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.

Self-Delusion

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You ever notice how much we lie to ourselves?

We lie to ourselves *a lot*.

It’s this weird, insidious thing that we do to let ourselves off the hook for the things we know we should be doing.

And the thing is, we lie to ourselves knowing that the lies are exactly that: lies. We hope that those lies become the truth.

But lies don’t become truth just because you hope they will become truth, or just because you keep telling them to yourself as if they are truth.

How are you lying to yourself?

And are you brave enough to tell yourself the truth?

Creating Should Be Fun

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We all have that image in our mind, right? The haggard writer, stooped with their spine bent over the keys, tumbler of coffee (or something stronger) clutched in spindly fingers, red-rimmed raccoon eyes staring at the page.

Tortured. Tormented.

And you know the thing about stereotypes: there’s always a grain of truth. Sometimes more than a grain. We think of that because we’ve all been there — as you fight to get the story just right, as you push and pull and strive and struggle, you smile less, you agonize more. You hate the work some days and other days it feels like the work hates you right back.

But creating can’t be like that *all* the time. I mean, if the writing is like that *all* the time, why are you doing it?

On a good day, the writing is like turning on the hose on a hot summer day — it’s crisp and it’s clear and it flows without end. It’s almost like magic.

I haven’t had enough good days with my writing lately, and I wonder if it’s not because I was trying to make the wrong project happen. I switched gears today and I recaptured a little of that magic. So if you’re like me — struggling for days, weeks, months with your writing — maybe do yourself a favor and give that project a break. A *little* one, at least. And let your brain work on a project it wants to work on. Let it stretch its legs.

Find that magic again. And if you can’t?

Create new magic.

Eyes Without Faces

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We’ve been back at school since August here in my part of Georgia, and say what you will about whether we should or should not be, and whether we’re doing enough to protect these kids and their families (to say nothing of teachers and their families) from COVID (in my not-so-humble opinion, we are not), but it’s been good to see the students again.

I mean, last year ended so abruptly and catastrophically that it was hardly an ending at all; it was like going to a movie theater, and having the film cut off just past the 1 hour mark — and then the manager comes in and says the film is totally borked, it can’t be fixed, and they’re just going to have to refund your money. And you’re like — what??

Anyway. I started out thinking about masks and who wears them in schools (they aren’t mandatory, here), and what that says about them… but I figure that’s too cliched, and it’s also not entirely a useful examination. I mean, kids are hardly reliable narrators of their own stories, let alone the stories that get told through them. A kid not wearing a mask isn’t indicative that the kid thinks COVID is a government conspiracy, for example, the way an adult not wearing one is. It could be that the kid just forgot to wear a mask. Or that they lost it. Or that they just got tired of wearing it and took it off. Or that (I had one kid tell me this was the case) their parents forbid them to wear it. Or any number of other permutations. So while it’s interesting to see which kids wear masks, it’s not particularly instructive.

No, I want to mention a very strange phenomenon in this era of mask-wearing, which is: I am forgetting what my students look like.

Not in a broad sense, of course. But a student of mine pulled her mask down in class to have a sip of water and it struck me that I hadn’t seen her mouth in a year.

Okay, so that’s a pretty odd observation to make, but I made it, and there we are. Then I started thinking about it, and I realized that there is no small number of students whose mouths I haven’t seen since February of last year.

And your mouth is half of your face!

And, okay, I teach theater, so I’m sort of hyper-aware of the amount of information that gets conveyed between people through the use of the face, and … we’re covering our faces up (those of us who are attempting to help, in our own little way, our society to get through this mess OKAY NO MORE SOAPBOX), and it’s doing this strange thing to our interactions.

I mean, we can see each other’s eyes, and that’s not nothing, but you take away facial expressions, and you suddenly have a lot less information when you’re talking to somebody.

It’s just a very strange phenomenon, to have that strange moment of “oh, right, *that’s* what you look like” with people you’ve seen every weekday for six months.

It’s just one more way that this pandemic has made us feel alien to each other.

I’ve always thought that Billy Idol song, “Eyes Without a Face” was sort of creepy and beautiful. (I can’t claim to have ever paid attention to the lyrics.) I heard it the other day and I realized… so many of us, now, are eyes without a face to each other.

