Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Clicka Clack

Pavowski5 Comments

The body has all sorts of delightful ways to remind you that you’re getting older.  Some are obvious, others are subtle.  Some are tsunamis that strike without warning, others are the slow inevitable creep of continental drift.  (I’m looking at you, my slowly-but-surely receding hairline.)  Today I’m keenly aware of one nasty one in particular — my crackling bones.

I’ll go ahead and be judicious and say that it’s possible I can’t attribute the cricks and cracks in question entirely to age, but I’m living in denial that my running career of the last couple years is causing lasting damage to my body.  It’s not.  IT JUST ISN’T, OKAY?  Now that that’s settled…

I posted last week about another kind of drift, that being the outward slide of my waistline and the upward trend of my bathroom scale.  Okay, my wife was pregnant so it was impossible to be careful about what I was eating, not that I was trying anyway, but that’s over with now, Sprout the Second is a month old tomorrow (!), and it’s time to restore normality.  So: diet starts this weekend, and my new exercise regimen has been ramping up for about a week and a half.  Or maybe two days.  I don’t know because, as I’ve mentioned before, my house exists outside of space and time as we know it.  Or, at the very least, space and time are playing silly buggers on me.

Anyway, that new regimen has me doing some bodyweight exercises on days on which I do not run.  I have a feeling that this is a pretty good way for things to start off because on the first few days I did these exercises, I could not climb stairs properly afterward, nor could I reach the top of my head to wash it in the shower.  I have it on good authority that destroying your muscles like that is a good way to wake them up, so those must be good signs, yeah?  That workout is getting easier, so I’m ramping it up, doing extra sets and extra reps.  But during yesterday’s session, I dunno if it was especially quiet in the room or if I was in a higher state of awareness due to the blood flow or the dizziness induced by my 60-second plank attempt, but I heard a funny sound while I was doing some jumping jacks.

Quick sidenote on the jumping jacks.  I’m not sure if I’m doing them wrong, and I feel that I must be, because they are the easiest part of the workout for me.  Unless of course I perfected the technique in 5th grade gym class and my muscles stored it in memory which is tapped into and processed with perfect efficiency now twenty years later.  That works, right?

Whatever.  The jumping jacks are easy, but I hear a sound.  Sort of like when you have a handful of pop rocks in your mouth; a low crackling that fades in and out as you open and close your mouth.  Or maybe like the consistent repetitive clack clack of chips at a poker table.  Damn, where’s that coming from?  Oh, it’s just my entire both feet clicking and crackling away with every jump.

I’ve had a pretty constant pop to my right ankle for a lot of years: the detritus of a pretty gnarly ankle sprain that I never went to the doctor for because I’m a man.  It goes off if I rotate my ankle in bed or flex the foot going up or down stairs, stuff like that.  But this noise is not that.  This is my entire foot, in fact both feet.  I tune in more closely as I finish the set, and it’s like I can hear dozens if not hundreds of tiny little bones and ligaments and tendons clicking and sliding and ticking against each other like a bunch of ball bearings trapped in a spider web.

What do I do with this information?  Go to the doctor I saw a few months back for my plantar fasciitis and say, oh, yeah, now I can hear every bone in my foot move when I do jumping jacks?  He’ll only tell me to stop doing jumping jacks or stop running, so that’s right out.

I guess I just have to accept that this is my new body, one that makes all sorts of noises I wasn’t planning for it to make.  (I’m sure my wife could tell fantastic stories about my unintentional emissions.)  I have another birthday in a few weeks, maybe by that time my entire skeleton will calcify and I won’t be able to scratch my nose without sounding like a set of dominoes falling down a marble staircase.

On YA Lit: Should Adults Be Embarrassed to Read It?

Pavowski4 Comments

There’s apparently been a bit of a stir lately over this article on Slate condemning adult consumers of Young Adult Literature.  To condense, the author over there, one Ruth Graham, feels (rather strongly) that YA lit is strictly for YAs and if you’re not a YA then you shouldn’t be reading YA lit.

Okay, that’s perhaps an intentional oversimplification, but the argument is simple.  As an author, you must know your audience.  (An interesting comment for me to make given my schizophrenia lately over exactly who my audience for AI might be.)  And an author writing for young adults presumably makes different choices in their stories than an author writing for adults, whether it’s simplifying plots and making characters’ choices more transparent, using saucier or more elevated language, or even the entire subject matter of the story.  So the author is writing for a specific group of people (though that group might itself be incredibly diverse).

