Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Why There May Be Hope for Humanity (an anti-vaxxer redemption reflection)

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Who doesn’t love a good case of poetic justice?

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe pointed me to this story at the Times Union, which tells how a mother of seven has suddenly flip-flopped like a foundering fish.

The tl;dr version is this: this mother, while in the midst of a vaccine schedule for her existing three children, got taken in by the anti-vaxxer movement. She stopped vaccinations on her existing children and did not vaccinate any of her subsequent progeny. Fast forward a few years. At the moment, she and her family are under quarantine — quarantine! — because one of the kids caught Whooping Cough and it ravaged the household like a grizzly bear in a sandwich factory. (I know sandwiches aren’t made in factories, okay? Just… geez.) As a result, she has rethought her position on vaccinations and is planning to vaccinate her kids as much as possibly immediately.

Now, look. I don’t endorse the dark, seedy place in our hearts whence comes Schadenfreude, but I’d be lying if I said Schadenfreude didn’t tickle my nethers when I heard this story. I don’t know if there is a more selfish and misinformed segment of the population than the anti-vax crowd; my blood boils when I hear one of them proclaiming with snobbish smuggery that they haven’t vaccinated their kids and they are perfectly healthy! Claims like this fail, of course, to understand that those who self-righteously choose not to vaccinate overlook the benefits they’re reaping from everybody else who does (see Herd Immunity), or quote ridiculous statistics from bogus studies about the incidence of illness or complication arising from vaccinations themselves.

Erg, it would be so easy to derail into a tirade about the lunacy of the anti-vaxxer movement, but that’s not my point. It’s easy to kick a dead horse, but it doesn’t help anybody, least of all the horse.

My point is that there is hope for humanity.

Look, this woman got taken in by some bad information and scare-mongering. She stopped vaccinating her kids. Maybe that’s not you, but any of us could be taken in by information just as bad, scare-mongering just as … scare… mongery. Maybe I start to believe that gay marriage will destroy our society. Maybe I start to believe that the earth is flat. Maybe I go off and do something really crazy, like vote Republican.

The point isn’t that she got taken in, the point is that she came back from the edge. True, it took her entire household coughing like a misfiring Edsel to see the error of her ways, but she saw it.

I think it’s a commonly-held belief that people just aren’t going to change their minds. Try to have a conversation with somebody on the other side of the abortion issue, for instance. We get so caught up in all the extra, non-issuey stuff (“he’s an idiot! How could he possibly think that??”) that a lot of times, the issue itself gets lost in the shuffle. And a lot of the time, that may be true. But not every time.

Not this time.

When I first heard this story, I couldn’t help chuckling just a bit in a self-satisfied, “well, that’s what you get” kind of way. I couldn’t help it — out it burst, like an alien from the chest cavity, ugly and raw. She got what she deserved. But the more productive way to look at it is this: for better or worse, regardless of the circumstances, she is now correcting an error. And while she can’t do anything now to avert the house of plague that’s swirling around her, at least she can do the right thing to protect her family in the future.

Which is what it’s all about, innit? Making the best decisions we can with the information that’s available to us.

If we can do that, we’d all be living better lives.

Also, vaccinate your kids.

Climb the Trope Ladder

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I fell into a TVtropes rabbit hole today.

If you’re a writer, and you don’t know about TVtropes.org yet, you should.

I don’t know if there’s a better resource for teaching you that there really and truly is nothing original left in the world for artists to create. A wholly humbling browsing experience. Yet, by the same token, it’s encouraging to click through its wealth of pages to see all the stories that use the same old tired tricks and do just fine.

If you haven’t seen TVtropes yet, it works like this:

You land there for whatever reason. Maybe a fellow writer or critically-minded movie buff refers you to it. Maybe you’re looking for the name of that one guy who was in that one movie and you stumble upon the site. Maybe somebody who secretly hates you and wants to destroy your productivity sends you a link.

