It’s hard to get any consistency about my schedule these days, but the words are flowing. I’ve made it easy on myself with my daily goal: I’m only asking myself for 500 words daily, 5 days a week.
But surprise surprise, I’m finding that the “goal” is more like a “limitation”. Just this week, I’ve done:
(Mon – 475 words)
(Tue – 537 words)
(Wed – 570 words)
(Thur – 623 words)
And that’s not trying to write more, that’s just writing where the writing takes me and stopping once I find a decent stopping point. Problem is, it’s getting harder to find good stopping points, because I’m enjoying myself so much.
You’re cruising down the highway, minding your own business, and here comes Speedy McNoTurnSignal . He’s three lanes to the left, but that won’t stop him crossing all three lanes because he needs to exit right now and to hell with you if you’re in his way. Or you’re making your way through a parking lot, you know, attempting not to his pedestrians and to navigate the labyrinthine painted lines (I mean, does it take any qualifications at all before they let you design parking lots? The ones near us seem like they were sketched in crayon at the asylum), when you spot FancyCar McSlappyPants. Fargo the lines, says SlappyPants, I’m going my own way like the car commercials tell me to, as he rips across the lot at 45 mph. Or you’re driving home from the grocery store, trunk full of ice cream and popsicles for the hot summer months, and damned if you’re not caught behind another Faceless One of the Legion of the Brakes. She’ll mosey along the two-lane roads between the store and your house, somehow making all the same turns as you and stopping for an inordinate amount of time at every stop sign, her speed never exceeding — except on those brief and blessed downhills — ten miles below the posted speed limit.
An old adage comes to mind: everybody going faster than you is a maniac, and everybody going slower than you is an idiot.
Regardless of how the bad driver is breaking the law/social decency contract, the root of bad driving seems to stem from one thing: selfishness. It’s more important that I exit right fargoing now than that I let these poor bastards know I’m about to do it.
But just as big a problem — maybe even more of a problem, depending on the situation — is the opposite problem: rather than considering not at all the other drivers on the road, you also have a breed that considers the other driver too much. This is a guy who will brake in the middle of the road, stopping the flow of traffic at a busy intersection, to allow in the poor sap trying to make a left out of that one place that you really shouldn’t be making a left out of to begin with. Or who will come to a full stop on a neighborhood road — cars behind him and all — because I’m approaching the crosswalk with my kids in the stroller and I will cross the road in about twenty seconds. Or who actually observes the yield sign and lets people in when they have the right-of-way,
To that guy, I say: STOP BEING SO NICE.
I get it. You want to be decent to your fellow man. You feel for that guy. Nobody’s going to let him in. You want to make sure the bald dad and his kids can cross the road in peace. (He’s had it hard, after all. Just look at that hairless dome. He deserves a break.) But in “being nice” to me, you kinda make me into the jerk. Because now I have to hurry up to take advantage of your niceness. Or if I can’t hurry, then I’m the jerk who just takes his time while you were trying to be nice.
So. Stop being so nice. Embrace the same bit of common sense I’d recommend to the lunatic drivers. Sometimes you have to let the other man suffer a little.
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“Really, Pav?” I hear you remark. “You’re complaining now about people being too nice on the road?”
*shifts uncomfortably in seat*
“I mean,” you continue, “aren’t you really just looking for things to get upset about at this point?”
*stares out the window*
“For that matter, aren’t there any number of actual, legitimate issues and problems in our society that you could ramble about for the few minutes you could’ve been writing about this crap?”
Yes. Okay? Yes. In particular, I can’t even open a browser window for the last week without getting slapped about the face with news of truly horrible, deplorable human behavior. This Stanford rape case and the collective internet outrage. That gorilla died, and the collective internet outrage. Trump is still a raging idiot lunatic, and collective internet outrage.
I just wanted to think about something else for a little while.
And then I went out in the world and people had the gall to be polite to me.
Sooooo… I’ve been on something of a junior crusade against sugar lately. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my 4-year old had three cavities filled not to very long ago … meh. Reasons aren’t important. I’m giving labels a little more of a look than I used to.
So he asked for waffles this morning (just now, in fact), and, well, you can’t have waffles without syrup. That’d be like driving to Florida with the windows up and the radio off. But wait — syrup is basically JUST sugar, isn’t it? And because of the sugar junior crusade, I peeked at the label:
Problem is, food labels are largely meaningless. Right side: chemicals schmemicals, blah blah blah. High Fructose Corn Syrup is basically the devil’s own heartsblood, yada yada. Whatever. We all eat chemicals, that ain’t my concern (this week).
Sugar: 43 grams. Well, dammit, we’re in America, what’s a gram, anyway? They might as well have said 1/18th the volume of your ear canal. (Herein lies the problem for Americans especially when it comes to this sugar thing: we don’t know what the hell grams are. Turns out the maximum recommended amount of sugar for a grown dude like me is between 40-50 grams. THE MORE YOU KNOW.)
1/4 cup?? Seriously? Who, outside of legitimately handicapped people with no motor control or 4-year-olds out of their parents’ view uses 1/4 cup of syrup for anything?
Ugh. Serving sizes. Grams. Chemicals. This parenting gig … who has the time to look out for everything you’re supposed to look out for?
Books are the lifeblood of the writer. Not just because we traffic in them, But like water, we depend on them. We cannot function without them.
But while water in its purest form is a thing we can’t live without, not all water sustains us. Thirst may be a thing we can’t survive, but if you drink muddy water from a scummy pond, you may soon have worse problems than thirst to deal with. The man marooned on a desert island reaches for seawater to slake his thirst and only hastens his death.
I think part of the reason I’ve been in something of a creative funk lately is because I haven’t been reading as many books — or I’ve been reading the wrong kind of books.
