Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Time Will Pass.

Pavowski2 Comments

GOD.

That last post is depressing the haberdashery out of me, and I’m afraid I just can’t let it stand. I’m not going to bed with that kind of negativity bouncing around in my skull. (Yeah, I’m already prepping for bed at 8:30, WHO WANTS Some?!) (I totally do not want some. Please just let me go to sleep.)

Here, then, is a little bit of positivity and productive inspiration. I discovered this quote about a year ago, and I guess it built a little rat-hole in my brain. It really resonates with my current obsession. I rediscovered it over at Doyce Testerman’s website and I’m stealing it for posterity.

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Doyce Testerman, btw, is the second most British librarian-slash-villain name ever, superceded only by Benedict Cumberbatch. Heart Sherlock.

Please Shut Up

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I really wanted to find something I could blarg about this evening.  I really, tried hard.

But I am tapped.

I don’t really know why.  Today was a day at work much like any other day.  I hammered out a pretty solid 1300 words and change.  Felt the flow pretty strongly, too; no piddling around, no aimless wandering to get the juices flowing, just down to work and kept smashing away at it.  Like a rock.  Left myself well poised for tomorrow’s session as well, a trick I’m learning to embrace and enjoy.  But that’s it.  I keep searching for off topic ideas to write about and I’m coming up empty.

Actually, I do have something to say, but it’s a little preachy, so I’m going to keep it brief.

Parents, teach your kids to appreciate the value of silence.  Take some time to teach them that not every fargoing minute of their existence has to be filled with distraction, with music, with jokes, with youtube videos, with gossip, with dancing, with ANYTHING.  There are times for all of those things. Those are good things a lot of the time.  But for god’s sake, let the silence in and enjoy it every now and then.

As a teacher, nay, as a parent, NAY, as a HUMAN BEING, it’s so frustrating to see the scores and scads of children — who are about to become adults! — who, when faced with a few minutes of quiet reading or study time, reach immediately for headphones, or can’t help but whisper (or just flat out talk) to a friend, or drum on their desks, or find ANYTHING TO DO EXCEPT KEEP SILENT AND FOCUS.  I get it.  They’re kids.  School is not the thing they really want to be doing with the day.  That’s okay.  I’m not faulting them for that.  But I think there’s something wrong when you can’t simply let yourself be alone with your thoughts for a little while.  When you can’t just turn off the music, put the goldfinger phone down, and actually listen to somebody else talk for a little while.  I don’t even mean me.  Just listen for a moment to process and consider the thoughts of another human being.

And the talking, ye gods.  They talk at each other and past each other but it’s a rare moment where any of my students will actually say anything to one another.

And yeah, I know, giving voice to these thoughts makes me sound hideously old and tired and get-off-my-lawn-ish.  I can’t help it, and I’m not sure if I want to.  Because if a kid can’t stop and think, how is he any better than an animal?  What’s the point of tens of thousands of years of evolution if we’re going to de-sensitize the one organ that gives us an advantage over every other creature on earth?

Okay, the lament for our future is over for now.  Pardon my soapbox.  I’ll just close the door as you leave and cry inside for a while.

TOYS.

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I am obsessed with toys.

Not the toys that my toddler leaves strewn about the house.  Those haberdasheryspawned contraptions of plastic and plush and cacophony without cease are the stuff of my nightmares, and I’m convinced that, when I have shrugged off this mortal coil, if hell is waiting for me, then at least one level of it will be a simple living room floor covered with toys that, much like the severed heads of the hydra, only spawn more toys when I try to clean them up.  An ever-growing, inescapable bramble patch of sharp-edged Legos waiting for my tender underfoot, a never-flagging symphony of bells and xylophones and singing woodland creatures.

Ahem.  Not those toys.

I’m talking about adult toys.  NO NOT THOSE ADULT TOYS.  Toys for grown folks.