You click around a little bit, maybe trying the “random trope” or “random text” functions to have the site spoon up a tasty helping of trope-centric technobabble to your face. Want to write your story with a hero who unwittingly unleashes even greater evil upon the world? There’s a trope for that. How about the twist where a loved one is left dead for the hero to find? Yeah, it’s been done. Maybe you want to see a bunch of examples of the ways heroes have sacrificed themselves in stories. TVTropes has you covered. Whatever your device, whatever the circumstance, whatever unique idea you think you have, it’s been done before and TVtropes has it on record.

Hours later, you’ve got twenty-four browser tabs open compiling all the different sins of all the movies and books you love and all of the tropes with cool names like Toxic Phlebotinum and you forgot to eat lunch and they turned the lights off in the building and you’re wondering, finally, how you can weave all these things into your next story.

The cycle will repeat as long as you leave even one tab open. One thing leads you to the next, and then the next, until you’re miles deep in the forest and everything looks the same. The only way out is for the power to fail on your computer, and even then, you have to have the resolve not to click on that bright, shiny “restore tabs” button when you get booted back up, lest you find yourself falling once more into the black hole…

In all seriousness, while the site sounds like it’s a great way to depress yourself at the prospect of seeing exactly how much and how often a certain device has been done (to death), it’s fascinating nonetheless to see all the different permutations of plot and character which can be perfectly successful. In addition, I’m not sure if there’s a better tool for thinking of ways to carry on a stuck project; simply look up a beloved story, identify some of its defining tropes, explore those tropes, and then bend them to your will.

What felt like endless, zombie-like wandering through the dark alleyways of the site has filled my head with all kinds of ways to expand my current story.

I think that means I can qualify all that mindless clicking as research.

So, I’m off to do more studying…

Wasted Time… Like a Leaky Faucet

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Time.

I’m a little bit obsessed with it. So much so that I’m one of those dinks that actually still wears a wristwatch that’s functional, rather than a fashion accessory.

It’s eternal and unchanging, unless of course you happen to be traveling at the speed of light, or taking up residence within the jurisdiction of a black hole. Then again, if that applies to you, you’re probably not here reading my drivel.

But for all that time is eternal, we, sadly, are not. We get only so much time to operate with, and as miraculous as modern medicine is, it can do nothing to stretch that time out. (I just heard a story on This American Life about a cryonics experiment that went… horrifyingly wrong, all because people are determined to extend their time on this mortal coil. It ain’t happening yet.) Which means that it’s up to each of us to make the most of this non-renewable resource that’s been allotted to us.

So why — why, why, why? — are so many people determined to waste their precious time?

I’m not talking about relaxing after a tough day at work, or watching a few reruns of Seinfeld with your wife. Time spent relaxing, to a point, is not wasted time.

No, I’m talking about the in-between moments, the moments not specifically spoken for but bridging the gap between moments that matter. Driving your car. Walking from one place to another. Shuffling zombielike through the aisles of the grocery store. Moments you don’t even consider, but that end up swallowing up so many minutes — or even hours! — of your day.

I’m a teacher, so I see this one every day: students have five minutes to get from one class to another, and they lurch at the slowest pace possible from Biology to Math II. That I can understand, to a point — you’re not looking forward to sitting through another drone about the Pythagorean Theorem — but still. You eat up every possible moment getting from A to B, then you have to take extra time to get your business together, get your head right for sitting through another class… in short, you end up slowing everybody down since you wasted time on what? dragging your feet?

But that’s a student. That’s a kid. Who doesn’t properly understand the significance of the time he’s wasting.

How about this? You’re in the grocery store, waiting to check out, all your precious foodstuffs on the belt, and the person in front of you is watching the groceries go into the bag, or watching the numbers on the display tick slowly up… and then the cashier tells them, that’ll be entirely too much money, please. This isn’t even an old person, most of the time. It’s a thirty-something guy who looks perfectly ordinary, you know, not like an idiot. Or a twenty-something woman texting on her cell phone. Anyway, the cashier tells them, you know, it’s time to pay, and THAT’S when they reach for their purse or their wallet. As if it was a total shock to them that there was input required from them in this transaction. As if you’ve never been to a grocery store in your life, and you never thought that you’d have to lift a finger to get the food to your house so you can cram it down your beak.

