Author: Pavowski

I am a teacher, runner, father, and husband. I am an author-in-progress. I'm bad at jiu-jitsu. I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into a lot of trouble.

The War On The War On The War On Christmas

Pavowski14 Comments

Two things:

  1. Christmas is not under attack.
  2. Even if it were under attack, there are few things in our society so likely to survive an attack as Christmas.

Still, you can’t swing a pixelated cat this season without running into something like this:

Which, holy crap, is awesome. But frightening. But mostly hilarious and awesome.

The opening salvos in the perennial “war on Christmas” sounded a few weeks ago, when Starbucks had the gall to roll out a “holiday” cup design that had a little less vaguely Christmas-themed adornment than in years past. The valiant defenders of Christendom and Christmas quickly recognized the slight and wasted no time returning fire upon the hapless soldiers on the front line: the poor and uninterested baristas who put the cups into their hands. Which is a little like if I, upset over all the prematurely wilted spinach I’ve gotten lately from my Kroger, go in and dump a bin full of rotten greens on a bagboy. In classic smug (and most importantly, easily bandwagon-able) fashion, throngs of Christmas crusaders took back the coffee bar by claiming their names were “Merry Christmas”, thus forcing the disinterested twenty-somethings to make the totally-not-Christmasy-at-all red cups absolutely Christmasy.

(Fixed, apparently.)

Still, blink and you might have missed it. Already nobody cares about the cups anymore, much like nobody cares about the religious lunatics who felt slighted by the cups. There is, after all, actual persecution and marginalization happening in the world without entitled yuppies inventing more of it.

But we know what’s coming.

Because Thanksgiving is almost here. And Thanksgiving, for all that most of us look forward to guzzling gravy straight from the boat and possibly embedding our heads inside the cooked turkey’s flavor-cavity (what, am I the only one that starts Thanksgiving dinner that way?), is nothing these days but the red carpet leading up to Christmas’s door. The decorations are going up. The soundtrack at the mall is changing from inane pop music that nobody listens to to the heartwarming Christmas songs none of us listen to. (The previous sentence is correct.) (And seriously, give me Elvis Presley and Burl Ives and keep the rest of the holiday tunes.)

Fox News will cry persecution first. Actually, they probably already have. Then, under pressure from … people, apparently, or maybe just because they see Fox doing it so they feel they should jump in, CNN will “investigate”. Then it’s only a matter of time before the local reporters in your city are standing in front of a nativity scene in your neighborhood, as stony-faced as if they were standing witness at a murder scene, to tell you about the protests outside such and such government building and the pushback from whatever organized blah-blahs. (I seriously got weary in the middle of typing that sentence and just gave up.)

Let’s be honest. Christmas is not under attack. And even if it were, the “attack” means about as much as an army of clowns attacking Fort Knox with toothpicks. Christmas is woven into the thread of our collective national consciousness. Atheists and Jews celebrate Christmas: it’s a good way to feel involved, and it’s too exhausting not to. Christmas is going nowhere. It’s too much a part of who we are.

But neither are the eternally put-upon going anywhere, which means that every year we will have to put up with the rhetoric (and let’s be honest, the whining) of those who feel that the rest of the world is at war with Christmas. And, internet society being what it is, mockers of those who complain about the world being at war with them live for this season too. The War on the War on Christmas is as predictable as December 25th itself.

It’s endlessly amusing to me that in this season which is supposed to be about lifting each other up and expressing warm feelings and charity and giving and vaguely-defined general good will that throngs of idiots will take to the internet and the street and whatever soapbox is to hand to get good and wound up about this invented conflict.

Which is why, this season, we need to declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. All of these people need to go. People are allowed to say “Merry Christmas”. People are allowed to not say it. Government buildings should maybe not decorate themselves in explicit Christian iconography because, you know, that irritating little Constitutional bit about the separation of church and state. But that doesn’t stop you from decorating your house, or from going out and seeing other houses decorated, or from going to the mall and wading around in the Santa Claus orgy that’s been going on there for weeks. Fargoing live and let live.

But of course, that also means that we need to stop giving attention to the squawkers who ridicule the idiots getting upset about this stuff in the first place. Live and let live. Just like anything else on TV and in the news: if you don’t watch it and don’t care about it, pretty soon, they’ll stop running it.

So declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. Ignore all the hate-babble and go and have yourself a merry little whatever.

Just make sure you spend lots of money.

That’s the real reason for the season.

That, and Rambo Jesus. Sorry. I just had to post it again.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.

