Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

You Are Not Your Brain (Except That You Are)

Pavowski5 Comments

Probably confirmation bias at work here, but ever since I started mulling over New Year’s Resolutions and my objections to them, I’ve been seeing relevant ideology everywhere I look. Case in point: sometime in the last two days, and I can’t recall which store I was in at the time, I saw a book on display titled “You Are Not Your Brain!” It was crammed in there with some other self-help titles and weight-loss crash-course books somewhere near the checkout. It might have been a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I can’t remember, and it’s not important. What’s important is the title.

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I’ll go ahead and disclaim that I didn’t have time to look at the book. I was shuttling the two sprouts around, and if it’s not written down on my itinerary, it doesn’t get done. And I do hate to judge based on surface impressions rather than an in-depth analysis of content. I’m sure there’s something to the book; I’m sure it’s a fascinating read. (I may be giving more benefit of the doubt than is necessary or merited here, but we’ll go for it.) But the book itself isn’t even important. The title is. Because first impressions matter. Titles matter. You are nothing if not your brain.

You may not like the person that your brain has made you into. You may not appreciate all the things that your brain compels you to do. You certainly may not understand certain tendencies that your brain has. But to say that “You Are Not Your Brain” is to make the fatal mistake of assigning power over your decisions to somebody or something that is not yourself. As if there’s this evil spider-demon perched in your skull, making you eat extra cookies and watch reruns of The Biggest Loser. “I didn’t do that, my brain made me do it. This book can cure me of that bad decision making by helping me to countermand my brain.” No. Get a life.

(There’s a corollary here, for the legitimately chemically unbalanced and mentally ill. That sharknado is for real. And if you suffer from those conditions, then your locus of f’ed-up-ed-ness certainly is external.)

No, we are our brains. We are nothing if not our brains. Our hearts? Our souls? Whatever. Our souls are no more forced into making bad choices by our brains than my minivan is forced to go from zero to 60 in about five minutes and corner like a drunken ox by virtue of not being a cherry-red Lambo. (Lambos are fast, right? And do we still call them Lambos? … whatever, I don’t cars.) Facts are facts. Heart of a Mustang, Mind of a Minivan… sorry, you’re driving like a minivan, because that’s what you’re wired to do.

Which is not to say, of course, that you can’t don some electrical gloves and welding goggles, get in there and rewire the thing. If it’s spewing sparks and leaking plasma and pumping doubt and misery and desperation into your airways, making bad decisions and ruining your life, you can change that. Not overnight. It’ll take hours and days — or more likely, months and years — of studying schematics and learning about triggers and tendencies and fighting urges and really taking a good hard look at the way the spluttering gizmo works. You can change the way you think. But — and here’s the problem with a concept like “you are not your brain” — if you can’t identify the problem, you can’t fix the problem. If you’ve got a flat tire, it does you about as much good as a stack of hundred dollar bills in a starving dog’s mouth to know how an internal combustion engine works. You can stand at the side of the road and blather and bark all you want about how the engine is FINE, the car SHOULD be running, but that ain’t gonna patch the tire. If you don’t own the problem and look at it objectively and truthfully, you can’t fix the problem.

This is going to have to be my last word on New Year’s Resolutions, because I’m exhausted from getting upset over them. So many people making resolutions — and so many people five days into their resolutions (if they’ve made it even that far) — think the problem they’re fixing is external. My job sucks because I hate my boss, so I’ll get a new job. I eat horrible, artery-clogging food because it’s easier than cooking for myself, so I’ll order off the “diet” portion of the menu. I don’t work out because I don’t have time, so I’ll just download this seven-minute workout app and use that.

It doesn’t work like that. Your job sucks because you are not at home in yourself in it, but there are perfectly content telemarketers, gleeful garbage collectors, top-of-the-world door-to-door salesmen. You eat out because you don’t know how to cook, but the answer isn’t to order salads at McDonalds. Learn to cook for yourself and actually exercise some control over what goes into your body. You don’t work out because you haven’t made the time (let’s make that distinction: we all have the same 24 hours every day). An app on your phone is not the answer. Know what is? Cutting out some TV and exercising instead is.