How can you not be prepared for this? Sure, it’s a few seconds, but those seconds add up, and they’re not just your seconds, either — those seconds of your own hesitation get pawned off on everybody in line behind you.

I’m at the soccer match the other night. Match scheduled to start at 5:30. It’s 5:25. Teams are both on-hand, warmed up, ready. Officials are on-site and ready. Scoreboard is set for the start of the match. And everybody is standing around looking at one another. 5:30; nothing happens. 5:35; more milling about on the sidelines. 5:40; finally the teams line up to have their starters announced. 5:45, the match finally starts. Fifteen minutes late. For no reason! The fault could lie anywhere — maybe one of the coaches had to run to his car, maybe the on-site administrator had to deal with an issue and wanted the start of the game held, whatever. But that’s 15 minutes that a stadium full of parents and friends, two teams of players, an additional two teams who play after, can’t get back. For nothing!

We live in a society where, for better or worse, everybody overlaps with everybody else. I cut you off in traffic, you take it out on your husband later that day. You don’t notice the light changing and cost me the traffic light, I assign extra homework for the 90 students I teach. The repercussions of our every action echo outward like ripples in a pond. Yet again and again, I come across these people letting their time — AND MINE — dribble out the corner of their mouths like so much drool. Distracted with something else. Not paying attention. Just not at all motivated to put any pep in their step.

I want to grab them by their collars, shake them until their bleary eyes snap into focus. Impress upon them, somehow, the fact that while they shuffle through the hallways, while they blunder through the aisles, while they dodder at the stoplights, their time, like sands through the hourglass, is slipping irretrievably into the past.

It only takes a half second to look up from whatever’s right in front of you and remember that your actions impact the world all around you. Is it so much to ask that we do so? In fact, if you are alert and aware and moving through your life with purpose and vigor, you actually gain time… what would have been wasted can then be applied to other, more important things. Is it ridiculous, then, to expect the people around us to act with a little urgency, to behave as if time matters to them?

And at what point would one become a total jerkstore for demanding that they do so?

You’re a Genius All The Time

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Much as I love to ramble on when it’s time for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, I think I’m going to let brevity get the better of my wit today. (As if that were a fair fight!)

I’ve spent the week dunking my toe back into the ocean of drafting delights this week, and whoo, it’s overwhelming. Drafting is awesome, but drafting is also awful. As such, I’ve been peeking around the internet to find things and stuff to keep me motivated and rolling forward, because, as I think I may have mentioned before around here once or twice, momentum matters. As is always the case when you go trawling the internet, you find a few gems and a lot of space trash, but in particular I found one site that’s chock-full of fantastic little tidbits for writers especially, but for everybody, when you get down to it. Lists like this one from Neil Gaiman, or this one from Kurt Vonnegut are delightful and straightforward.

But there’s something raw and enchanting about the magic brain bullets Jack Kerouac squeezed off in a list of 30 points entitled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, in all its disjointed shorthand and ungrammatical gutpunchery.

The whole list is excellent, but in particular, I really like this piece of self-motivational pie:

#29: You’re a Genius all the time.

I’m going to paraphrase Bill Murray’s character from Ghostbusters 2 and say that that is the kind of thing I need to hear every day, that kind of uplifting, you’re-right-even-when-the-world-thinks-you’re-wrong certainty. Maybe I wouldn’t be such an idiot. So I’m going to print that off and affix it to my laptop, or maybe I’ll stick it in the sole of my shoe, or maybe I’ll tattoo it backwards across my forehead, just so that I can remind myself in the morning when I’m feeling not so much particularly like a genius.

Did I say genius? I meant Genius. Capital G. Real deal. No games. Just Genius. All the time.