Toddler Life, Chapter 331: Dinner Plans

Pavowski2 Comments

Parenting is nothing if not a slow ceding of control over your own life to humans less than half your size. You think you’ve got things more or less figured out, and then along come the sprouts and you realize that not only is the world not what you thought it was, but it’s incredibly and ridiculously more dangerous than you thought. I personally can no longer do the dishes without keeping a wary eye on the upturned silverware on the tray in the dishwasher. Incidentally, you also learn just how slippery certain surfaces can become when covered in chocolate milk or melted popsicle or (and this is happening alarmingly often of late) toddler vomit.

Control slips away by degrees.

First, it’s sleep — you are now slave to the sleep schedule of somebody who has no need for an alarm clock to wake up at 4 AM or earlier.

Then, it’s evening entertainment — gone are the days of late (or even evening) movies. Banished are quiet dinner dates. No more can you even enjoy a leisurely glass of wine while cooking. The rugrats steal all this away in great grabbing gusts.

But there was another milestone, another reckoning of just how far we’ve fallen, and it’s come over the past few weeks, because our oldest has started to develop a taste and preference for certain foods. Pizza is a big hit, though he knows he can’t have it all the time. Grilled cheese is a several-times-a-week favorite.

But you know the toddlers are running the house when you’re having bacon and eggs and pancakes for dinner on a Wednesday.

Respectable adult life, I hardly knew ye.

wtf wordpress?

Pavowski7 Comments

Why, when wordpress redesigns their drafting page, do they always get rid of the word counter down at the bottom? And why does the drafting box always shrink?

The word counter is a thing I’m constantly concerned with (because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but like faculty meetings at my school, I tend to run a little bit long). Especially for my fiction, which I’m working on getting tighter, but for my everyday posts, I’m making an effort to keep things concise. Wasted words are wasted time, and I don’t like wasting my time or anybody’s who reads the site. Without that counter, I can feel myself (already even within this post, and the parentheticals aren’t helping) adding words in one after another just by dint of the fact that nobody’s there to stop me, and no word counter is there to shame me.

And the layout. I swear, the webpage is using about 50% of my monitor’s horizontal space to display the text box, with great blank swathes down either side of the page, like they mowed the center of the yard down nice and neat but left the sides on “jungle” setting. Add in the toolbar creeping from the top and I can see my words taking up about 33% of the available space.

33% of the space, when the words are all I care about.

Did I accidentally tweak a setting? Or has wordpress just “fixed” my “problems” for me?

Science Sunday with the Mythbusters

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I’m a big nerd.

I dunno if you know this or not.

I love science fiction, astronomy, physics… I can’t get enough. I subscribe to Crash Course Astronomy on youtube. I am counting the days to the new Star Wars movie. So I guess it was inevitable that I would love a show like Mythbusters, which takes a scientific look at everyday turns of phrase and bits of movie magic to see if there’s any actual truth to them.

After filming their final season, the show’s hosts have been on a tour lately, doing speaking engagements and sharing some of their favorite moments about the show around the country.

Last night, they were in Atlanta.

And because my wife is awesome, she got me tickets to the show for my birthday back in July.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the show is a little nichey; that while it has its fans, it’s probably not widespread enough in popularity for most people to even be familiar with it outside of maybe seeing a rerun of it on the weekend. Still, they basically sold out the Fox theatre in downtown Atlanta. Further, the audience was wonderfully diverse: people of all ages and all ethnicities filled the rows, but maybe more impressive were the families, especially those with kids as young as six or seven. And I will happily admit that I spent the bulk of the show with a big dumb fangirly grin plastered to my face.

Still, I didn’t know exactly what the show was all about. I thought they’d show some clips from the TV show, answer a few questions, maybe do a few live demonstrations. But it was a lot more than that.

The show was full of lovely little moments. My heart warmed when they called their first volunteer up onto the stage — an eleven year old girl — who proudly proclaimed that math was her favorite subject in school. Adam talked about some experiments they had run but never been able to use on the show, like a ridiculously explosive, easily accessible chemical that they are forbidden to disclose, and a lab rat that turned cannibal during a food experiment. The usually stoic Jaime got emotional when asked about his most frightening moment on the show.

Simply awesome.

(My brother and I are about thirty rows back on the left.) You can tell based on my formless face-shaped dome head.)

But what I really want to talk about is Adam Savage.