And you know what’s in charge of ALL those decisions that get made? (Because, make no mistake, whether you exercise or not, you made a choice. Whether you grill some chicken or order a triple-extra-fatty-cheeseburger, you made a choice. Whether you stay in your crap job and learn to love it or drop a piano on your boss to escape his corporate lash, you MADE A CHOICE.) Your brain is in charge of those choices. You ARE your brain.

Deal with it.

Worse still, I just went and did some scratch-the-surface research (thanks Amazon) and found out the book is written by a pair of neuroscientists. SCIENTISTS. WROTE A BOOK CALLED “YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN.”

SCIENCE.

CommiTTmenT (You Don’t Need New Year’s Resolutions)

Pavowski18 Comments

A few days ago, I posted a roundabout look at New Year’s Resolutions and my general disdain for them. And freely I own that I’m a cynic and a Grinch about lots and lots of things. But I don’t think I’m wrong. Most New Year’s Resolutions fail, right? I mean, you apparently need look no further than any gym. Gyms sell enough memberships in January to keep them in the black for the entire year. Regular gym-goers spend January and February griping about the resolution-makers that clog up the gyms during those months. They go and buy their memberships filled with purpose and zeal. They arrive at the gym without a real plan and mill about, hopping on a treadmill here, a bench-press machine there, and then they go home, feeling good about themselves for getting out of the house. I’ve read ridiculous stories in the last couple of days about sign-up lists of over an hour to get on a treadmill. An HOUR! (Protip: run outside and feel less like a rat on a wheel!)

Of course, by the time March comes around and the realization has dawned that it’s hard making time to go to the gym regularly, and that it takes work and discomfort to make the change they want in their bodies, the herd thins out. Why? I think there are two factors at work.

First is societal pressure. At the New Year, everybody is making resolutions to change his or her life for the better. “New Year, New Me!” And they promise to lose weight, cut back on vices, start working out, save more money, be a better person, and on and on ad nauseam. Problem is, they’re making these resolutions because they’re supposed to. It’s that time of year, after all, and people are going to be asking what your New Year’s resolutions are, and you want to have something good on your ledger. Which is one of the worst reasons to make a decision about changing your life, not to mention, it doesn’t work.

The reason it doesn’t work is the second factor: commitment. Or rather, a lack of it. If you want to make a change in your life, it takes time, and thought, and hard work, and a hell of a lot of sticktoitiveness. You know, “commitment.” The average New Year’s Resolution is made in a haze of misery about the state of a life lived over the previous year. It’s a lament after looking at oneself in the (literal or metaphorical) mirror. It’s born of frustration and disbelief (how did I let things get this way?) because it is based in the moment. But in the self-centered, instantaneous-feedback world of iPads and Twitter and name-your-app-or-device-that-has-I-or-me-or-my in its title, it’s hard for us to think outside of the moment.

Unfortunately, change doesn’t happen in the moment. I look in the mirror and recognize that I didn’t go overnight from 175 pounds up to almost 200. It’s easy to think that the change was sudden, but no, the fact is I worked hard at making myself that way by not fighting against my own momentum for about a year. I’d have to be an idiot to think I could decide on Jan. 1 to lose weight and start turning it around right away. Except that’s exactly what happens. People buy their gym memberships, go dutifully for a few weeks, don’t see the type of radical change they’re looking for and/or expecting IMMEDIATELY, think “fargo it”, and go back to the couch. People decide they’re going to write, and they do so religiously for a few weeks, but then it dawns on them that it’s actually work to write and it takes away time from other things they’d rather do, and it’s over. If you look around, you can find scads of blogs with twenty or fewer posts. They create the blargs, full of that mystical swill that makes us want to share and tell stories and paint pictures with words, and then slowly the gumption peters out and the blargs fall discarded like so many chewed-up tires by the roadside. (I’m painfully aware of this, because the title I wanted for this blog is in use by a woman who created a blog to talk about her pregnancy and wrote all of 2 POSTS back in 2011. Fargo!)

