Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

That Time I Overheard a Jerk in a Restaurant and Learned a Lesson About Writing

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It’s odd how one little detail, left out of a situation, can completely change your read on it.  Or, to cut in the opposite direction, how you can think you have a handle on what’s going on, and then you learn something new about what’s happening, and all of a sudden you feel like a horrible sharknadoheel for thinking a certain way, or maybe you feel totally vindicated.

The wife and I went to dinner while the grandparents kept the kids for the evening.  Sidenote: when I say dinner, for us that means we hit the restaurant at about 4:30.  I know, we might as well be geriatrics, but when your kid’s bedtime is at seven, you have to rethink the way you live your life.  So it’s 4:30, and we’re at dinner at a nice little pasta place we like where there’s tacky 90’s stereotypical Italian decor and they serve you way too much food so you eat leftovers for two days afterward.  Because it’s 4:30, we have the place almost to ourselves, so we get served quick and we eat quick, which is nice, because having a two-year-old has left me unable to savor a meal; all I know how to do anymore is shovel foodstuffs into my beak while my mind wanders to the sprout and whether or not he’s likely to get into mortal danger before I can swallow a half-chewed mouthful.  But the kids aren’t there so we actually get to focus on each other and the ambiance, a really rare treat.

I don’t know if it’s my inclination as a writer that makes me such a shameless eavesdropper or if I’m just a jerk, but while we’re at dinner this other couple comes in and I immediately start with the judging.  There’s nothing special to say about her, but he is a paunch-bellied, unshaven slob, and that biases me against him before he opens his mouth.  To be fair, this restaurant isn’t the swankiest of joints, so there’s no dress code, but, come on.  Call me old-fashioned, but if you’re taking your wife / girlfriend / main squeeze to a dinner that’s gonna cost more than ten bucks a plate, maybe don’t dress like you just came from a World of Warcraft marathon session in your mom’s basement?Read More »

Aaaand I’m Sterile (Seriously)

Pavowski7 Comments

It’s been four days, and I can take the icepacks off my crotch.

Okay, I’ve had the icepacks off since the second day, but that certainly doesn’t have the same ring.

As Bill Cosby once put it, “My wife and I have five children.  And the reason why we have five children is because we do not want six.”  My wife and I have two children.  And I am happy to say that there will not be any more additions to the line, from my wife’s and my branch at any rate.

That is to say, at 4 PM this past Thursday, I got the chop.  Vasectomy.  Snip snip and my days of fathering kids are irrevocably done.  My wife asked me several times in the days leading up to the, uh, event, if I was nervous about it.  I was, but only in the sense of this being a permanent modification to the only body I will ever have.  I don’t have tattoos, I don’t have any piercings (well, one in the ear which almost certainly shouldn’t count), I don’t have any metal hips or plastic fingers or anything.  I am strictly factory-issue.  Until now.

Not that I have convictions about marring your own sacred temple or anything.  You get one body, you get one life, do with it what you please.  Tattoo the Mona Lisa on your butt if you want to, or better yet, a space unicorn leaping through a ring of fire around your belly button.  Spike holes the size of tree trunks through your earholes.  The only consequences you’ll have are the funny looks you’ll garner, and in the case of your tree-trunk earrings, probably some chronic neck and back pain.  (What?  I’m over thirty now, this is the stuff I think about.)

It’s a strange feeling.  In biological terms you could make the argument that I no longer qualify as a male.  Certainly there’s a gravity to the fact that, after twelve or so weeks when they can flush out all the cobwebs, I won’t father any more children.  That’s heavy sharknado, man.  A harsh toke.  But it’s also an incredibly calming sensation.  You hear about those couples in their late 30’s, 40’s, hell, even their 50’s who all of a sudden “had a surprise” and bango, they’ve got another sprout running around.  There’s comfort in knowing that won’t be my wife and I.  We’ve had the talk dozens of times about whether or not we want any more kids, and now, having the two, the decision became very, very easy indeed.

What I found humorous about the entire operation (haw, haw) was just how much of a big deal it wasn’t.  When baby was a couple of weeks old, I made an appointment for a consult, which could not have been more of a formality.  Medical history, list of medications I’m taking or allergies I have, and I was scheduled.  They wanted to take a urine sample but, because I’d foolishly gone in the hall right outside the doctor’s office, I couldn’t, and they said it was “no big deal.”  No big deal!  I’m only about to sever my manly bits and thwart my biological imperative.  No big deal.