Anyway, there’s your wisdom for the day. You’re a Genius all the time. So if nothing else, you’ve got that going for you.

Which is nice.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

How to Crush your Saturday Morning (a guide for schlubs)

Pavowski11 Comments

At its heart, this blog is a journal. A daily (more or less) recounting of what’s front-of-mind. I dispense a fair bit of advice on this blog, much of it about writing and parenting, but occasionally, I like to step out of my comfort zone and write about things that I probably shouldn’t, and today feels like one of those days. The flavor du jour?

Saturday morning.

As a guy not so long out of his twenties, more or less recently become a father, and still very much making it up as I go along, it occurred to me not long ago that I was really screwing up my Saturday mornings. I used to think Saturday morning was the initiation of the weekend, and that meant sleeping as late as you possibly could, then slothing around the house until you could no longer put it off. But the older I get, the more I feel that Saturday is just another day in which lots of things have to be done. Maybe it’s the grocery store. Maybe it’s your kids’ soccer games. Maybe it’s a crapton of yard work. (Ha ha, I don’t care about my yard, score one for me.) And as the health organizations have been telling us, what’s the cornerstone of a good day? Breakfast.

Problem is, if you’re like me, you learned how to do Saturday morning lazy, and you don’t know how to bridge the gap. You end up eating cold cereal or leftover pizza instead of eating proper breakfast fare. Maybe you don’t know how to cook. Maybe you’re crap at time management. Let’s work on that.

I’m no master chef, but I do believe that anybody can learn to cook one or two basic things and then parley that knowledge into fleecing people into believing that you know how to cook. And the easiest place to start? Breakfast. Why breakfast? First of all, it’s simple. Breakfast doesn’t have a lot of options as far as cooking goes. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, toast… You branch out from there, but those are the basics. Secondly, eggs are super cheap, so while you learn to cook ’em, you won’t be breaking the bank (because, let’s be honest, you WILL screw up a few times). Third, who doesn’t love a hearty eggs ‘n bacon breakfast? Nobody, that’s who. You’ll be a hit if you can serve up some tasty eggs and bacon in the morning.

So, for those guys (and gals!) like me, who are totally lost when it comes to cooking and starting your weekend off right, I want to share with you my method for CRUSHING your Saturday morning in just about thirty minutes. This is especially designed for guys (or gals!) who have a significant other and/or kids they need to feed first thing in the morning, but you know, you can scale it to your needs.

So, get your eggs and bacon ready.

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 400 or so.

Purists will say bacon should be cooked in the pan. Nonsense, I say. I learned about cooking bacon in the oven about two years ago and I’ve never looked back. Bacon in the pan requires constant attention, lots of turning, and I always ended up with raw bits and blackened bits on the same piece. In the oven it’s picture-perfect every time, and the slow cook of the oven frees you up to do other things.

Step 2: Dishes (first time).

Oh, you’re one of those who unloads the dishwasher as soon as it’s done washing? YOU DON’T NEED THIS GUIDE. Look, doing the dishes is a chore, and it’s best done when you have nothing better to do, which is almost never. But now, you’re waiting for the oven to preheat, so take those five minutes or so to clear that thing out. It’s full of the dishes you ran last time, and you’re going to need the space in a minute… stop putting it off and unload those dishes.

Step 3: Bacon in.

Line a cookie sheet with tinfoil (you’ll thank me later) and lay the bacon in. Cooking time will depend on how thick your bacon is, but the sweet spot for me has been about 19-20 minutes at 400, depending on how crispy you like it. If in doubt, start checking it as early as 15 minutes. Set your timer and forget about it.

Step 4: Dishes (second time).