The problem is, they don’t really make toys for grown folks.  There’s a toy section at Target (Yeah, Target, because FARGO WAL-MART), but it’s for kids.  Toys for grown folks underwent some serious branding a long time back and are now known as “accessories” or “programs” or “electronics” or whatever other title the little odds and ends are for whatever fascinating little squirrel-hole of a hobby you find yourself falling down.  My holes are reserved for things like running and writing and watching movies and maybe I should rethink the phrasing of this sentence.

I should make something clear at the outset here.  I’m a packrat.  It’s awful.  I love stuff.  I really do.  The American credo of getting as much as you can (that’s a thing, right?) has found a happy little home in my brain and I feed it at every opportunity I get.  I find a hobby, or a thing that I love, and I buy all kinds of little useless crap that has anything to do with it.  I’ve got a storage tub full of decks of cards from when I went through a card tricks phase a few years back.  I’ve got boxes in the garage filled with little action figures (THEY’RE NOT DOLLS, SHUT UP) from cartoons (okay, anime) I watched in college.  I’ve got dusty plaques and trophies from when I was less than ten years old.  No less than four sets of serious-ANTZ darts (because, yeah, darts were a thing for me for a while) — the ones that come with their own little carrying case and you have to screw the whole shebang together, feathers and all.  A personalized goldfingered bowling ball from when I was in a bowling league at the age of fifteen.  It’s not memorabilia.  There’s no sentimental value.  It’s my STUFF, man, and I’m a-keepin it.

So I hoard stuff.  And my wife hoards stuff, too.  Like opposite ends of two magnets, we attracted one another, except that like magnets would repel each other, and we’re the same, so the metaphor kind of falls apart at this stage, but sharknado, I’m on a roll here.  Our garage is not a place we like to show off to people.  It’s a repository of our shames.

Because, make no mistake, there is bountiful shame.  I know that, on many levels, it’s ridiculous to have all this stuff.  Who the haberdashery needs thirty decks of playing cards?  And yet, I can’t get rid of it.  Even as I profess to strive for minimalism and simplification in my more recent years, the demons of my past keep working behind my back.  Organizers to decrease desk clutter?  Yes, I’ll take two, and try them for a week, and then put them on the pile of clothes that I keep meaning to donate out in the garage.  A fancy new bag to keep my job stuff organized as I go back and forth from home to work and back?  I’ll take one in blue AND black.  One will live in the back of my car; I will call him Tim, and feed him empty tin cans and drive-thru receipts.  BECAUSE I KEEP THOSE TOO.

New hobbies?  New toys.  With running, it was new shoes, the soles lined with the down of angels to comfort my delicate feet, new socks made of synthetic fibers to absorb shock and sweat (socks that actually care which foot you put them on – seriously, I had never seen socks emblazoned with tiny L’s and R’s before I took up running), a fancy watch which can triangulate my position and tell the government (I mean me) how fast I ran that mile, what neighborhood I ran it in, and how long I was meeting with the terrorist operatives in the woods (wait, what?), new shirts woven of mystical threads to provide legendary comfort and style, hats, gloves, shoes, headphones, all of which are covered with little reflecty bits to ensure that I am not struck by oncoming traffic whilst I’m out pounding pavement when the rest of the world slumbers.  They say running is cheap — all you need is your shoes and you can head out the door.  The romanticism of that idea drew me in.  I shudder to think how much money I’ve “saved” by taking up running rather than or instance shelling out for a gym (which I would not have gone to, that’s off topic, STAY ON TOPIC).

Now, writing!  I am new to Serious Writing (about as new as this blog is, which is to say, not quite a month in), so my list of purchases is still rather short.  BUT NOT NONEXISTENT.  I am typing these very words on a spiffy new bluetooth keyboard with my tablet (the bluetooth keyboard actually makes the tablet totally decent to write on). I bought some e-books, which DON’T COUNT because they don’t take up space, but yeah they still count because they are still representative of my inner slobbering consumerist packrat self.  A new bag, to facilitate carrying the tablet and keyboard as well as my other stuff going back and forth between work and home (yes, I got a new bag a couple paragraphs ago, just… okay?)