Then, the day of the event.  In the first place, it’s outpatient surgery, which is a fancy way of saying you don’t go to a hospital and they kick you the fargo out after it’s done.  In fact, my operation (it feels silly to even call it that) was completed on the same exam table I was evaluated on during my consult.  This was a shocker to me given my experiences with hospitals lately (two c-section births for my kids and my wife to go through, one extended stay in hospital for sprout the first immediately following his birth… the concept of an operation that doesn’t require a lengthy ensconcement in hospital is not one that I really understood.  Nonetheless, I arrived for my appointment at 3:45 and was whisked into the exam room and prepped for surgery, and I was on my way home by 4:30.  I was even able to drive myself home.

I won’t go into extreme detail on the operation for the sake of any squeamish men who may be reading, but I will describe it a little for the sake of being thorough.  First of all, about the only direction I was given as far as preparation was to “shave the area”, which was a quarter-sized patch on the front of the… can I say sack?  Let’s say sack.  If you’re a fan of Seinfeld, you’re probably familiar with the episode where Jerry shaves his chest by accident: he set out to correct an irregularity, then he had to even it out, then he realized he had made things worse, and before he knew what was what, his entire torso was shaved and he was howling at the moon, scratching his feeble growth.  This was not unlike that.  I ended up clearing “the area” and a good swath all around.  Doing this in the summer is not something I advise outside of necessity.  The one word that comes to mind is “sticky.”

Anyway, I go in and strip and sit on the table under a paper sheet (not even a gown, remember, I’m not in a hospital) and the nurse comes in to prep me, which involves making small talk about Georgia Tech and slathering brown antiseptic gunk all over my privates.  The doc comes in, gives me the last chance to chicken out, and advises me to lay back.  I have the option to lean forward and watch or lean back and stare at the ceiling.  I chose the latter, because I’d rather not vomit all over myself.

Quick little stab as the lidocaine goes in, and then I feel some pushing and pulling and working but no real sensation.  If you’ve never been under the effects of lidocaine, it’s a bit like being poked and prodded through four or five pairs of socks.  Then, another stick, deeper inside this time, and a spike of cold fire zips all the way down to the, uh, boys, and that’s the last thing I really feel until the cutting.  Well, I think it was the cutting.  Guys, if you’ve ever jumped into the car too fast and sat on your business, that’s the closest thing I can liken it to, except that it was a slow sensation to set in.  Kind of like it was being stepped on, deliberately and slowly.  Then the same thing on the other side, and then they started to mop up.

The business of it was over in about five minutes, which I distinctly remember because it was so freaking fast it almost defied belief.  The actual sensation that I remember most is suppressing my laughter as the doctor stitched me up — he had literal needle and thread and was sewing my, uh, business, up with these comically overstated strokes of the needle, like some lunatic maestro conducting an imaginary orchestra in my pants.  (Okay, I wasn’t wearing pants, but could you… just… come on.)  Nothing but tugging and the swooping of the needle, a tug and a swoop, and I’m biting my lip to keep from cracking up.

And that was that.  I spent the rest of the night with a pack of frozen peas on my crotch, and I spent the next day in the pleasant dizzy haze that only prescription pain meds can legally provide.  Sunday I was off the meds completely and had a little workout late in the day, today I had my first run since the operation and am having no ill effects.  Oh, my entire sack turned black from bruising but that’s fading and apparently totally normal; no extra pain associated with it.  The only lasting effect I have from the operation is a tiny, half-inch seam on my business, and even that will fade within about a week.

Okay, so this post was maybe a little graphic and probably more than you cared to know about my man parts, but I wanted to write it for a couple of reasons.

  1. This blarg is a chronicle not just of my writing experience but of key moments in my life, and this is most certainly that.
  2. I honestly want to encourage guys who are thinking about this to have it done.  If you’re afraid of the pain or discomfort, you shouldn’t be.  A weekend spent with a little unpleasantness in your area is far, FAR more preferable than a lifetime with extra kids you didn’t expect.
  3. To go further in that vein, compared to a female sterilization, a vasectomy is far less invasive, and has a far shorter recovery time.  The ladies have to go through childbirth and living in a man’s world after all — this is a tiny bullet you can take for your wife (and your relationship).

