Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

An Organic Being

Pavowski5 Comments

Here’s a riddle. What combines the flu, flirting, horrible awkwardness, and a fantastic bargain?

If you said my day earlier this week (mine, not yours), you’d be right. Well, I guess to be fair, you might be right about yours, but you’d definitely be right about mine.

So, yeah, the drugstore isn’t the first place I think of when I think of picking up dates, but apparently that’s why I’m losing the game to this guy who, for lack of a better idea and because I have to call him something, I’ll call Dave. And the funny part about this story is that Dave’s not all that much unlike me. He’s socially awkward, a bit of a geek, and probably ultimately harmless. But all I know of Dave I learned from the other side of a partition in the vaccination administration booth at the back of a Walgreen’s, so it’s entirely possible I’ve misread him. If that’s the case, Dave, my bad, bro.

I’m standing in line waiting to get the flu vaccine (a thing I have to do since 1)I’m a teacher and 2) I have toddlers and infants living in my house) and I hear a technician (what do you call the person who gives you a shot at Walgreen’s? Not a nurse, certainly. Orderly? Clerk? Technician sounds best, so I’ll go with that) explaining to her patient (again, it’s the best word I can think of under the circumstance) that he’ll feel a pinch and then some pressure, and then it’ll be done.

Without batting an eye or hesitating at all, Dave responds, “yeah, I might pass out, so if you could just keep talking to me, that’d be great.” And the technician stutters and stammers a little bit, obviously somewhat taken aback. So Dave goes on. “Yeah, I kind of get grossed out if I think of myself as an organic being, so I really need to keep my mind off the needle.” And the tech says, “Oh, I see.”

“Oh, I see” is one of those phrases which almost never means in context what it literally says. “Oh, I see” is one of those things you say when a stamp collector explains to you the differences between his 1919 French Revival printing (or whatever) and 1921 New Orleans Renaissance iterations of the same stamp. It’s a thing you say when you accidentally wander into a room and everybody’s wearing masks and holding daggers and they point to the sign on the door that says “invite only”. “Oh, I see” really means, “god help me, how do I get away from this situation?”

And I bet that she would have actually gotten up and walked away had Dave not kept talking. He starts asking her if she likes beer, and then starts rattling on about this local brewery that makes a wicked (his word) ale this time of year, and she should really try it. Then she excuses herself, because y’know, she actually has a job to do, and Dave asks if he can just sit in the chair for another five minutes or so because he’s afraid he might pass out, and could she come check on him again before he leaves?

Look, I know that you can’t pick the moment when fate throws that special somebody into your path. And in some ways, I kinda admire Dave and his tenacity — the way he kept on trying not to let her walk away from him like some poor little broken robot just trying like hell to fulfill its programming. But, dammit, the fargoing Walgreen’s is not the place for romance, okay? It’s flu season. This poor woman is probably overworked and in contact with sick people for the better part of every day, she does not need you making a pass at her under the cover of your vaccination. Okay, Dave? Okay!?!

In my mind, Dave slipped her his phone number as he left, and she blushed a bit, and the whole encounter left her flattered and curious and maybe a little bit twitterpated and weak in the knees, and THAT is why she inexpertly jabbed the needle into my arm and kept me there impaled like an insect in an entomologist’s study for what felt like an eternity. Because I refuse to believe that she’s that bad at giving inoculations on the regular. She can’t be. There would be lawsuits.

In short, I really hope things worked out between Dave and the Walgreen’s Tech. Because if she fargoed up my arm for no good reason, that would be a shame, but if she did it for love, then I guess that’s okay.

Oh, I forgot the part about the fantastic bargain. My insurance covered the stabbing attack on my arm, so it was free of charge. (I know, kind of a let down, right?) No, actually, upon further reflection, the bargain is that I am now in possession of the phrase, “I get kind of grossed out when I think of myself as an organic being,” which I am totally working into my next novel somehow.

This post is part of SoCS. The prompt this week was one of the five words, “bat”, “bet”, “bit”, “bot”, and “but”. I’m pretty sure I snuck them all in here.

