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.

Parenting: It’s Really Not That Hard

Pavowski4 Comments

Our kids go to daycare, and my wife and I both work in education. So perhaps we’re a bit more sensitive than the average individual to the herd mentality and group dynamics that can sprout up in kids of all ages in a common setting. I don’t, however, think we’re smarter than the average person, or more capable of seeing obvious problems associated with otherwise everyday actions.

Our daycare has a pretty strict and pretty clear policy on bringing in food from outside for your kids: you can’t do it. To say nothing of the obvious danger for kids with peanut allergies or similar maladies, having one kid who brings in a hot sub while the rest of the class is having overcooked nuggets and sad, limp green beans is just a recipe for bad news, especially with kids who don’t even have the vocabulary yet to explain why they’re mad that Johnny’s chowing down on a delicious sandwich that probably cost as much as the lunch for the other fourteen students in class combined. So food from outside is disallowed.

This regulation is posted pretty clearly all over the building.

And yet.

The teacher in my son’s class told me about a parent who, earlier in the week, dropped off her child at 7 AM — while the rest of the class is sitting down for a breakfast of fruit and toasted english muffins — with a McDonald’s bag. Then tried to hurry back out the door.

“Ma’am, he can’t have that in here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you can take him out and sit with him in the lobby while he eats, if you like, but he can’t have outside food in the classroom.”

“I can’t stay; I have to go to work. This is his breakfast.”

The (severely underpaid) teacher then had to explain to this woman (who is presumably in her thirties and has, also presumably, learned at least a little bit about the way the world works) why they couldn’t allow her son to sit down and eat a McDonald’s breakfast at the same table with the other kids. You don’t have to use your imagination, really. Kids get jealous. Arguments start. Whining breaks out, then outright screaming. Pretty soon, one kid has impaled another against the wall with a lance made of Legos while the other kids are crowning a hash brown Harvest King with a diadem of braided hotcakes. Lord of the Super Size.  Preschool pandemonium.

Honestly. It’s really not that hard to get this aspect of your parenting life right. It takes getting up an extra ten minutes early to make sure your kid has something to eat in the morning, or — or! — you can just let the kid have breakfast in class with the rest of the kids. Either solution fits just fine into the accepted social order and — let me put a fine point on this — necessary routine that dealing with a room full of three-year-olds requires.

Or, you can be a to-hell-with-the-rest-of-the-world, me-first and my-kids-only jerko scumbag and send your kid to school with a bagful of grease and gristle. Which will promptly be thrown in the trash.

And then there are the parents who can’t be bothered to send their kids with show-and-tell items from home, so the kids feel left out. Or the ones who can’t do the simple homework assignments like tracing their kids’ hands on a sheet of construction paper so they can make turkeys in class. Or the ones whose kids go to school biting and scratching at the faces of other tiny humans. Or the ones who rant anonymously about other parents on their vicious little blogs.

Wait, what?

Okay, this rant is over, because I’m in serious danger of falling into a rage-spiral over the parents at our daycare, To be fair, I actually really like our daycare. Our kids have fun and they actually seem to be learning things. It’s the other parents I can’t stand.

Sartre said it best. Hell is other people.

And their snotty, sticky, smear-finger-paint-on-your-trousers-while-you’re-leaving-for-work kids.

You Don’t Need NaNoWriMo

Pavowski1 Comment

It’s that time of year again, when the leaves are changing, the temperature’s dropping, and established and would-be writers around the country are hunched over keyboards and stacks of paper, pounding with slowly numbing fingertips on worn keys as they push, strive, claw and crawl to make the 1667 words per day needed to add up to a 50k word novel at the end of 30 days.

It’s NaNoWriMo, and that means if you travel in writerly circles, as I do, your feeds are blown up with this weird unsayable moniker, with the braggings and boastings of those who are shattering their daily word count goals, and the wails and lamentations of those who aren’t. It’s cacophonous and wearying, viewed a certain way, or inspiring and invigorating, viewed another.