I may write an update in a few weeks when I’m fully recovered (I still have to be very careful if sprout wants to jump on my lap for example), but I don’t know that that’s necessary.  The surgery really was minor enough that in retrospect it hardly merits as much as I’ve written.  It really is a tiny, tiny thing even though it has huge repercussions.

Do We Really Listen to Advertisements?

Pavowski7 Comments

Who loves commercials?  This guy does.  Commercials are fantastic.  They’re an art form, really, and a tremendous challenge: in what other medium are you up against the task of wresting your audience’s attention away from their phone, their wife, their plate of hot wings, their fridge?  In what other medium do you have a limit of just fifteen or thirty seconds to make a convincing point — enough for your ideas to stick in the mind of your audience?  Advertisers have a hard job, and some of them are very very good at it, but some of them are very very bad at it.  Pardon my complete lack of wordsmithery, I’m still coming down off the pain meds and the old bean is throbbing something fierce.

But that’s a nice tie-in, because I want to talk about a specific commercial that’s affected me in a very specific way.  The product in question is Lumosity, a product I neither use nor endorse, because — as is my wont — I know nothing about it aside from what I’ve seen in the ads.  What I’ve seen, however, is beyond stupid.

First things first.  Is the ad effective?  That depends.  I can’t ever see myself buying or recommending the product.  That would seem to be a fail for the ad.  However, I don’t know that I’m in the target demographic for the product (brain training, memory retention, seems to be marketed at an older crowd, even though it’s all young people in the ads), so that’s a wash.  However, the ad has without a doubt stuck with me: so much so that I’m here blarging about it and I’m about to tell you why it’s stuck with me so inextricably, and if the goal of an ad is to plant an idea in your mind — to Inceptionize its audience, so to speak — then it’s certainly effective.

Take a look at the video below.  I saw this ad on my television about three days ago and it’s latched into my brain with white-hot raptor claws.

Anything in there strike you as odd?  Nonsensical?  Let’s ignore the central claim about games being able to strengthen your brain.  That may or may not be a valid claim; I certainly haven’t done the research, though I did play a sharknado-ton of video games as a kid, and well, let’s just say I didn’t become a rocket scientist or anything.  But no, it’s not that.  Ads claim all kinds of things that are dubious.  Just look at any ad for a weightloss product.  No, at about the 14 second mark, the talking head in the ad says something so idiotic that my brain actually made me play back the commercial — I ACTUALLY REWOUND THE PLAYBACK TO RE-WATCH A COMMERCIAL, OK — and watch it again to make sure I heard it properly.

He says “It makes my brain feel great.”

Ponder that for a moment.  Let it marinate in your thinking parts and ooze its septic juice all over your cortices.  Feel the throbbing pleasure build in your brain as you process the wonderful feeling that critical thinking produces.  Oh, what’s that?  You don’t feel anything?  That’s because the brain is not a sensory organ.  Ergo, it can no more feel great than it can ride a bicycle or teach a monkey to dance.

I’m straying into the realm of science I don’t know enough about here.  I know that.  The brain is nothing short of a miracle of evolution.  But it can’t feel things.  It can interpret electrical impulses that your various organs that actually do sensing relay to it, but it does not create sense data of its own.  Claiming that your brain can “feel great” is beyond stupid.  YOU can feel great.  YOU can feel intelligent or smug or satisfied or capable of world domination after playing Lumosity’s games, but your brain doesn’t feel ANYTHING.

But, they said it.  And it made it through first draft to the final draft and into the commercial, so they obviously thought it was a good line.  And why not?  Who wouldn’t want their brain to feel great?  I know I would!  Gosh golly gee, my brain just lives in the dumps all day long.  It feels like total crap most of the time.  I want my brain to feel better!

…See how dumb that sounds?

There’s another ad in recent history that I sadly can’t find online at the moment.  It was an ad for a toothpaste, Sensodyne I think.  In it, a woman says she suffered from tooth pain due to damage to the enamel that drinking coffee had done over years and years, and that Sensodyne helped her get some relief.  WELL AND GOOD.  But then at the end of the commercial, she starts listing the virtues of this magical angel’s butt-paste.  It whitened my teeth.  It repaired the damage I’d done.  It allowed me to drink cold beverages again.  It helped me to eat healthier.

