BE STOPPED. I am sure that if the government could somehow weaponize a toddler’s whine, no military in the world would stand against us for fear of the psychological trauma that the sound can cause.

Luckily, my parents are magnanimous old souls, and they lie to me and tell me that he always behaves fantastically for them, so they agreed that he could stay with them for a night or two.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to foist my child off on his hapless grandparents. They asked for him.

But I’m not here today to write about the kid. No, I’m here to talk about a night without the kid.

Toddlers are like tiny black holes. They drift around, sucking up your energy and time, occasionally throwing toothbrushes into the toilet and sticking lollipops on the backs of the cats. (Black holes do that stuff, right? I may have gotten distracted.) But you can get used to living with just about anything. We can tune out most of his whining. We eat fast and without tasting so that we can finish our meals in less than the time it takes for him to fidget with a few pieces of broccoli and start demanding popsicles so that we can field his tantrum. We step over and around and through the messes he’s left all over the house, somehow having blinded ourselves to them, as if the entire area of the house that is less than six inches above the ground is an enormous SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field (thanks Douglas Adams!). That’s just our life. Every couple of days (…or every couple of weeks) we’ll clean house from all the insanity that he causes, and we live with it.

But tonight, he’s gone. And the house is so wonderfully, terribly peaceful.

There are no tantrums. No screams to go outside. No tugging and yelling to get up and play (“DON’T SIT, DADDY”). No haphazard and wanton destruction of the room: no toys strewn about, no magazines knocked in the floor, no tiny puddles of milk and juice and unidentified sticky substances underfoot.

Have our lives ever been this quiet before?

We went to dinner, my wife and I, taking sprout the second with us in her carrier. I can remember (vaguely) taking sprout the first with us to restaurants, shortly after he was born (in other words, shortly after our Life Before Children — a time so darkly lost in history it can scarcely be remembered), and thinking how stressful it was to eat out with a child. Then he grew to be a toddler and it got even worse. Now? A newborn in a carrier? We’re on vacation! We sat across from one another at dinner, enjoyed a little bit of quiet conversation, and then stopped trying to fill the void and just enjoyed the motherfargoing SILENCE.

Silence. It’s such a simple thing. You never think about it when you have it in spades. Living alone? Early married life? You can have all the silence you like, you can go crazy on it. When you have a kid — a toddler, no less — you begin to forget what silence even means. Silence might as well be Narnia. Mythical. Impossible. Imaginary. You get snippets of it — an hour while the kid naps, a blissful moment while the kid plays in quiet with a new toy, a handful of seconds after you close the door and walk around to the other side of the car — but you don’t get to enjoy it. There is no stretching of the legs, no draining of the tension in the neck, no softening and unclenching of blood vessels or anuses. You live in fear and dread of the next tantrum, the next shout, the next dropped cheerio that turns out to be the next great calamity.

We eat dinner in silence. We drive home in silence. We do the dishes, pick up some toys around the house, get ready for bed, in perfect, blissful silence. It’s glorious. Wondrous. And we miss the kid.

For all the noise and all the messes and all the noise and all the tantrums and all the noise and all the disagreeing and did I mention the noise, the house feels empty without him in it. Were our lives ever this quiet? How did we ever deal with this much quiet?

I am fighting against my basic urges. I am trying to enjoy the time without having to worry about him, without saving him from pitching himself down the stairs or from impaling his eyeball with a fork or from cracking his skull on the coffee table, without listening to his fits and his whining, but I can’t. Something in your DNA wants to have the child near even when having him near makes you want to kill him.

Thanks, mom and dad, for taking the sprout (the terror, the speaker of demands, the destroyer of rooms, the scatterer of toys) for a couple of days. Keep him as long as you want. But not too long. We miss him over here.