Let’s just take that on its face.  Say you’re an accomplished author, and you write your book about robot-fighting tree-farmers in post-carbon-emissions formerly-known-as-America.  (Don’t steal that, it’s MINE.)  But you write it specifically from the point of view of, and full of the lingo of, and bulging with references to, let’s say, south Floridian retirees.  Why would you make such a choice?  This is the strange and wonderful land of Hypothetica, just keep your hands and feet inside the chopper.Read More »

Why the World Cup is Awesome, Even if You Don’t Know Anything About Soccer

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I imagine that I am not all that much unlike many other Americans at the moment in that I know very little about soccer (sorry, football) and yet at the moment I’m trying to pretend that I’m obsessed with it.  Except I’m not so much pretending as I am actually becoming actually fascinated and interested and a little bit mouth-foamy over it.

Seriously, I cannot pull myself away from the games.  If the USA is playing, I’m watching.  This is deeply and personally important even though I’ve never particularly cared about soccer (sorry, football) in my life.  (Also, full disclosure, I coached middle school soccer for a year and yes, I am probably more invested in these games than I was in those.  Something about watching from the air-conditioning from my home instead of the sweltering heat of the sideline, not seeing my team (yes, actually my team that I actually coached) get trounced 6-1 just makes it more enjoyable.)  But if I happen to catch another game on, I’ll watch that, too.  My wife gets frustrated — “you never watch soccer, you never talk about soccer, what is this all of a sudden??” — and I find myself saying things which might be true, like “well since USA won their game, they might meet the winner of this match down the line, and I want to know what they’re up against.”  Because, naturally, team USA needs me, the average schlub, to know what their potential opposition might try to pull so that they can hopefully stop it.

There is something infectious about it, though, soccer (sorry, football).  It’s one of the strangest and most natural sports I’ve seen.  Strange because the pacing of it is off the wall.  Seriously, televised bowling has better pacing.  Ping-pong is more predictable.  Soccer (sorry, football) is twenty minutes of dinking a ball around a field that really is just too big for anything that isn’t motorized followed by ten seconds of frenetic, heart-pounding mouth-foaming blood-boiling couch-stomping action.  But it’s incredibly natural because it simply flows like melted butter across piping hot pancakes.  Nobody has to be told what to do.  Things don’t have to be explained, reviewed, argued, discussed.  The game just happens and continues to happen until a goal is scored or until somebody gets their knee dislocated, but even then they only stop for maybe five minutes.  True story: I was at a football game — college football game, mind you, not the World Anything — and a player was injured.  Okay, injured player, that’s bad news, but the action was stopped for thirty minutes while a parade of coaches, trainers, officials, and I think even the player’s scholarship official ran on and off the field seeing to this kid.  Thirty minutes!  The soccer (sorry, football) game (sorry, match) is half over by that time!

I should mention, also, that I’m watching most of the games on Univision, and if you’re not watching the games on Univision, you’re missing out.  Okay, the real reason I’m watching on Univision is because I don’t have cable and ESPN has a stranglehold on the broadcast rights, so I’m boned otherwise.  But seriously, watch the games on Univision.  Or at least flip over now and then.  I don’t understand a word of what’s being said, and I don’t pretend to.  It just sounds like a couple of guys — I picture that guy, “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the beer commercials — and another guy in a mariachi hat for some reason — discussing what might as well be politics over cigars in some dive bar, and then all of a sudden one of them is jumping on the bar, throwing his headset across the room, and shouting GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL and so am I, thrashing around my living room like some mariachi marionette.  (Seriously, how awesome is that little turn of phrase: mariachi marionette.  I don’t care, I’m kudos-ing myself for that one.)

As an endurance athlete…

Okay, sorry.  I had to pick myself up off the floor from the laughing fit that calling myself an “endurance athlete” induced.  As a practitioner of an endurance sport, let’s say, I have tremendous admiration for the soccer players (sorry, footballers).  You can’t watch these guys trot back and forth across that field (sorry, pitch) which might as well be a well-manicured airstrip without having a sense of the tremendous training and physical prowess they possess.  The kind of endurance that, well, let’s just say my wife would have a worse laughing fit than I just had if I compared their endurance to mine.  The kind of physical prowess that… god, you get the idea; let’s just move on, okay?  Jeez.