Wait.  Hold on.  Stop the train.  You want to claim (or rather, the company wants you to claim) that this toothpaste turned you from a french-fry mobbing, pizza-devouring, I’ll-have-seconds-on-my-ice-cream-no-make-that-thirds unhealthy eater into a healthy person that makes smart food choices?  NO IT DIDN’T.  Sorry, it didn’t.  MAYBE in learning about the toothpaste and the damage you were doing to your teeth you realized that you were eating like a human garbage disposal and THAT realization made you reconsider the things that you put into your mouth-hole.  But the toothpaste has no more to do with the decision than it did with Obama’s re-election.  (Unless I’m on to something here.  In which case.. uh… yay, Sensodyne?  Please don’t bug my house?)

Okay, I’m fixating.  I’m reading way too much into what should otherwise be a throwaway moment in a commercial that shouldn’t matter to me.  BUT THIS IS THE POINT.  Advertisers will say anything — literally, ANYthing — to make you buy a product.  Who among us doesn’t want to eat healthier?  Who wouldn’t like to have their BRAIN FEEL GREAT?  These nonsensical claims, ridiculous as they are, sound good when we hear them and they work on us subconsciously , tricking us into thinking that the products they’re hawking are actually worth a monkey’s turd.

All this is to say, next time you see an ad, just think about what’s really being said.  Seriously.  Stop and think and engage those critical muscles in your brain (OH WAIT THE BRAIN DOESN’T HAVE MUSCLES JUST KIDDING) and actually consider what they’re saying.  You might just stop yourself from wasting your money.  Or at the very least you can get a preachy blarg topic out of it.

Routine and Breaking With It

Pavowski12 Comments

This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1214/

The theme for the week is “getting away, or getting out.”  As usual with these stream of consciousness posts, I won’t be doing any editing or fixorating after this post is finished, so it may be a bit unpolished, which I guess is the point.

In the four (now five, yikes) months since I’ve been “seriously writing,” I’ve come to notice a few things about, well, writing.  Specifically, that while rituals are important, they can also be limiting.  What I mean by that is, there’s this box.  And you always hear that it’s important to think outside the box, or whatever, and that’s true.  The box can hold you back.  But that sells the box short, really, because the box can also be comforting, like an old sweatshirt you slip into on the first cold days of Autumn or like a glass of wine before bed.

Case in point, when school was in session, I wrote in virtually the same way every day.  I’d steal a solid thirty minutes on my lunch break to work on my novel, using that time to block out any other distractions.  Really focused work.  Looking back, now, I can identify the work that I completed in that way not just by the timestamps but also by the way it’s written.  Word choice, sentence structure, ratio of dialogue to prose… my work completed by the routine has a certain feel to it that my work outside of routine doesn’t have.  Not to say it’s better; there are certainly merits to the work I completed outside of routine.  But the routine was the box, and I came to depend on it, so much so that in the last month of the Project I found myself mentally blocked, in no small part I fear because I didn’t have my routine to mentally prepare myself.

Now I love routine, but this experience with my first draft has shown me that you can’t always count on routines, so one thing I want to work on in my next project is shaking things up a bit and breaking at least some of my dependence on routine.

It shouldn’t shock me the effect routine has on my writing; it’s the same with my running.  When I was just getting started running, I did all my runs at the mall.  Well, as I increased my ability to run faster and farther, I started to become aware of hitting a wall with my runs at the mall.  After all, it was the same loop, the same hills, over and over and over.  So I started to branch out, to run different routes all around my neighborhood and, as I pushed my distance still farther, around town, and I noticed my pace and my endurance increasing all the more.  Breaking the routine allowed me to make bigger gains faster than if I’d kept doing the same thing over and over.  With new hills and new turns I was challenging myself in different ways, and that helped make me into a better runner.

It puts me in mind of those ads for P90X and Insanity that were big over the last couple of years, the central tenet of which was “muscle confusion.”  Here was a program designed to keep you from getting into the box in the first place.  The focus of these workouts was to exercise in a different way every single day to keep the body and the muscles from recognizing a pattern and getting lazy.  I never tried the workouts myself, but the reasoning seems sound enough.

