Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Why are Shoelaces on Kids’ Shoes Even a Thing?

PavowskiLeave a comment

For the longest time, I’ve put off teaching my kids to tie their shoelaces.

What age is the right age?

And is it even necessary, I mean, really? We live in an age of technological wonders. Velcro has been around for decades. (By the way, in the last xxxx years I learned that “Velcro” is a brand-name — if you’re not dealing with the name brand, you’re actually talking about “hook-and-loop strips”. The more you know!) When is the first “smart shoe” going to be invented? (It ties itself, then reads you your notifications while cooking your dinner!)

I think I’m going to continue to put it off for as long as I can find shoes in their size that close up with Velcro.

It’s just such a pain to teach kids anything that deals with fine motor skills, and lace-tying is among the finest skills you’re going to ask of a kid. Think of all the things you have to do! Cross over, make a loop, loop another string around the stem of the loop, make ANOTHER loop, pull that loop through the gap created by looping your second string around the first loop… I’ve just typed that out after untying and retying my own shoes and it still makes my head hurt.

And that’s if you use the bunny-ears method you learned in grade school.

A few years ago I learned a (far superior!) method for shoe-tying that gets the job done in about half the time. Why? Because the information is there to be learned, that’s why. It’s called the Fieggen knot and if you invest the five minutes necessary to learn the method, it will change your shoe-tying life, to the bemusement of friends and family. (“Look at this,” you’ll say. “I can tie my shoes really fast!” And you’ll do it. And they’ll shrug and say, “that’s neat, I guess.” You, too, can create this sense of underwhelmed wonder!) But forget trying to teach this intricate little movement of the fingers to a grade-school kid.

I don’t even tie my own shoes that often. I leave them loose enough to slip on and off, so I can go for weeks without re-tying my laces. But if you do that with a kid, they’ll be throwing shoes all over the room because they run everywhere and they run with the grace of the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.

But both of the kids play sports, which means laced cleats, which means shoes are gonna come untied a lot — and they have to be tied a bit tighter than slip-on status. So I guess I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and teach them, lest I be that parent constantly jogging onto the pitch at a dead ball to tie their kid’s shoes.

You don’t wanna be that guy.

De-Synced

Pavowski2 Comments

Weekends just aren’t recharging my batteries like they used to.

Is that 40, or is that COVID?

I guess there’s no reason it can’t be both.

I just feel so tired.

And it’s only Tuesday.

I did run this morning, so there’s that.

And I wrote more on the play as well, so there’s that too.

But man. Weariness in the bones.

I know I’m not the only one, but it feels that way sometimes. The world is so determined to be back to normal even though it clearly isn’t normal again yet, not by any stretch.

I worked the early morning shift for a few years, starting my shift at 4 and 5 in the morning, and the oddest thing about that job was the way it made me feel out of phase with the rest of the world. I’d go to sleep at 7 or 8 PM to wake up by 3, arriving at work in the dead of night, leaving to go home just when the rest of the world was hitting its stride before lunchtime.

(Among other things, this job taught me the skill that all Dads learn somewhere along the line — the ability to fall asleep at almost any time or any place when the situation allows for it. Yes, napping is a skill. No, it cannot be taught, only honed through necessity and sheer force of will.)

This — these COVID times — feels like that, only instead of being out of sync chronologically with everybody else, I feel out of sync emotionally, or maybe psychologically. But just like being de-synced chronologically, it has me tired all the time.

And man, I try to be upbeat and think about solutions to problems when I write here but … the solutions just aren’t coming for this one.

Oh well. Another sip of tea, a few more words on the page, a few more miles to run in the morning.

So it goes.

Something Finished, Something New

PavowskiLeave a comment

It flew under the radar this week, but I finished a thing.

Actually it’s not true that it flew under the radar… it was all over the radar. I just wasn’t quite sure how to process the jumble of feelings I was having about it.