Personally, I won’t be partaking. I didn’t last year, I won’t this year, and I don’t see the need in years to come, for that matter. But that owes more to my personal feelings on what motivates us than it does to the little internet carnival that NaNoWriMo has become.

As a motivational tool, I think NaNoWriMo is pretty awesome. Anything that can get people thinking creatively and telling the stories locked away in their dark, squishy little hearts is a good thing by me. And there is certainly something empowering about seeing the hordes of writers taking to the internet, each with a dragon to slay that is unique and personal and wholly their own, but which is at the same time a dragon that the writing community sets out to slay together. Swords made of words, axes of pages, slings and arrows of plots and characters all fly at the beast with the intensity, voracity, and — it must be so — insanity that the task requires.

People working together can accomplish things that, apart, they never could, and one of the really neat things about NaNo is how it transmogrifies writing — almost by definition a solitary, lonely act — into a communal rite.

And that’s pretty cool.

But the task is gigantic. It’s a moonshot with a trebuchet. A marathon without a day of training. A climb up Everest without a pack. And while the challenge surely motivates some, it’s too much by half for others. To make 50k words in 30 days requires 1667 words every day, no weekends off, no mental health days, no excuses. It’s no surprise, then, that the path to the dragon’s lair is littered with the bodies of the fallen, the strewn pages of the slain, the half-formed words of the faint of heart.

And that’s a shame.

But writing takes all stripes. Some are motivated by the challenge while some would break themselves upon it. Personally, I know that attempting a challenge like NaNo and failing would fill me with more writerly self-doubt than already hangs over my head on any given day.

I’m also leery of the gimmickiness of the whole affair. Whether you’re an accomplished or aspiring writer, going balls-out to draft 50k words from scratch smacks of spectacle rather than substance. It reeks of bluster and swagger rather than actual accomplishment (“I’ve written a novel this month, what did you get done?”). There’s a desperation behind it, I think; a frenetic surge of energy that cannot be sustained.

Really, what bothers me about NaNo is the same thing that bothers me about New Year’s Resolutions, birthday gifts to the self, and any other extrinsic sources of motivation that we come up with to push ourselves out of our comfort zones: the fact that they’re arbitrary and manufactured. We choose this day or that month to try something new, to make a change that we have apparently been wanting in our lives, but why that day? Why that month? Does the fact that it’s a new year make it easier to lose weight, start exercising, keep a cleaner house, stay in touch with friends, reconnect with family? Of course not. Does the fact that it’s November make it easier to write fifty thousand words? Naturally not, doubly so if you live in the U.S. and have the Thanksgiving holidays to contend with. We take these steps, we attempt to make these changes, not necessarily because we’ve decided it’s time for ourselves to do these things, but rather because everybody else around us is doing the same thing.

But here’s the thing. If a change is what your life needs, the day to make that change is today, whether today happens to be January 1st or the beginning of NaNoWriMo or the first day of Lent or your birthday or just another day in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable month (I’m looking at you, June.) If you’re ready to start writing a novel, why put it off until November? If you want to start exercising, or gardening, or reading more, or cherishing the lamentations of your enemies or whatever, why put it off until January?

We only get so much time on our little blue speck. You owe it to yourself to do everything you can to make your life better in the time that you have.

If writing a novel will make your life better, then you should be doing it already. Whether it’s NaNoWriMo or not. (Although, again, to reiterate, if NaNoWriMo motivates you within your existing desire and work toward writing, then, hey, go for it.)

And if you’re kicking around the idea of eating healthier, exercising, whatever, and you’re just looking for a good time to start, or you’re waiting until you’re ready, well… we’re never ready.

You just have to go and do it.

Seriously.

Right now.

Go slay the dragons.

Unexpected Response

Pavowski3 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week: a horror story in three sentences. And since I’m still on a sci-fi bent, why not sci-fi horror?

Three sentences almost doesn’t merit a post here, but it’s a thing I wrote, so here it is. In fact, I might do a few more. These are fun.