Double Space, I Hardly Knew Ye

Pavowski7 Comments

I’m always afraid I’m going to be found out.

I’m that guy in the movies who’s walking backward against the current and the only thing saving me from annihilation is that somehow the other berks in the matrix haven’t scented me out yet. I’m covered in zombie entrails walking amongst the walking dead, counting on the smell of dead things to keep me incognito. I’m the wolf covered in tufts of cotton, only invisible because the sheep haven’t bothered to look my way.

I’m making it up as I go in every facet of my life. As a husband? Yeah, I’m five years into that and have no idea what I’m doing. As a father? Don’t make me laugh. What parent really knows what he is doing? It’s my baseline goal to make sure the kid doesn’t grow up to be a mass-murderer, anything beyond that is gravy. As a teacher? Let’s just say I fear for the future. Even now, as I write this blarg post, I’m inescapably aware that in no way am I qualified to be writing the things I’m writing about, whether in my novel or here on this lonely corner of the web. I don’t know what I’m doing.

The only reason, as Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black, that I’m able to go on with my life is that most of the time, I do not know about it. There are probably better ways to write, but I am merrily unaware. Doubtless there are better parenting methods, but mine is working well enough for me so far. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. And I sure as sharknado thought I was doing a decent job as an English teacher.

The problem with living happily in ignorance is that sooner or later, somebody will point out the ways in which you never knew you were wrong, as evidenced by any nimrod who’s anti-vaccinations will be glad to tell you. Even now, this very instant, I am struggling with a bit of information I’ve just learned which is shaking up my very existence, fighting against the habits and automatic thinking which have been a part of me for over twenty years.

Seriously, how did I make it this far in my life not knowing that you only press space once after a period?

I’ve been typing with the double-spaced period for ages. AGES. I learned in my keyboarding class in middle school that a period gets two spaces behind it, and I’ve been typing that way ever since. Then today, it’s pointed out to me that two spaces after a period is nigh-archaic. I ask my wife who writes for a living, and in typical I-can’t-believe-I’m-married-to-this-idiot fashion, she says, “obviously. How did you not know that?” Somehow in twenty years I’ve missed the memo on this and nobody ever bothered to tell me.

Recently I heard a story about a guy who went into Home Depot to buy a new toilet and asked if, since he lived alone, he could just get a toilet without the seat. He lived by himself, no women in the house, so no need to put the seat down. Innocently, a worker asked him how he would be able to go #2, and the guy said, “what do you mean?” After a bit of embarrassing questioning, it came out that the guy had never sat on a toilet seat in his life, he always just squatted over the bowl. Certainly it never hurt anybody. He just never learned the right way and continued on, living his life in the complete wrong way until by mistake somebody set him straight.

So it is with me and the period. The humble period, of all things. Only the most common punctuation mark in the written language. Only the simple symbol of the end of a sentence, the building block of the paragraph, and therefore of all language itself. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to hit backspace, in this paragraph alone, to go back and erase one of the extra spaces I’m inserting as automatically as breathing.

The double space is a habit it’s going to take me months to unlearn. I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back, find my sixth-grade typing teacher, and punch her in the neck.

What’s next? Will I find out I’ve been spelling my own name wrong? Mispronouncing the simplest of words? Wearing my shoes on the wrong feet?

NaNoWriNOPE.

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You can’t swing a cat the last couple of days without hearing about NaNoWriMo.  Well, I guess that’s only true if you travel in writerly circles.  Outside literary circles the talk, I’m sure, is just more football, more Ebola, more elections, and if you’re really unlucky, the start of the Christmas season.  Down here with the writers and the would-be’s, though, it’s all NaNoWriMo all the time.

I think NaNoWriMo is awesome.  I’ve never done it, but I’ve had friends who tried.  Anything that motivates an otherwise stuck writer to unstick himself and put pen to paper, keys to screen, voice to dictaphone, is a thing that’s fighting on the side of good.

That said, I can’t personally get excited about it.