No, change takes commitment. It takes a good, long, hard look at the self — and not just the self we see, but the self we are: the love handles and the laziness and the fact that we can’t climb a flight of stairs without breaking a sweat and the fact that it’s so much easier and more inviting to watch hours of Reality TV reruns than it is to pick up the pen (virtual or otherwise) and create something. It takes a plan of action, not just jumping into the deep end of the pool and hoping for the best. It takes patience and an acknowledgment that it takes time to change your momentum: every step you take toward a new self is a step twice as hard, because you’re fighting against the current of your own bad decisions. The good news is, each step unburdens you just a little bit as you drop the bad momentum and build good momentum. It’s slow going, is all, and it takes commitment to weather the storm.

The point is, you don’t need New Year’s to make a change in your life. Or maybe you do. Ultimately it doesn’t matter when you make the change, the important thing is that you make the change. But don’t make it because you have a glass of champagne in your hands and the balls are dropping.

What’s that? Oh. Ball. The ball (singular) is dropping. Don’t make a change because it’s the time for making changes. Make the change because it’s time for the change to be made, and commit to the work that the change requires.

Happy New Year.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Word Bloat, and a note on New Year’s Resolutions

Pavowski1 Comment

Perception is everything. Sometimes the only thing.

I was working on the edit last night, and I realized that I’m a lot closer to the end of the first pass than I thought I was. To be precise, there are still a lot of pages between my current position and the end, but the big rewriting is nearly done, and from there it’s just a pruning of the hedges, a dusting of the shelves, and a putting to bed of the toddlers. Then it’s finally going to be time to show this thing to some actual people to actually read it. Those people will then hopefully have mercy on my soul and tell me only in the kindest of terms how many root canals they would rather sit through before they’d turn to my book.

But the end is in sight. Maybe still a pinprick on the horizon, but at least the horizon is no longer an endless blue expanse — it actually looks as if I may be coming back into harbor after all this time. And that’s awesome. Unfortunately, while I was noticing that the end is in sight, I also noticed the word count in the bottom corner of the document. It may be early in the game to be overly concerned with the word count on the novel as a whole, but like a chipped tooth that you can’t stop running your tongue over, I can’t put the number out of my head. The first draft was finished at roughly 89000 words. Now the thing is just a few hundred short of 100k.

It’s bloating. Slowly expanding in the middle, like a middle-aged married guy. And I worry that with the changes I’m making, it will continue to swell like a corpse in a pond if I don’t take measures to trim it down. It’s part and parcel of this whole editorial process, I suppose, for me to find yet another thing to smother my soul in doubt over.

So now, 40 pages shy of the end of the book, I’ve suddenly become draconian in my examination of the language of the thing. I wield my highlight and delete functions like twin poison-coated samurai swords. Which means I’m going to have to re-read the entire novel again making the same ruthless cuts, lest the first half sound like it was written by a living dictionary while the second half was written by a dictionary with all the adjectives and adverbs cut out.

But enough about the edit. It’s New Year’s Eve, which means it’s time to pop the champagne, break out the sparklers, and fall asleep at 9:30, because that’s how we roll in my house. It’s also time for resolutions, which is a tradition as idiotic as any we have in our funny old culture.

The date of Jan. 1 only has significance because we say it does. In the scope of the universe with all its bits of flying dust and nigh-endlessly burning gas and invisible particles and unfathomable tracts of empty space, the significance of one tiny planet making one revolution around one tiny sun has all the import of an ant fart in a hurricane. But somehow, and for some reason, we’ve decided that it’s a good date for “reinventing ourselves” and making vows that have as much likelihood of being fulfilled as my hair has of sprouting into a saucy pompadour atop my dome.

Here’s a hint for resolutions in general: if you’re making them for any reason at all other than because you find it of crucial importance to your life, you might as well write the resolution on a square of toilet tissue, and then use the toilet tissue for its designed purpose. Resolving to lose weight at the new year because that’s what everybody does? Yeah, you might as well just eat a dozen donuts now and save yourself the strife. Quitting smoking on your birthday? Go ahead and stop off for some new lighters on your drive home. If a resolution is worth making, it’s worth starting on it right fargoing now. As in, I resolve right now to stop griping about resolutions and go work on my novel.