Adam Savage is one of the nerdiest nerds around, putting a gusto and chutzpah into his geekiness that’s really enviable for a more low-key geek such as myself. While I expected to see a few neato science experiments and hear a few funny stories about being on the set (and there was certainly plenty of that), what really resonated with me was the opening moments of the night, wherein Adam told some stories about growing up geeky and what led him to the sort of thinking and experimentation and self-instruction that would eventually lead to a career doing special effects for movies and television and web series about science.

Being the big nerd that I am, I whipped out my pencil and notepad and began scribbling.

Out of the evening, I came away with a list of reading material that I need to look into (100 Years of Solitude, and the works of Raymond Chandler) and some lovely poignant aphorisms about science in particular and learning and being human in general. They were even, believe it or not, applicable to writing. So I thought I’d share a few of them here.

  1. The deeper you go, the harder it gets. Adam told a story about learning to juggle, starting with the absolute basics and eventually undertaking to learn tricks. At first, the gains and improvements came quickly and readily, and he was able to master new facets of the skill every couple of days. (As a fellow novice juggler, I can certainly identify.) But very quickly, you come up against a wall beyond which the improvements become harder to achieve. While he mastered basic juggling in under a week, it took him well over two weeks to master even a few simple tricks, and he found he simply didn’t have the drive or the time needed to undertake it further. As a result, he’s a decent if not impressive juggler. And, well, that’s like writing, or hell, like anything really, innit? Anybody can do it, anybody can undertake to string sentences together and even craft a narrative. But if you want to be good, if you want to impress people with your talent, well, you’ve got to slay a whole other sort of beast. You’ve got to live and breathe with your work for long months and years, you’ve got to study, practice, think about language, try and fail in a thousand different ways. In short, you have to put in the miles. I’d wager that most would-be writers don’t have the gumption to do that. It remains to be seen whether I do.
  2. The Champion of one notch above mediocrity. As a result of all this, he became just barely decent at a lot of things: he had fascination with tons and tons of different skills and ideas, but didn’t have the follow-through to devote himself to get really good at any one thing. As a result, he was seasoned in lots of areas and knew a little bit about a lot of subjects, but never became an expert in any of them. I think we could all take a page from that book. There’s value in trying lots of things, even things you don’t expect to plumb the depths of (see my collection of Flash Fiction for examples). Out of those tiny forays comes growth, comes a broadening of the experience.
  3. Failure is always an option. If you watch Mythbusters, you’re familiar with this little epithet already; rare is the episode that doesn’t feature an experiment blowing up — sometimes literally, often dramatically — in their faces. But this isn’t a setback. In fact, they seek this moment because if you simply skate through an experience and everything goes to plan, you maybe enjoy a bit of success, but you don’t really learn much. Failure, however, is a fantastic and ruthless teacher; nothing teaches you how not to suck like picking over the charred and smoldering remains of your failed forays beyond mediocrity. Unless you failed at skydiving. No second chances in skydiving.
  4. Art and science are just two different kinds of storytelling. This one shook me to my core. I like to think there’s something magical and even otherworldly about storytelling, in the artistry of a nicely turned phrase, the cleverness of a well-tuned plot. But as with so many things, the moment I sat down to think about it, the pieces started sliding into focus like a Magic Eye painting. Stories tell us why people do the things they do. Science tells us why the world is the way it is. We love art because it speaks to worlds and people and emotions that might be, and we love science because it shows us the magical things we never knew about the world we currently inhabit. Furthermore, I don’t think you can have a good story without science — even if it’s just the inexact science of human interaction — nor can you have good science without a bit of art — the elegant organization and tracking of variables, the spiraling recursion of repeatability.

I’ve gone on enough, but suffice it to say that while I went to the show expecting a bit of fun, I came home with a whole new respect for a show I once thought of merely as a diversion.

 

Elvis is Everywhere

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The radio chirped out an all-call, and Officer Barkley shifted his grease-paper wrapped double cheeseburger from one hand to the other to scoop up the comm.

“This is car 57, go ahead.”

“211S in progress, Third and Main.”

Robbery. Bank robbery, most likely; there were about a dozen banks and ATMs in the strip-mall on that block. It had been a while since Barkley had gotten involved in more than a traffic stop; a byproduct of his recent return to field work after his injury apprehending a murder suspect five months ago. He cut his eyes at his partner, a new recruit by the name of Presley, who nodded curtly and switched on the sirens.

“Car 57 responding. Details on the suspect?”

There was a hesitation on the other end of the line. “It’s, uh… it’s Elvis.”

Barkley’s heart caught in his throat. “Viva Las Vegas,” he muttered.