A little while ago, I reached for a book that I thought I was going to love: Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn. Flynn is the author of Gone Girl, which I loved in all its twisted darkness, so I figured another book by the same writer would be a sure thing. So I jumped into the book one night, and I read about twenty pages, and I just wasn’t feeling it. No big deal. I was tired; try it again another night. Tried again a few nights on — still nothing. Thirty pages in, it wasn’t clicking with me.
I should point out that this isn’t a review or an indictment of the book. My wife loved it. But it just wasn’t working for me. Now, I’ve got a stack of books on my bedside table just waiting to be read, but I’m this weird creature. I don’t love reading multiple books at a time. I like to take on one thing, drill through it, and move on to the next. If I read too many things at a time, I get overwhelmed, distracted. Like in that old Missile Defense game, where you’ve got like thirty missiles aimed at your base, and you can only blow up so many of them? That game stresses me out.
My blood pressure is spiking just looking at this picture.
No, I prefer to keep to one book at a time. But I also don’t like to leave things unfinished. So here I was with this book that I wanted to like. But I didn’t like it, so I didn’t want to read it. But because I wasn’t reading it, I couldn’t move on to other books I might have liked more. I had sipped from a scum-covered pond, and I was, as a result, not only thirsty for proper, refreshing water, but convulsing with dysentery in the meantime.
The bad book was clogging my system, and it was making me feel unmotivated and gross and even, stupidly, bad about myself. (Why don’t I like this book? What’s wrong with me?)
It sat there on my bedside table for a month, and I never got past page sixty. Shameful! And at the same time, I was becoming creatively blocked, as well. Unmotivated. Uninspired. Unproductive.
I don’t know what caused the wake-up, but one day I finally decided to dump the bad water out the window. I moved Sharp Objects to the bottom of the pile and picked up Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King instead. (Yeah, I know, I should be pulling my reading material from lesser-knowns, since I’m hoping to become a lesser-known myself soon. What can I say. I suck.)
And what do you know? Within fifteen pages, I’m fascinated and repulsed by the antagonist, frustrated and sympathetic to the protagonist, and before I know it, I’m 45 pages in and my eyes are drooping because I’m up way too late.
And — wonder of wonders — all of a sudden, a day or two after I ditch the bad book and pick up the good book, comes the thunderbolt from the blue that starts me off on my newest jag. (3000 words in so far. Not exactly awesome progress, but as I mentioned yesterday, it’s summer, and my Getting-Things-Done-ometer wobbles like a weasel in a windstorm over the summer.)
So here’s a reminder to myself. Read more good books. Toss out the bad books. Stay inspired and keep fargoing writing.
Also: bookwise is not a word, I was disappointed to find out. But it should be.
This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.
And my wife and I are teachers, so that means we’re doing nothing at all for the next two months! … Because that’s what people believe about teachers, right?
Actually, I try to live as close to that as possible. You see the arguments break out online (because the internet is made of stupid arguments) between people who think teachers just chill over the summer and teachers who retort that they work just as hard over the summer. You know. Professional development. Curriculum planning. Building and organizing.
Hogwash. Summer is for slacking. I’m not saying those teachers don’t exist, but I did not catch that particular brain parasite that compels them to slave through the summer months in preparation for another long slog through another school year. Summer is the time for doing daddy things, like taking kids to playgrounds, to the pool, to the beach, and … maybe some day there will be time for doing some actual daddy things, too.
Problem is, it’s summer, and regardless of whether we’re working or not, we’re not going to work. Which is great, but it sort of screws with the concept of time. We build our schedule around a few set points: This is Monday, this is the working week, this is Friday, this is the weekend. And the workday is likewise punctuated: Here is when you have to get up, here is when you have to leave the house, here is when you need to gird yourself because that class is coming in with that child in it, here is when you go home, here is when you need to be in bed to do it again tomorrow. The routine is regular, necessary, and natural.
And in the summer it disappears entirely. You wake up everyday (or, more correctly, the kids wake you up) and it’s like, “what are we going to do today?” (The answer, of course, is: “The same thing we do every day. Try to take over the world.”) And you sloth around a little, or maybe you even wake up and exercise, and you rustle up some breakfast, and then what? Naptime is a long way off, and these kids aren’t going to entertain themselves, so you cobble something together — a trip to the playground or the pool or, and let’s not get all high and mighty or anything because we all do it, a movie day at the house. Then they sleep, and while they sleep, you try to restore some semblance of order to the house (because the kids have somehow managed to trash it, even if you went out to do something specifically to keep them from trashing the house). Then they’re up again and you have to figure out the afternoon and then dinner, and then you’ve got an hour or so with the wife before, holy crap, it’s bedtime again, and where did the day go?
I feel like I write this post or something very much like it every year, but that’s only because after six years of teaching and four years of daddying I still don’t have it figured out. Getting Sharknado Done over the summer should be easy. With no J.O.B. taking up eight hours of your day, theoretically there should be more than enough time to do anything that needs doing during the day, and a few things that you didn’t even know needed doing. Yet somehow, it feels harder than ever to find time for things like writing, or exercising, or playing fix-it around the house.
Why is that?
Is it just the kids? They expand and spread out like humanoid black holes and engulf time and space and your entire life over the summer?
Is it the lack of routine? The absence of the workday and the order it imposes on your time?
Is it the relative position of the earth and sun? The longer daylight hours tricking you into thinking there’s plenty of time left when in reality there is no more or less time than ever?
Is it the heat? Maybe it’s the heat.
All I know is, it’s hard to get stuff done over the summer. Maybe doubly so for teachers.
We start off summer like this:
And after a week, and for the rest of the summer, it’s like this:
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 