And apps!  Holy schlamoly, there are so many apps out there for writers, it’s a wonder that writers haven’t buried the world in the pages produced by all the productivity they’ve gotten out of all these apps. (Because a thing that writers definitely do NOT do is buy all these toys, read all these things, download all these apps, and proceed NOT to write anything of value, right?  Right??)  Dictionary apps and thesaurus apps and blogging apps and word count apps and timer apps to make sure you work undisturbed until time is up and apps that shut down the Internet while you’re working and apps that do all of these and also pour you a nice cup of coffee, just kidding, unless you’re reading this from the year 2020 because surely by then there will be an app for that, right?

My favorite at the moment is a little word processor called WriteMonkey, a stripped-down plain text editor which aims to eliminate distractions and allow you to focus on your writing without the urge to check e-mails, surf the web, watch an hour’s worth of Mental Floss videos… to be fair, the urges are still there, but the program blacks out everything else on your screen, theoretically making it more difficult for you to indulge your urges.  Out of sight, out of mind, and all that. It operates pretty well as advertised.  But the big dumb draw of it for a distractable donut like me is that you can toggle on these little keyboard clicks to make it sound (and, if you’re really into it, look) like you’re typing on an old-school typewriter, complete with a cheerful ding when you hit return.  I know, it’s dumb.  But it sucks me in, man, like a brand-new Dyson.

I punched out a solid 1400 words today to the soft ratatat of classic typewriter keys today, and left myself well-poised to jump right into Tomorrow’s writing (getting started is the toughest part).  Who knows how long these new toys will hold my focus, but I’m gonna keep working them as long as they’re working.

So.  Many.  Things.

Hi Mom!

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I found out over the weekend that my mother reads the blarg here at Pavorisms.

I have mixed feelings about that.

There are basically two kinds of people reading my more-or-less daily word-tripe here.  No, make that three.  Actually, it’s a little bit more complicated than … ah, Fargo it.

There are a few different types of people reading this blarg.

The first type is the family and friends whom I personally invited to look at it or who saw it on my Facebook and are checking it out as a sort-of-obligation, sort-of-curiosity, sort-of-show-of-support for my recently declared writing endeavors.  I love them dearly and thank them for taking the time to show an interest in what I’m up to.

The second type is other writers stumbling in from some writing sites I’m frequenting.  These people do not know me personally, but rather are here strictly to check on the art and, presumably, to suss out the competition and maybe even get some ideas for their own work (I know that’s what I’m doing when I visit your sites, type-number-twoers).  I love them dearly and thank them for taking the time to show an interest in what I’m up to.

A third type is other users of WordPress who have had my blargs end up in their queues for one reason or another and who, again, have stumbled in to see who the haberdashery is making all the noise down the hall.  Sorry about all the sawdust and classical music.  One of those is good for my sinuses and the other relaxes me.  Nevertheless, they are here, poking around, checking out the decor, probably thinking to themselves how much I’m bringing down property values around here.  I love them dearly and thank them for taking the time to show an interest in what I’m up to.

There are probably some other types out there, too.  My wife sort of defies categorization (in all the best ways!) because she reads up on me and probably most importantly is responsible for allowing me the time to write and Ramble here and on the Project.  I mean, sure, she’s family too, but she’s in a class of her own (sure, I’m obligated to say that, but honey, I mean it!).  Then, it’s even possible, if not likely, that at some point one or more of my students will discover this site and I’ll have them to welcome as well.

All that is to say, finding out that my mom is out there reading got me thinking about a couple of things.