A thing occurs to me in watching these games, though, which is that I think I know why soccer (sorry, football) hasn’t taken off with American audiences (outside of the World Cup of course).  It’s the flow.  There are no stoppages, no timeouts, no ten-minute breaks to warm up a new pitcher.  We Americans are spoiled by the ever-present commercial break in which we go to the bathroom, grab another beer, serve up some bean dip, flip to another station to check the other game… whatever you do during the commercial break, you can’t do it when you’re watching soccer (sorry, football).  Because you never know when the sharknado is going to break loose and you’re going to have to throw a chair through a window because team USA just gave up the win with less than a minute left in stoppage time even though they had the victory completely locked up, I mean SERIOUSLY, did we just forget to play DEFENSE there at the end or WHAT!??

Er, I got sidetracked.  So yeah.  It’s not that American audiences can’t handle soccer (sorry, football).  It’s that the game itself doesn’t lend itself to standards of American advertising, which keeps it off the air because there are more profitable things the networks can air.  (If you thought networks were in the business of providing content to their audiencess, you were sorely mistaken.  Networks are in the business of providing audiences to their advertisers.)

But we’re a bright people.  Certainly one of us can come up with a way to stick some commercial breaks into the middle of a soccer game (sorry, match).  Mandatory three-minute water break when a new player comes on the field (sorry, pitch).  Mandatory review with commercial break every time the ball goes out of bounds.  Ten-minute explanation with graphics and holograms anytime offsides is called (seriously, if you can explain offsides in a single sentence that makes sense, you deserve a mariachi marionette).

So?  Get to it.  I’m back to watching some FOOTBALL.

Why I Like “Like”

Pavowski10 Comments

This post is part of SoCS:http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-2114/

Trying something a bit different here, a non-fiction based prompt from another blog.  The topic?  Write about the word “like”.

Well, there’s a lot to like about “like”.  The straightforwardest (yep) and simplest is the fact that “like” is used to build similes, which are like the connective tissue holding the loose clunky bits of your prose to the solid, enduring ideas that everybody’s familiar with.  Similes are just those little bits of language where you say “this thing over here is like that other thing over there.”  They can be as simple or as complex as the situation demands, but they are infinitely adaptable and always appropriate.  In fact, I’m going to step out on a ledge here and say that the simile is perhaps the most important literary technique out there.

Why?  Because it creates inroads.  Pointing out that two essentially unlike things actually ARE alike, that they do share characteristics — whether their similarities are immediately apparent to the casual observer or not — is one of, if not the, most effective way to make the most opaque of subject matter clear to your reader.

Example?  Let’s say I took creative writing instead of calculus in college.  (This is true.)  Therefore I’m not particularly familiar with arcs and curves and the best method for calculating trajectories or … okay, I’m probably making my point perfectly about not knowing anything about calculus.  Let me try again.  Physics.  As the saying goes, I know a little about physics, enough to get me into trouble.  Say I’m trying to explain a concept in physics to somebody who knows nothing about physics.  Somebody who, for example, might prefer to watch Titanic again rather than branch out and watch something new and exciting, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.  Just hypothetically speaking.  This is not a real person.  But this person’s perception of gravity, let’s say, might be that it makes objects fall down.  In a highly specific way, that’s accurate: here on Earth, gravity makes things fall down.  As far as capital “G” Gravity goes, however, that’s a horrifically simplified view.

Sharknado, I’m meandering off-point.  Let me return to the simile.  Right.  A simile allows me to explain to this person whose thinking is a bit myopic that gravity, capital “G” Gravity as it exists in the Universe, not just on Earth, is a bit like the attraction between Jack and Rose in Titanic.  Once they affect each other, they forever feel one another’s pull.  When they are close, they are nearly inseparable, but even when they are apart, each one is aware of the other’s presence, and is always trying to find a way to get back together.  Now, it’s not a perfect description of gravity by any imaginable stretch, but it’s allowed me to (hopefully) shift the way that this particular person thinks about gravity by tapping into what they know about something else.

So, similes are awesome.  They allow me to paint pictures in your head by saying for example that “the blood pooling around the dead man smelled like so many old, grimy copper pennies” or that “the colors of her eyes were blue like the bluest blue sky; endless, perfect, infinite” or, in a favorite quote of mine from Douglas Adams, that the alien ships “hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don’t.”  Each one lets you see one thing in another way, lets you consider my experience and my retelling of a thing, which then colors your interpretation of that thing in a way that’s perhaps different than the way you already thought about it.