See you next year.

A Farewell to Traffic

Pavowski4 Comments

Christmas is over, and I couldn’t be happier.

Not because I hate the season. I love the season. And I love the holiday, and the family, and the spirit, and the things… But I hate the traffic.

See, we live just around the corner from the mall; a mall that attracts shoppers from as far away as Alabama, which means that our podunk little town suddenly begins attracting ungodly numbers of shoppers after Thanksgiving. It’s ridiculous. Our city is not a huge one nor a tiny one — it’s sort of Goldilocks’ed right in the middle — but the city planning and especially the road layouts are sharply indicative of a city office that never planned on the city getting as big as it is or attracting the kind of Christmas traffic that it does.

What that means is that from November to December, you can double or triple or better your travel time to get anywhere, even if it’s just around the corner for a burger. Even getting out of my neighborhood, thanks to its juxtaposition with one of the main arteries leading to the highway, can take fifteen minutes or more depending on the (lack of) goodwill from the holiday drivers. We are consumed with traffic, which leads to headaches, which basically makes me become a hermit from Thanksgiving until a few days after the madness has passed.

It’s funny how much of an effect something like traffic can have upon my psyche, especially considering that I actually enjoy driving most of the time. But traffic sucks the life out of me. And when the traffic is caused entirely as a result of poor planning, is compounded by the jerkish behavior of average joes ignoring the rules of the road in favor of their own rushing around, and has virtually no solution in sight thanks to the cramped layout of buildings and shopping centers preventing any widening of roads, it really makes me hate humanity a little bit. Like, more than usual.

But Christmas is over, and the world is returning to normal after the gift explosions and the candy cane hangover, so the traffic is becoming livable again, which means I can go out into the world again. I can stop hating strangers so much.

And let me just acknowledge how difficult it was, with a prompt word like “consume,” how difficult it was not to write about the thirty pounds of turkey and casserole and cheesecake that I consumed over the break. For a guy like me who’s working on managing his weight, that stuff is pretty much front-of-mind right now.

Short entry today to ease me back into posting now that the holidays are over. Good one coming up about gender roles and expectations (heavy stuff for the blarg here at Pavorisms, but don’t worry, it’ll be characteristically flip and uninformed).

This post was part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. And yes, it’s a day late. I’m consumed with guilt over it.

Toddler Life, Chapter 76: Infants Are At War With Our Sleep Schedules

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I believe I’ve written before about the sixth sense the babies have about the plans adults have made in the house. In short, if you are a parent of a kid under… mine are only 2, so I’m going to extrapolate a little bit here… 7, that kid will inevitably find a way to unearth your plan, smear it with his slobbery little fingers, then shatter it into tiny little pieces, then eat the pieces and poop them out all over the oriental rug in the living room. The priceless one you inherited from your grandmother. The one valued at over ten thousand dollars, because somehow a rug can be worth more than a car.

They know. They have brains the size of baseballs, but they can smell a plan forming, and the smell is abhorrent to them. They don’t have sophisticated language skills yet, or the ability to set a booby trap or actively create a mess for you to clean up at the expense of whatever thing you were thinking of doing, but what they do have is the knack for becoming unignorably needy and unbearably obnoxious.

Case in point:

Morning runs have been getting dodgy of late. My wife is exhausted from the wee hours wake-ups with sprout #2 (justifiably so) and has asked me to help out with some mid-night changings and feedings. (Mid-night is hyphenated, because oh, if only they happened at midnight. No, were they at midnight, they would fall in between REM cycles and allow for a nice long stretch of sleep unbroken before sprout #1 wakes at half-past waaaaay too early. These happen at 10:45 — roughly an hour after we head to bed — and 3 AM — just a few hours before we’re going to wake up.)