These are strange times.

P.S. I learned that after shooting the video for “Eyes Without a Face”, Billy Idol’s contact lenses had fused to his corneas, and he had to have surgery to have them removed, so THAT’S HORRIFYING.

P.P.S. I also learned that “Eyes Without a Face” was first a film, and the images from it are …unsettling. Do a google search. Or better yet, don’t.

P.P.P.S. I’ve also decided, after thinking about mouths for the past couple days, that “mouth” is one of the worst words in the English language.

Clearing the Poison

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I’ve sort of made it an unofficial guideline — not a rule, but a guideline — to steer away from politics and away from negativity when I can, here at the ol’ blarg. I don’t always succeed, but it keeps me from spiraling into rants and endless anger … or at least from doing so here in the digital space.

But with so many things still locked down, and so many of us still living half-lives thanks to COVID, there is a relative dearth of things to think about or write about. I mean, sure, the world’s still spinning, but what’s new with *me*? What’s unique to *my* experience that merits spinning off 300-1000 words here in the digital space?

Very little.

I keep my head down, I go to work, I wear my mask, I repeat. I go for my runs, I try to work out, I try to get some words on the page every day. I keep pushing forward. Try not to get lost in despair at how absolutely moronic people can be, and how horrible they can be to each other.

Still, it’s hard not to notice that the last few weeks have been … easier, somehow. There’s a little less of the feeling of impending doom from day to day, a little less of the feeling that as bad as things are, they could go from very bad indeed to absolutely catastrophic with a tweet or a speech from a certain individual.

And with that, there’s a little less mental fog. A little less pressure in the chest region. A little less headache over things so fantastically out of my control. The poison is being purged from my personal system, it seems, and that can only be good.

This does not mean, of course, that things are peachy. But it does mean that my mental energies can turn a little more effectively to some of the things that matter, rather than to some of the hopeless distractions that have commanded my attention for the past months.

Things are as stressful as ever, in other words. But this is a stress I welcome. Stress I can live with.

Here’s hoping your days are a little less poisonous, too.

One Little Step

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2020 broke us.

2021 is following it up strong, so far.

And there’s so much stuff everywhere, all the time, clamoring for our attention. Bad news headlines. Infuriating politics. Frightening developments. And then, at the same time, we all live in our own little tornadoes of uncertainty. Whose job or daily routine hasn’t been shaken up — if not shaken to its foundations — by the events of the past year? Nothing feels certain. Nothing feels dependable.

Every day we’re asked to give more, and every day after that, we’re asked again, as if the previous day’s ask never happened. There’s always more: more to do, more to think about, more to be responsible for.

And it’s easy — amidst all that “more” — to get overwhelmed. To see all that clutter and pressure and stuff and think I’ll never get through it. To fall into that dread: that the tasks are too big, the obstacles too impassable. Dread turns to despair. Despair turns into inaction. And inaction makes everything that was merely bad before become catastrophic.

How do we get past these things?

Take one step. Just one. A tiny step forward, whether that’s a step toward a goal or a step around an obstacle or just a step away from the dread and despair. And you don’t let inaction overtake you, don’t let despair define you. You take a step, even if it feels tiny and insignificant, because nothing else happens without that first step. One step follows the next. Once you’ve taken that step, you take another. And then another. And then you look behind you and you realize that you have made progress, you did accomplish something, even if the steps themselves felt like nothing.

There’s this story I saw a few years ago about the world’s largest beach cleanup. Mumbai had one of the dirtiest, most litter-stricken beaches in the world. Plastic and garbage and junk as far as the eye could see, and nothing to be done about it. Cleaning it up was unheard of: an impossible task. Until one person decided to get out there and start cleaning it up.

And when that person stepped up, so did others. And others. A little bit at a time. One person providing inspiration to another. The efforts cascaded. And within a year, the place had been transformed.

On the left, a photograph of part of Versova beach taken on August 6, 2016. On the right is an image of the beach tweeted on May 20, 2017.
On the left, a photograph of part of Versova beach taken on August 6, 2016. On the right is an image of the beach tweeted on May 20, 2017. (via CNN)

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Step forward. Do something. Do anything.