I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s my innate anti-herd mentality, my inherent distrust of groupthink.  If a lot of people are doing a thing because it’s trendy, most of the time, that alone is enough for me to not want to do that thing.  And NaNoWriMo is definitely trendy.  The website claims that over 300,000 people completed the challenge last year, to say nothing of the untold scores that fell off the wagon.  And I have a feeling that, faced with the mammoth task of slaying a 50,000 word novel, there were more than a few that fell off the wagon.

NaNoWriMo should appeal to me on every level.  It invites anybody who feels they have a story to tell to get off their donk and tell that story.  That’s a message I believe in; just look at what I’ve done with this place since I suddenly decided I had stories worth telling, oh, seven or eight months ago.  It encourages you to pour your heart and soul into a thing and work doggedly at it against all odds to get it done.  Yeah, I feel that.  It tells us that anybody — anybody — can do this writing thing, no matter what job you work at or don’t work at, no matter what demands your family makes on your time, no matter  what else you have going on in your day.  All this is relevant to my interests.

But I won’t be doing it this year.  And I probably won’t be doing it for many years to come.

I think my problem with it… no, that’s not right.  Problem is too strong a word, and I’m not here to take a bold stand against NaNoWriMo.  I think it’s awesome, as I stated above.  So, not a problem, as such.  More a misgiving, a lurking doubt.  My lurking doubt about NaNoWriMo is that it’s a gimmick.  And before I wander out onto this very tenuous, very no-actual-leg-to-stand-on branch, let me make it clear that this is just what I think for me.

When I thought about whether or not I would try for NaNoWriMo this year (and I did ponder it, briefly), I realized that it struck me as a gimmick. A potentially useful gimmick, perhaps.  A gimmick which would push me toward my goal of becoming a better and hopefully published writer, probably.  But a gimmick.  It’s imposing a ludicrous daily writing goal.  An insane deadline.  A Herculean writing task.  And if I were to fail at it, to come up short, I’d tear myself up over it.  That’s my MO, that’s what I do.  A missed deadline, a failure to produce, is crippling to me.  Insecurity about whether I’ll be able to produce is why I’m starting to stress out NOW, at the beginning of November, about whether I will in fact finish my first editing pass by the year’s end as I arbitrarily set out to do.

No, working on this edit and pushing out another short story every week and unspooling my brain on the blarg here are quite enough writing goals for November and the near future, for that matter.

I don’t need NaNoWriMo to feel like a writer.  Neither, for that mater, does anybody taking part.  But if it helps you, more power to you.  If it motivates you, then let it motivate you, and embrace the headache and the stress and the adrenaline and the frenzy of it.  I’ll just be over here, plugging away at my novel already in progress, occasionally tossing off posts about how amusing it is watching the NaNoWriMo’ers flailing around.

At any rate, if you’re NaNoWriMo’ing, go get it.  But just remember that you don’t need it.  If you’re a writer, you’re a writer without NaNoWriMo.

We Are the Grid

Pavowski9 Comments

What if memory were a saleable commodity?

I think this idea must have been implanted in my grey matter sometime around the time I first saw Total Recall when I was, I dunno, 15 or so, but I think it’s not so far-flung an idea as it perhaps seems on the surface.  When you consider the exponential growth of technology, and the fact that you now have a device in your pocket which can measure your caloric intake, sleep cycle, physical activity or lack thereof, and sharknado, probably even your bowel movements during the day, is it so hard to imagine a future wherein memories can be added to your hard drive for a fee?  Or deleted?

Terrible childhood keeping you from living up to your potential?  Not anymore.  Erase those awful parents and replace them with the Stepford Wives version of your mom.  All aprons and chocolate cakes and hot dinners and high heels.  Dad used to smack you around?  No, he didn’t.  Your dad was the perfect, pipe-smoking, newspaper-reading, catch-playing, allowance-giving Leave-it-to-Beaver dad.  (Truth time, I never saw a single episode of Leave it to Beaver, but that’s what it was about, right?)