Oh, you’re one of those who washes dirty dishes the moment they’ve been used and leaves your sink empty at night? YOU DON’T NEED THIS GUIDE. Seriously, who feels like doing dishes right before you go to bed? You left them in the sink just like I did; don’t pretend you’re fooling anybody. That bacon needs 20 minutes to cook and you’ve got ten minutes before the next step starts; might as well dive in. You just emptied the dishwasher, and a dishwasher isn’t happy unless it’s full of dishes. MAKE YOUR DISHWASHER HAPPY.

Step 5: Prep the eggs.

Get your skillet on medium heat, and, if you prefer, get the butter out. I prefer bacon grease, but use whatever brings you the most joy. Now, if you don’t mind the idea of flavoring your food with the grease of delicious pigs, follow closely. Pull the bacon pan from the oven (there are probably about five or six minutes left, you might want to check and see how it’s doing anyway), and tilt the pan slightly. A bunch of grease will run down the pan; use a spoon and scoop a bit of it into your skillet. I like a teaspoon for 2-3 eggs, both to grease the pan and to make the eggs taste like literal heaven on a fork. Adjust as necessary; 2 eggs per person is usually pretty reasonable. Me, I like eggs, so I go for a little more. If I’m feeding myself, my son, and my wife (the infant is still on baby food), six eggs does the job pretty perfectly.

Step 6: Eggs in.

Yolks or not depends on taste and cholesterol needs in your household, but you cook them the same either way. You have to experiment with your stove to get the cook time right, but for me, eggs in any form take no more than 3-4 minutes in the pan. (If you’re keeping track of the time, you see what’s developing here: the eggs should finish up within a minute or two of the bacon.) Start with scrambled eggs, and you can get fancier with your prep as time goes on. If in doubt, scrambled eggs are done when they’re firmish and still glistening. When they lose their glisten, they’re getting dry. I’ve heard that you shouldn’t season the eggs until late in the cooking process because the salt can screw up the flavor if it goes in while the egg is raw, but I’ve never been so sensitive to the taste to notice the difference. Also, if you know that much about seasoning, again, YOU DON’T NEED THIS GUIDE. Anyway, I like to season once the eggs start to firm up just a little bit, but you know, figure out what works for you.

Step 7: Toast (optional).

Yeah, carbs are the devil. I’ve stopped taking toast with my breakfast, but toast is easy enough. Pop it in about the time you get the eggs in the pan and you’ll be fine.

Step 8: Plates.

If you timed it right, the timer’s going off on the bacon within about a minute of the time you’re pulling your eggs off. It’s ideal if the bacon’s done first so that you can get it on a plate to cool and pat some of the grease off first, but that’s not a deal breaker. Anyway, spatula the bacon onto a plate lined with paper towels to draw some excess grease off. While it’s draining, spoon the eggs onto plates (along with the toast, if you made it). Serve, and enjoy.

My plates look nothing like this. Who cares? If it’s delicious (and it will be), nobody cares. And if you put that green thing on your plate for breakfast at home, I’ll kill you.

Step 9: Dishes (last time).

Remember how nice it was having a clean sink about halfway through this process? It was glamorous, right? Well, now you’ve got all these dishes from your cooking adventure mucking up that canvas. Don’t go into Saturday with dirty dishes hanging over your head. Take the five minutes and finish up; that egg skillet will never be easier to clean than right after you cook with it — leave your dishes and that egg residue turns into lacquer. Know what lacquer is? They used it to protect paintings back in the day because it doesn’t wash off. Clean it now, before it sets.

Step 10: Enjoy the rest of your freaking day.

See that? Do you see what just happened? You fed your family, cleaned up after yourself, ate a hearty breakfast, and demonstrated your role as provider and master of the house, and now you get to carry that feeling of accomplishment with you for the rest of the day. You feel like a boss, right? And it only took you thirty minutes. For bonus points, next weekend, do the same thing all over again, but this time, get up before everybody else so that the aroma of your boss-cooked bacon hypnotizes them to walk dreamlike down the stairs for the breakfast you have waiting for them.

Now your schedule is all cleared for that SVU marathon you’re totally going to end up watching instead of fixing the toilet like you were supposed to do.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.