First of all, persona.  The me you see writing here is not necessarily the same me that parents a toddler or teacher high school English or gets up at 5am to run.  I don’t talk this way in real life.  (Most of the time.)  But these thoughts buzz around in my skull ALL THE TIME, and I am pleasantly surprised to find that blarging and letting some of these thoughts drip out has a dual effect: one, the buzzing in my head is diminished; and two, it actually helps me to focus my thoughts for future writing, both Project-related and blarg-related.

Second, my audience (such as it is).  After all, as an English teacher, one of the things I typically remind my students in their writing is that you have to know your audience.  How can you write appropriately if you don’t know who you’re speaking to?  You won’t sell a lot of Legos and toy airplanes and matchbox cars if you advertise in black and white.  You won’t get a generation of teen girls out to see the newest vampire movie if you don’t put a bronzed, bare-chested, vaguely ethnic heartthrob in the trailers. So who the Fargo am I writing for?

The answer, it turns out, was simpler than I even thought.  I’m writing for me.  I don’t know if that’s the best way to write, but it’s the only way that makes sense to me right now.  I’m writing my novel the way I want to write it – in a way that I would want to read it.  I want to write the best goldfinger book I can , but more importantly, I want it to be a story I’m personally proud of.  As far as this little pile of brain crumbs goes, I am just trying to have a little fun and reflect on what it’s like to go through what I’m going through.  Writing in any capacity is stressful at the least, and at the worst it can make you want to dig a hole in the earth, fill the hole with your broken and pitiful ideas, and set them all on fire before diving in headfirst yourself.  Writing a novel — working with the same characters, the same plotline, the same problems, the same story — for days, weeks, and as it will soon become, months at a time, magnifies all of that.  Some days writing is transcendent.  I open my brain, let my fingers do a little tap dance on the keys, and the magic just streams forth as rainbow colored goop streams from my toddler’s mouth.  (Sorry, got a little bit topical.)  Other days it’s like practicing dental work on an irate shark; all thrashing and screaming and fighting for air.  Other days still it’s like the 13th hour of a stakeout; the donuts have gone stale, the coffee’s cold, and I’m fighting sleep just for a glimpse of the perfect word to come through the door.

Writing is hard.  This blarg is here for me to clear the pipes a bit, to burn out the gunk, to give my brain an ice bath after it runs its verbal marathons.  I hope that those of you out there reading it find some enjoyment in it.  I hope that you can find some humor in it.  I even dare to hope that maybe you can find a little inspiration in it.  But this is not for you.

If this blog were for you, family and friends, I’d try harder to clean up the language and use less disgusting metaphors and talk less about my spiraling, uncontrollable writer’s brain thoughts.  If it were for you, fellow writers, I’d try harder to clean up the run-on sentences and the overly wordy similes and unnecessary adverbs, and talk a little less about my kid and my job and the rest of my life.  But it’s not.

Today, I squeezed off 1100 words on the Project. Some of them were the right ones; many of them, I’m sure, were the wrong ones.  But they all felt right.  They all work to tell the story I’m trying to tell.  There’s some gouda language in there.  There are some run-on sentences and probably too many adverbs.  But I love the story like crazy so far, and if I’m lucky, it will eventually find some other people who enjoy it like I do.

Who knows, my mom might even enjoy it, too.  Despite all the gouda.

Want Crayons (Toddler Art?)

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The kid has started coloring on the walls.

We’ll start with the metaphorical.

He’s caught another stomach bug – his third, or his second and a half, depending on how you quantify the two weeks of pain we endured at Casa de Pav back in January.  How he keeps catching this evil is beyond me, but he doesn’t catch it halfway – it starts out of nowhere with a big, dramatic vomiting spell (I could tell about the time I was in Wal-Mart with the sprout at 7 AM and he erupted in a fountain of cottage cheese and peach slices shutting down an aisle and requiring me to make a pit stop through the toddlers’ clothing section which I was not planning on making and then carrying him home wrapped in my hoodie and his clothing in a garbage bag, but I won’t, I MEAN OOPS).  Then he moves on to blowing out his diapers and literally pooping the rainbow for a few nights.  We’re on night two.