So the box helps — routine helps — but more and more I think it’s going to be important that I work to get away from routines, get away from what’s comfortable and easy, and force myself to step off the reservation, out of the box, and go tumbling down a cliffside every now and then.  That’s my writing as well as my running and my cross training.  Hell, the fact that I’m cross training at all now — something I haven’t done in two years of running — is a step in that direction.

But I’m not trashing the box.  Just like there is no good without bad, no light without dark, neither can there be invention and experimentation without the norm to return to occasionally, even regularly.

It begs the question, then: what’s “out of the box” in terms of writing?  Off the top of my head, it means straying from some of these habits and tendencies.  Overuse of fancy say-nothing words like “particularly”.  Preoccupation with sounding clever or intelligent.  Fear of the simple statement.  Gravitating toward dark subject matter in short fiction.  Trying too hard to avoid dialogue tags.

For that matter, how can I get out of the box with running?  It’s harder than ever at the moment to break with routine since the sprout joins me for most of my runs, and that means the stroller, and that means I’m very limited in where I can go.  But here are some ideas.  More speedwork and/or interval sessions.  Running without music more.  Varying the dips and twists and turns in my route as much as possible.  Making sure to drive to a more interesting location for a run every couple weeks or so.

In short, routine can be helpful, but it can also be a crutch, and if you don’t escape the routine every now and then, then like a mouse in a cage, you will become trapped by it.

Am I overthinking routine?  How else can you push the boundaries while still getting the most out of a routine?  And do I overstate or understate the value of getting away from it?

Do We Hate Women This Much?

Pavowski2 Comments

My wife and I don’t have cable.

I view this as a good thing because gone are the nights of watching something just because it’s on.  (Oh, a 36-hour marathon of Law and Order, Extra Sassy Unit?  SCORE.)  If we want to watch something, we have to seek it out.  But it’s also a bad thing, because there are times when there is a serious dearth of decent entertainment to be had, and that time is the summer time.

Anyway, if you, like we do, get your programming on a streaming device, you know the glory of the commercials that you see five, six, twenty times in an evening.  The computer tailors ads to your interests and funnels them into your eyeholes, banking I suppose on the law of averages; if I see the ad enough times, I’ll just go ahead and buy / watch / ingest the damn thing.  One thing I won’t ingest, however, is the show on the advertisements of the last couple of weeks, Celebrity Wife Swap.

A brief sidebar.  As a creative type, I think — and it may be wishful thinking, I’ll grant you, but that won’t stop me thinking it — that Reality TV may have run its course.  It’ll kick around and thrash in its grave for a little while longer, and we’re certainly not done with the likes of rinkydink shows like Duck Dynasty or Pawn Stars, but the days of Reality dominating the discussion are over.  Recent ratings of powerhouses like American Idol and others tell me that.  The fact that a bizarre, quirky, what-seems-like-it-should-be-a-niche-diversion show like The Big Bang Theory can run the show when it’s airing tells me that.  But that doesn’t stop the Reality ship from setting out to sea again, like the Exxon Valdez transporting its load of hey-you-need-this-stuff-for-real on a crash course with your unsuspecting occipital lobes.

/soapbox on

I won’t be watching Celebrity Wife Swap, in the first place because it’s just another Reality show putting “ordinary” people in “everyday” situations and I have real fargoing life if I want to see that.  But this show has really struck a nerve with me, and I’ve not even watched an episode (I don’t even know if it’s a first run or if it’s back for another “unbelievable” season).  To be clear, it’s struck two nerves.  One: can our entertainment-obsessed society delegitimize women ANY MORE?  Two (and it’s a far lesser concern than the first point, but it still irks): it seems on the surface like the worst kind of celebrity worship extant.