Damn, that feels circular.  What I’m trying to say is that “like” is like a vicegrip — a simple tool with a thousand different applications.  “Like” is like water — you find it everywhere, always adapting, always flowing, always enriching.  “Like” is like salt: sure, you could eat without it, but would you really want to?

This has been an exercise in language analysis.  Those don’t tend to read well here on the blarg.  That’s okay, I’ve got a humdinger of a flash fiction coming in my next post.

Enough Inertia

Pavowski3 Comments

I made a mistake yesterday.

No, it wasn’t the four hours of Sherlock that I watched.  Sure, I could perhaps have put the time to better use, but watching Benedict Cumberbatch in action is never the wrong thing to do.

No, it wasn’t the mediocre writing session I had.  That sharknado is gonna happen, I’m down with it.  The only mistake would be giving up and giving in, and letting the Howler Monkey bite my throat out.

I stepped on a scale.

I’m not going to lie and say it was a great shock to me that I had put on weight.  No, I’ve been on this expectant father trip before, I know what it entails.  Diet and healthy eating kinda go out the window when the wife is eating for two, and well, we’ve made all this extra food anyway, something broken in me since childhood won’t let me waste food on a plate.  Long story short, dear sprout #2 has left me about twenty pounds heavier than I was a year or so ago.  I say a year ago because that’s when I stopped looking at scales in general, not because I was upset at what they had to say but because I’d achieved a level of weight loss I was happy with and didn’t see the need to confirm that I was maintaining.  I was running around twenty miles a week, so I didn’t have anything to worry about.

Needless to say, not only have I fallen off the wagon, but the wagon circled around to pick me up and accidentally ran over my neck.  It’s time to dust myself off and get back on the horse.  (And I think I’m mixing up my metaphors again, goldfinger it.)

Running has been about self-improvement since day one for me.  Somewhere along the way it turned into fun, as well, but that doesn’t let me off the hook for the reason for the season.  I didn’t start running to have a good time, I started it to get my asgard in shape.  And it worked.  Trouble is, when you run a lot, and your metabolism kicks up, you start to feel like you can really eat just about anything and get away with it, which is true to a point, that point in my case being when I tore my foot up back in January and then got plantar fasciitis in my other foot just as the first foot was healing.  So now I’m working on getting back into running like I was before, but I’m twenty pounds heavier and my feet are still a little gimpy.

But I’ve also had the wrong approach with my running of late, which is the running scared approach.  I’ve been running scared of injury, running just to maintain, running to keep weight gain at bay.  I haven’t been running to improve, which is why I haven’t been improving.  I’ve been running most of my miles at just over ten-minute pace for the past couple months now.  For me, for the level I was at before January, that’s kinda pitiful.  So, no more ten-minute miles!  If I’m not improving, I’m backsliding, and there has been quite enough backsliding for one year, thank you very much.

But that’s only part of the equation, a fact I was able to ignore two years ago.  See, I was such an out-of-shape mess when I started running that the shock to my system when I started up was like turning loose a leaf blower in a ball pit.  Total havoc, and I cleared out a lot of balls and lost a lot of weight.  It wasn’t the whole picture, but I was happy enough with the results that I didn’t care about that.  I had lost the equivalent of a big-asgard bag of dog food in weight, who was I to complain?  More running won’t shock my system like that again, though.  I know that because I’ve been ramping up my mileage a little at a time since March, but I’m still gaining weight and I’m not getting any faster.

Time to start focusing on the diet and even doing some exercise aside from running, which is really going to be a test for me.  The only reason I’ve managed to stick with running so long is that at some point I tricked myself into thinking it was actually enjoyable and was therefore not really exercise.  But I have some tools in my pocket, a lot of resources, and I’m frustrated enough with myself that I think I can finally get this fitness thing sorted, and sorted properly.

So, no more lazy running.  No more getting down on myself about my writing.  (Yeah, right.)  If I’m not moving forward, I’m moving backward, and I’m too damn old to be moving backward anymore.

Speaking of moving forward, the novel is at 90%.  Feet don’t fail me now.  Except I don’t write with my… you know what I mean.