Unexpected Response

When we first aimed our dishes at the sky, we feared we might not find anybody. Then we found somebody, and we feared they might not understand us.

Now they’re here, and there is not enough firepower in the world to save us.

Collecting Fireflies

Pavowski2 Comments

I’m flolloping around in the doldrums of the wake of finishing my first draft.

There’s depression here. An aimless, impotent feeling. I’ve gone from working tirelessly on a singular project day in and day out to … well, not. To working on side projects, to taking a little time to refocus and rethink your goals for the next few months, and I’ve felt a little lost.

It’s a lull, to be sure; a haze as transient as the weather. Still, it sucks at the feet like a bog, a slow inevitable creep of inertia. I sit back wondering if I’ll be able to make myself do it again, if I can make myself go through another six month draft, another three month edit, a brand new project, a rehashing of an old one. And I don’t know! I really wonder if I have any more good ideas in me, any more stories waiting to be told, or if I’m deluding myself that the ones currently in the telling are worth the time I’ve spent on them. Maybe every idea has a bit of validity, but by the same token, every candle in the darkness gives off a little light. The hope, of course, is that I’m not a candle in the darkness, but a raging forest fire, or at least a cozy little bonfire around which some lucky individuals might sometime warm their hands and their hearts.

But these times of respite are important for the body, mind and soul. Because as I find myself not exhausting myself on a capital “P” Project, I find there’s a little more time in my day for thought, for aimless and okay-to-be-aimless writing, for reflection, for the cultivating of new ideas, for the reviewing of old ones.

I keep a little Evernote file for potential future story ideas. (If you’re not using some sort of brain-dump software like Evernote, you should be.) Some of them are just a couple of words, some are great sprawling paragraphs. Any time an idea strikes me (and ideas striking are about like neutrinos striking screens deep below the earth — they happen millions of times a second, but only incredibly rarely does matter actually contact matter and cause a reaction) I jot it down.

Well, today came one of those lightning flashes, so I reached for the old bottle. And while I was stuffing this particular lighting strike into the jar, I took a peek in there. And there were over a dozen little fireflies buzzing around in there, dinging off the walls; some with the reckless lunatic energy, some as massive and indomitable as barges.

So I feel a little bit better about the lull I’m in. It’ll pass soon enough, and it’ll be time to get back to work, catching more fireflies, stuffing them into my jar, selecting some for release back into the wild.

Hooray for Time

Pavowski11 Comments

Scientists have determined that the exact measurement of time at the molecular level is impossible.

In other words, time is complete and absolute bunk.

At no time is this more evident than Daylight Savings Time, an outdated and archaic practice that arbitrarily picks a day in the fall and stretches it by an hour, then arbitrarily picks another day in spring and shrinks it by an hour.

Now, a lot of people go about gleefully talking about the extra hour of sleep they get when we “fall back”, which is fine and dandy. But those of with kids know the truth.

DST means NOTHING.

12193539_10153111093681135_2652954883614864535_n

The kids are still going to wake up when their rhythm tells them to wake up, regardless of any “conditioning” or “preparing” you might have done.

My wife and I thought we were clever. We had slowly been pushing the sprouts’ bedtimes back since about a month ago, so that they could go to bed at the same “time” regardless of the numbers on the clock face.

HA.

Last night was Halloween, so any sort of regular sleep schedule was out. And this morning sprout #1 woke up to poop, which he cannot do by himself yet even though the attending adult is nothing more than a cheerleader and heinie-wiper. Oh, did I mention that he was up thirty minutes before his regular time, which was a full hour and a half ahead of the clock time?

Not only did we not gain time, we actually lost time on this exchange, which has me superjazzed about “giving the hour back” in Spring, let me tell you.

Meanwhile, it’s currently seven PM and it feels like midnight.

Thanks, Obama.

Seriously, DST is a joke. You want a non-arse-over-elbows, earth-specific time anomaly to get psyched about? Try the leap-second.