There’s a corollary here which neatly encapsulates the Catch-22 that takes place in my house every night (and here, were current events different, I’d quote Bill Cosby’s Himself routine about how “the same thing happens every night”, but the world is an ugly place and I can not currently quote Bill Cosby without feeling a little bit skeevy). Sprout #2 begins crying at oh, whatever time she damn well feels like it. My wife sleeps much more lightly than I do, so she wakes up immediately (I can sleep merrily for at least ten minutes of infant fussing). So she’s awake anyway, but I’ve promised to help out, so wife starts poking me in the ribs to wake me up. I get up. Go downstairs to warm up a bottle. Bring it back upstairs and begin to change baby’s diaper. By the time I get the bottle in her mouth, about twenty minutes have passed since she started crying. It’s a funny trick of the universe that twenty minutes is about the amount of time it would take for my wife to hear the crying, get up, change the diaper, stick a boob in the kid’s mouth, and be back in bed. But I dutifully feed the kid. Sometimes she accepts the bottle, sometimes she doesn’t. Either way, it’s about 40 minutes from the time she originally started crying before I can have the little bundle of joy laid back in her bed; 40 minutes which my wife cannot sleep through because of first the crying and then the slurping and then the singing and fussing and finally the walking around as I soothe baby back (hopefully) to sleep.

If that was too much to follow: it takes my wife 15-20 minutes to settle the crying baby back down with roughly a 95% success rate, and it takes me about 45 minutes to settle the baby with more or less a 30% success rate, because even though the girl can take a bottle, what she really wants is a boob, and to a lesser extent, her mother. But I am trying to help, so I soldier on anyway.

Right, back to the point. Baby wakes up at 4 AM this morning. I have the brilliant idea that I’ll put the baby down, and, since I’ll be awake anyway, I’ll suit up and go for a run, then come back and go to sleep if time allows, and if not, well, the run will have woken me up.

But the baby knows, and she won’t take the bottle from me. I’m determined to pull my weight and let my wife get her last two hours of beauty sleep before she goes to work (she’s making bank while I’m home for the break), so I keep at it. Baby fights me for twenty minutes, drinking about two swallows of milk and drooling half the bottle down her onesie, which then needs changing. Changing the onesie makes her cold, which wakes her up even more. Then she poops, so I have to change her diaper, which makes her even colder.

Now it’s 4:30 AM, and the baby is wide awake. Sometimes she can fake me out and appear to be awake but actually be very very tired, so I lay her in the crib and decide to give her a few minutes to see if she falls asleep while I suit up for my run.

She doesn’t. She begins squalling louder than before. I trudge back in and try the bottle again, but she demonstrates surprising forearm strength and nearly swats it out of my hand. There’s nothing for it: she’s awake, but I’m going to insulate my wife from having to get out of bed, so I take her downstairs and watch her flerp around on the floor for a while. (“Flerping” is that uncoordinated rolling, scooting, flopping and stumbling that only a baby who’s surprisingly mobile but not yet able to crawl can accomplish.) This she does for fully an hour without showing any sign of getting tired.

So I can’t run, because the baby is awake and will cry like I’ve stolen every cookie from her entire life if I lay her in the crib. And I can’t go back to sleep, because if I close my eyes for an instant while the baby is flerping in the floor, she’s likely to pull the Christmas tree over, or gag herself on the tail of a cat, or somehow set fire to the drapes. This infant — brain the size of a baseball, remember — has not only pooped on my plan for a productive early morning, but destroyed my fallback plan of going back to sleep, and has made me feel like an idiot besides for now being stuck on the couch watching her flerp at 5 AM.

5:45 AM comes, and I hear my wife stirring upstairs. I take the baby up and relate the events of the morning, and share my opinion that the baby is probably still hungry since she hasn’t actually eaten in nine hours. My wife takes the baby into the nursery and within two shakes of a cricket’s whisker, the baby is asleep, drunk on breastmilk straight from the tap.

I go for my run anyway at this point, because I’m stubborn like that, and spend the rest of the day in a mind-fog that can only come from … well, from a sleep-deprived night with an infant who is, apparently, smarter than all of us. Or at least smarter than me.

The only rational course is to plan to wake up in the night to feed her. That way, when she foils my “plan”, she will play right into my trap of letting my wife and I sleep through the night.

This will work.

Please, let this work.