#

Sandra hit the street and immediately broke out in a sweat, and only partially because of the two hundred thousand dollars she’d managed to shove in her gunny sack. It was a hundred and six degrees out, and the bejeweled jumpsuit and pompadour wig she sported were not what you could call forgiving in the heat. She snapped her sunglasses down and cast about in something closing in on panic. The shrill trilling alarm from the bank was a dead giveaway; pedestrians were parting around her like a boulder in a stream.

The streets should have been flooded by now; maybe one of the performances had run long. A siren rose in the distance; she only had a few minutes. She’d shoved the pistol into the waistband of her rhinestoned white pants, but there was nothing for it; she grabbed it and dashed up the sidewalk, ignoring the panicked cries of the passersby.

#

“There he is,” Presley said, jabbing a finger at the windshield.

Barkley followed her finger; sure enough, there went the King, white jumpsuit and all, running against the flow of traffic and scattering people in his wake. Hard to tell at this distance, but he could have been carrying a gun. Barkley gunned the engine and the car lurched onto the curb, scattering overweight gamblers in Hawaiian shirts.

“Go,” Barkley said.

Presley jumped out of the car and ran after the King, shouting for him to stop. But it was no good; the confused pedestrians parted in front of the suspect and then swarmed behind him with cell phones trying to catch a picture, getting in Presley’s way. Barkley dropped the cruiser back in gear and took off.

#

The cool air of the hotel lobby hit her like an Arctic blast, icing a bead of sweat oozing out under her wig. In front of her, a sign: Jailhouse Convention, ballroom C. Sandra threw a glance over her shoulder; the copy was closing, about fifty yards behind. To punctuate the situation, the door crashed open, and a shrill “STOP! Police!” rang out through the lobby. But there were too many people around for the cop to get a shot. Sandra kept running.

She flew down the disjointedly patterned carpet with her gun in one hand and her sackful of cash in the other, bills fluttering to the floor in her wake like startled butterflies, scattering hotel guests like spilled jellybeans to the left and the right. Here and there, pompadours and oversized sunglasses and bellbottomed jumpsuits turned to watch the commotion. At the end of the hall, a brass sign for ballroom C floated above a set of double doors. She kicked them open and charged into the throng of startled Elvis impersonators.

“BOMB!” She shouted.

The gyrating speaker on the stage dropped the mic and pandemonium broke out. Sequins scattered. A few hundred hunks of burnin’ love ran in all directions. Sandra yanked her wig off, shed her jumpsuit, and stole through a side exit.

#

To the tune of dozens of fire alarms, a flood of Elvises erupted from the rear exit of the building. They broke around the squad car and officer Barkley, who waited patiently with his weapon drawn on the door. Finally, under the cover of three particularly rotund impersonators, she slipped out, cutting immediately down the side street.

“Sandra,” he said.

She froze. Didn’t turn, just sighed and ran a hand through her hair, matted and lank with sweat from its stint under a wig cap. “Hank.”

“Didn’t think you’d actually do it.”

“Didn’t think you’d remember.”

She turned toward him then, caught him with her eyes. She was still beautiful, dammit. Moreso than she’d been when they were together, if that were possible.

“Your partner’s not so bright,” she said. “Looking for me in the midst of all that.” She flicked her head carelessly back toward the throng. You never saw so many blue suede shoes.

“Presley’s new.”

She laughed. “Guess it’s just you and me, then. So what’s it gonna be?” A wicked grin twisted her lip. “Are you lonesome tonight?”

Barkley swallowed hard. It had been a crap year on the force. He’d probably never make captain now, not with a bullet in his leg and a limp to match. Judging from the size of the bag she was carrying, she had at least a hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. His hound dog eyes rolled wearily across her, remembering the years together, the heartbreak, the bridges, the troubled waters.

The wind went out of him, and he lowered his gun. With a knowing look, she tossed him her wig and jumpsuit. It was big on her, but on Barkley, it would fit just about right. Unless… “Have you put on weight since I saw you last?”

He scowled. “I’m flushing my career, I’d like a little less conversation out of you.”

At that, she cackled. “Come on honey. Don’t be cruel.” And she grabbed his hand and guided him out of the alleyway.

#######

Chuck’s challenge this week is the perennial random song title challenge: my song was “Elvis is Everywhere” by Mojo Nixon. I’d apologize for all the song title puns in the story, but I’m actually not at all sorry.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Photo taken by Paul Smith for http://www.apepta.co.uk and kindly supplied by Martin Fox at http://www.elvis2k.co.uk