It feels like science fiction, but it isn’t.  In the short space of my lifetime — and I got started in the eighties — we’ve gone from the height of technology being a little black box on your belt that can receive phone calls but not place them, a hulking computer which could choke when reading a floppy disk — an actual floppy disk that was actually floppy — to almost everybody in the US owning a computer that fits in your pocket.  Oh, and that computer is connected — by fargoing magic, it would seem to our selves from twenty years ago — to a series of computers around the world which give us access to any bit of information we might want, from local movie times to the phases of the moon to the entire history of ancient Greece to entire catalogs of movies and television shows.  Oh, and this computer also makes phone calls.  AND LETS YOU TALK FACE TO FACE TO SOMEBODY ACROSS THE GLOBE.

The cover of Time magazine a few months ago featured the next step in “Smart” technology — a glowing heads-up display embedded in the forearm.  Smart Watches are all the rage at the moment; there are no fewer than dozens of models being hawked in magazines and tech websites now, and you may be getting one for Christmas.  Google Glass, much though it’s stumbling and crashing into the furniture in its infancy much like my two-year-old son, is here and refining itself and not going anywhere.  In a few years, we will hardly remember a time when the computer chips were on the outside of our heads; when conducting an internet search required interfacing with a keyboard and a digital screen rather than the automatic firing of neurons and the insides of our eyelids.wrist-cover

There will be arguments about whether real or “artificial” memories are superior, though it will hardly matter, because the artificial ones will feel so real we’ll be unable to tell the difference.  There will be debates about whether the tech should be usable in certain situations — I can foresee a scandal wherein a kid who’s never cracked a book in his life wins the National Spelling Bee over all the geniuses through the covert use of his neural implants, but nobody will be able to prove it.  The moment you meet a new person, their vitae will be displayed in searing neon text inside your brain, with the option to view a full background history for a small fee, you need only “glance right” and the money will automatically be debited from your account.

There will be no such thing as “off the grid” anymore, because we will be the grid.  You won’t be able to “unplug” anymore, because the stuff will be plugged into you.

I wrote a short story some months ago about a society wherein nobody was able to lie anymore because everybody had a device implanted into his head which blinked if they told a lie.  Make lying impossible, and the ability will disappear.  Except the world needs liars, so naturally, scientists found a way to bypass the very tech they had created to make lying impossible.  Not my best story, to be sure, but it seems relevant to the topic at hand.   At any rate, I go back to that story because it’s science fiction… except that it’s not.  We’ve had technology for years which, through a simple reading of your blood pressure, pulse rate, or even the dilation of your pupils can tell if you’re lying.  How much of a stretch is it to imagine a world where they just hook that stuff up to you at birth to cut out the middle man?

Sure, this means that we’d view everybody as an inherently deceitful and disingenuous person.  But hell, Sam’s Club checks your receipt before you walk out the door, and you pay for the privilege of shopping there.

When we can implant memories — and remove the ones we don’t want — what will happen to the idea of identity?  What will happen to the idea of being a unique person?

I’ve never climbed Everest, but I could easily implant a memory that I had.  And if I remember it — if I can smell the snow and feel the thinness of the air and see the panorama of distant mountain peaks and the world far below — is it not real?  For that matter, if something happened to me in my life and I can’t remember it — did it ever really happen?  Are we not all, at the end of the day, brains in a vat?

Believe it or not, no psychotropic substances were involved in the writing of this rambling blarg post.  Only a deep-seated paranoia about our collective cybernetic future.  I for one would like to preemptively voice my whole-hearted endorsement of our prospective robot overlords, and ask that when they plug me into the Matrix, they make me believe that I am a freaking ninja with a boat and a talking dog.  And a hoverboard.  Because yay, hoverboards.

This post is part of SoCS.  Typed with no editing at all, only spellchecking.  Which I’ve already had implanted in my brain.

Five Things I Learned Serving Jury Duty

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I’ve just finished serving jury duty, and I learned a few things from the experience.

First of all, it is stressful holding another person’s fate in your hands.  I know this a little bit from being a teacher, but it’s one thing to be the gatekeeper stopping a kid from passing on to the next grade and another thing entirely to be a juror sending a grown man to jail.