Let’s start with marginalizing women.  It’s not bad enough that our “great” nation’s highest court has just placed the rights of intangible corporations above the rights of women, or that women’s roles in narrative entertainment are always viewed and evaluated through a male gaze, but now for your evening entertainment, we have Wife Swap, a show whose very title is working to shoot Feminism in the kneecaps in between adverts for spaghetti sauce and overpriced luxury sedans.  If you’re a regular reader of the blarg here, you know I’m an English teacher, and as an English teacher, I tend to fixate on language.  The way things are said matters.  Think about the LANGUAGE OF THE TITLE OF THIS SHOW.  Celebrity Wife Swap.  “Swap.”  What do you swap?  Property, first and foremost.  The searing I-can-hardly-call-it-subtext-with-a-straight-face subtext of the title says that YOUR WIFE IS YOUR PROPERTY.  Brilliant, I knew there was a reason I married my wife.  Now I remember, it’s because I got sixteen acres of land and a couple of donkeys into the deal.  Wait, no I didn’t, because it isn’t THE FARGOING DARK AGES ANYMORE.  The last time people were considered property in this country, I’m pretty sure there was a pretty significant disagreement over it, and that disagreement reached the conclusion that hey, no, people aren’t property.

To dig further into the entrails of this fetid carcass of a show title, what sort of property do you “swap?”  The kind of property that has no practical value to you anymore.  The toys that you’re done playing with.  The intrinsically worthless “collector’s items” that you’re hoarding for no reason other than that they’re “exclusive” or “limited edition.”  “Swap” is a word most at home between preteen boys and their baseball cards.  What’s that?  Dated reference?  Sharknado.  Um… Pokemon cards?  No?  Damn… look, the point is, you swap something because you don’t want it anymore.  So your wife is your property, and you’re done playing with her so your neighbor can have her for a while.  Brilliant, ABC.  I mean, the housewives that are watching this steaming pile of horse turds are probably past the point of redemption, so I’m not worried about them, but what about the next generation of women in this country?  That’s the message we want to send on NETWORK TV, of all things?  It’d be one thing if an obscure cable network were showing it to garner some viewers, but this is a broadcast network.  We have to do better.

The other point, here, is much more of a personal one, and it’s one of celebrity worship, which is one of the most useless forms of idleness and of opiating the masses that I’m aware of.  I understand a fascination with celebrities… to a point.  They star in your movies and TV shows, they run the touchdowns, they lounge around inheriting hotel fortunes.  Bully for them.  By all means, watch the celebrities in your movies and TV shows, watch them run the touchdowns, watch them do whatever the likes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian do WHEN THEY’RE DOING THE THING FOR WHICH THEY ARE FAMOUS.  As soon as you start wasting your time worrying about what Ryan Gosling has going on in his personal life, you’re essentially saying that your own life is less interesting to you than the life of somebody you will never meet.  Ultimately, celebrities are just people.  On one level or another, their lives are as mundane as yours and mine.  When we (and by “we” I mean people who are not me, because I don’t go in for that sharknado) live vicariously through celebrity, we give up a bit of ourselves, and that is really, really sad.

So what’s the point?  The point is (and I’m conjecturing, here, because again, I’ve not seen an episode and I don’t plan to) that Celebrity Wife Swap is going to show you some of your favorite “celebrities” and put them in the ridiculous situation of stepping into another family’s life for a few days for the purpose of your amusement.  This is idiotic thinking of the highest order.  One family’s life is not like another’s, OF COURSE there will be conflict and misunderstanding and argument about what should be done.  It doesn’t take celebrity to make that situation any more compelling (and here I say compelling not in the sense that it’s actually compelling but in the sense that the network execs think we’ll just HAVE TO WATCH IT).  What, then, is wrong with putting celebrities in this situation?  Because it’s just an iteration of knocking down the other guy to make yourself feel better about your life, which is lazy and lame and sad.  “Oh, look at how silly *insert celebrity name* looks trying to deal with *other celebrity name*’s wife, MY LIFE IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT.  God, I feel good about myself.”  No.  Don’t.  Begrudging somebody their success is just being selfish.

You might argue that the show is just a bit of frivolous fun, that I read too much into it.  Maybe so, but if you want an idea of how screwed up a society is, look at what they do for fun.  Roman gladiator arenas, anybody?  Greek debauched wine-fueled orgies?  TV is possibly our nation’s greatest escape, and the things we PUT on TV and the things we WATCH on TV say a hell of a lot about us.  In short, if you’re watching the show, you should be ashamed, because you’re telling the network that this is the kind of thing you agree with.  That is, you agree with trading women like cattle and with watching the lives of other people rather than living your own.

/soapbox off