I finished the novel that I’ve been in permanent purgatory with for the past … I don’t even know how long. Two, three years? Lost chapters, stalled edits, a shattering of my confidence in my abilities as a writer, a return to form, another stall, getting overwhelmed with other projects, uh, COVID… it felt like I would never finish.

But I finished. And I’m actually going to let some people read it.

And I told myself I’d take at least a week off to decompress but … spoiler alert, I did not do that. I started immediately writing something new. But not a novel. Not that I’m done writing novels, but I wanted to get back to my roots, maybe do something for my students. So I’m working on a new play.

It’s nothing much yet, but it’s got me writing like crazy again the past few days. (After so long in the revision phase, it feels like flying to be drafting something NEW again.)

Anyway, I’m still here, still working, over in that dark corner where you can’t see me.

Creating something new.

What a delight.

I can’t

PavowskiLeave a comment

What in the absolute hell is happening in our country?

I’m as interested in pressing on with life as we know it and as it must go on as the next person.

But how, honestly, seriously, are we supposed to pretend things are anything like normal in a world where things like this can happen?

This is lawless third-world-country stuff.

I can’t even think.

I was hoping to do a play with a little bit of a political message this year, but my administration felt there is too much tension out there right now, people are “a little too crazy” and they shut me down.

At first I thought they were maybe a little too sensitive.

Now I am sure they were not.

Space Junk

PavowskiLeave a comment

Are you aware of the problem of Space Junk?

In a nutshell, it’s this:

We are good at sending things into space.

We are less good at returning them safely and responsibly to earth after their usefulness is at an end.

So we have sent thousands of satellites into orbit, and … okay, brief detour. Look, space is big, okay? (Really, mind-bogglingly big, to quote Douglas Adams.) Big like the ocean is big, except bigger, and seemingly infinite. Except not infinite, because only the part of space that’s particularly close to Earth is particularly useful to us most of the time. So even though space feels infinite, the part of space that we are using is decidedly, well, not.

(If you’re interested in such things, this site is pretty cool.)

So. We have sent thousands of satellites into orbit, but because space seems so big, we haven’t been particularly arsed about what happens to these satellites when they break down or when they serve their purpose or for whatever reason stop functioning or are no longer needed. “Just let it float away out there,” we seem to have told ourselves, “it won’t matter. Space is big.”

Which is true, until you consider that those thousands of satellites are, each of them, travelling at upwards of thousands of miles an hour. Which is, uh, really fast. And as you will remember from high school physics, even a tiny, insignificant object traveling at a speed that’s, uh, really fast, can do significant damage to your precious vital organs. (This is how guns work and why Americans love them!) Or to our precious space satellites.

Space is mostly empty, but it’s not all empty, and there are always bits of rock from distant asteroids or shards of ice from passing comets or celestial teapots from philosophy classes whizzing around out there, and occasionally, one of these tiny little things will hit another tiny little thing out in space with a force like a couple hundred pounds of TNT. This turns the little things involved into even smaller little things that then fly off, themselves at thousands of miles per hour, to smash into other things. (If you saw Gravity, you saw this effect in action, to horrifying results!)

This effect can cascade quickly. A satellite smashed by a meteor scatters its guts across low-earth orbit and takes out several other satellites, which scatter their guts and … you get the idea. Experts believe that, if not somehow dealt with, the resultant chain reactions will eventually all but prohibit travel in space for satellites, let alone people — to go into space would be the equivalent of stepping into a galactic shooting gallery.

And how do we deal with it?

The answer right now seems to be a collective shoulder shrug with a lot of uncomfortable throat-clearing.

This is, to put it bluntly, a problem.

And it’s a perfect metaphor for so many of the problems facing society today. Our blind rush to one-up each other, to get those satellites up there without worrying about how to safely get them down again, is literally choking the skies to the point that nobody can use them.

I don’t have a solution for this. But I learned about it several years ago and every now and then, I think about it, and it worries me. I just thought you ought to know about it, too. So I don’t have to worry alone.

Space Junk, Space Debris, Orbits, Space, Universe

As if all of us didn’t have enough to worry about.