Second, it is humbling and empowering, fascinating and exhausting to become a cog in the justice system.  You see it on TV and you know in an abstract way that it’s been embellished, but to actually dip your toes in the water and see it all spinning up close… well, it’s something.  Yes, it’s a huge drain on your time, yes, it’s horribly inconvenient, but the judges and the lawyers really let rip with a bunch of speechifying about the system and how it breaks down without the service of “people like you” and it’s enough to make you feel almost important for a few days.

Third, don’t be a stalker.

Fourth, don’t encourage a stalker.

So the case I was on was a stalking case.  And they encourage you, when you first sit down and hear opening arguments, to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions.  But you hear “stalker” and you think, okay, that’s a bad guy that needs to be stopped.  And I’m sure in many cases that turns out to be exactly the situation.  However, in this case — which sounded a lot more like real life — there was nothing so simple.  To simplify things to a point of ridiculousness, this couple dated for nine months, then broke up.  To be specific, she broke up with him, and he was still, to unironically use an over-cliched phrase, madly in love with her.

Now, breakups happen.  And one-sided breakups happen.  The problem here arose because she wanted to be cordial and nice.  So she sent him e-mails and text messages to the effect of: “I don’t want anything more to do with you, please don’t contact me again, I’ll talk to you later.”  Or, “Your last message was inappropriate, I don’t want you in my life, but I may speak to you if I see you around, and I may dial your number if I need to.”  I’m not one to victim-blame, but if you want a person to leave you alone, and you know that person is still determined to feel a certain way about you, you can’t leave the door open for contact.

Now, this guy stepped over the line.  He drove by her house unannounced, he sent some fairly ugly text messages her way when she started dating another guy, but he was not hiding in the bushes outside the house or parking across the street for hours on end or following her around in public.  It was an ugly, ugly situation.  No doubt about that.  But he wasn’t a stalker, so we acquitted him.

I’m not sure how much more detail would be useful and I’m not sure how much is really ethical to share, so I’m going to cut that portion of the program short.  However, there are some lessons to be learned from all this.

The first is this, and it goes for everybody: If you’re going to press charges against somebody, and the situation involves the dealings and behavior of both individuals in some way, you’d better be sure that your house is in order, because the lawyers and the investigators and everybody and their mother are going to go through your metaphorical house, drag all your metaphorical dirty laundry onto the lawn, smash it to pieces, burn the pieces, sort through the ashes, and then arrange the ashes into lovely grey mosaics for a jury of your peers to peruse ad nauseam. In other words, if you’re going to press charges, make sure the juice is worth the squeeze.

The second bit of advice is for the ladies.  If you want a man out of your life, and you feel it may eventually come to legal measures, slam the fargoing door.  None of this nicey-nicey, cordial-kitty crap.  I’m reminded of that moment in Dumb and Dumber where the girl tells one of the Dumbs that the odds of her getting together with him are a million-to-one, and he responds with vigor, “So you’re saying there’s a chance!”  Leave no chances.  Make yourself abundantly clear.

The third bit of advice is for the guys.  NO MEANS NO.  When she tells you she wants to be left alone, do yourself a favor and assume she’s serious.  The case I sat on was flimsy as hell and we still almost found him guilty.  And even though we acquitted him, he still had to give up tons of his time to stand trial, to have his personal business laid open for the world to see, to stand in humiliation at being accused of, let’s be honest, a crime that’s not going to win you the respect of your comrades.

The fourth bit of advice is for anybody hoping to avoid jury duty.  Wear pajamas to court.  Nothing shows the lawyers you’re an idiot incapable of using your critical brain to ponder the minutiae of a case which may send a person to jail for a long time like a refusal to put on proper pants.  Stupid me, I wore slacks and a collared shirt every day, and look where I ended up.

The fifth bit of advice is: Pajamas won’t save you.  In the jury pool room, waiting to be called to a courtroom, I was sitting next to a woman in hot pink pajamas and a hoodie, who did not look up from her cell phone the entire two hours we were waiting to be called to court.  Next day, I saw her again, standing in the waiting area outside another courtroom.  Still, of course, glued to her cell phone, and damned if she wasn’t still wearing pajamas.

Seriously.  Do your civic duty and put on some pants.