I feel for the poor kid.  He’s had a rough weekend as far as toddlers go, for whom every day which does not see your every whimsical desire fulfilled to the fullest possible extent.  In short, every day is a rough day.  But the weekend has been a bad one, by dint of a couple of things.

First, the barfing.  That’s never fun; it scares the haberdashery out of him every time, and it would be better if you could comfort him but the only thing that really comforts him is being held and, well, eww.  He hasn’t developed the decency to bend at the waist while he’s blowing chunks (a skill which, like so many others we take for granted as adults, is apparently NOT second nature after all) so he likes to walk around while he’s spewing, really maximizing the ratio of affected area versus possible area.  Of course his clothes get caught in the crossfire (just made myself laugh out loud and gag a little simultaneously, a pretty unique feeling), so holding and hugging him is low on the list following one of these sessions.  Also, his last vomit fountain was bright pink; fluorescent, almost.  The only saving grace is that it happened out of the house (in grandma and grandpa’s house.  Sorry about that.)

Second, the poops.  I won’t go into too much detail here for the benefit of those of you reading this who do not have (and have not had) young kids whose poops you have to clean up.  I will just say that his entire, uh, undercarriage is raw and painful to even look at, so I can only imagine the discomfort the sprout is in.  Honestly, picturing it mentally to try to write about it is giving me the haberdasheryfied heebie-jeebies.  We’ll just stop here.  ORANGE POOPS GREEN POOPS OATMEAL-COLORED POOPS OH MY stopping now.

Third, I tried to do a nice thing for him on this weekend of horrible weather and horrible sickness.  To be fair, I didn’t really know how sick he was at the time, so it’s sadder for me now.  I tried to take him to the mall for happy running-free unfettered playground magical wonderland time (see my previous post on toddler heaven) and the goldfinger playground was closed for some random publicity stunt in the food court.  Foolishness.  Knowing the tantrums and blowups that can result from a small thing like, oh, I don’t know, not being allowed to dig through the trash and pull out the salmonella-infested chicken-trimmings which would of course cause him to DIE IMMEDIATELY (this thought process on the behalf of parents is REAL), I’m sure I don’t have to hyperbolize to accurately represent to you the overwhelming ways in which happiness completely and utterly failed to ensue when I had spent the entire morning talking up “Playground?  Bear (we call him Bear) wants to go to the playground?” and then had to tell him, within sight of the Holy Land itself, that it was closed and he couldn’t play.  In fact I won’t try to describe it.  I’ll just let your imagination fill your ears with his heartbroken cries.

SO, a difficult weekend to be a two-year old in the Casa de Pav.  But now, we can return to the literal.

I finally remembered that I’ve been meaning to start tracking his growth here in the house in a concrete and measurable way that my wife and I can look back on in a few years and say, “aww, he was, in fact, that tiny once,” so I rounded up the sprout and a crayon and I drew a line on the wall over his head.  You know the drill.

What I forgot to remember is that every moment in a toddler’s life is a moment in which the toddler is learning things about the way the world works.  Whether the thing he is learning is the thing you’re trying to teach is, of course, a thing you can laugh about later.  What I wanted him to learn was that we can make a permanent mark on the world around us, that we can leave landmarks to the future from the long-forgotten past, that even when he gets bigger, we will still have proof that he was once tiny, helpless, adorable.  In retrospect, I see that perhaps those concepts were and are a bit abstract for a brain that has trouble understanding that the trash can is a thing that should be stayed away from, even though it’s a lesson we’ve tried to teach, oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty times last night alone.  (Can you tell that the kid playing in the trash is a fargoing ISSUE in our house?)

What he learned, on the other hand, is that crayons can make pretty, colored markings on walls JUST LIKE THEY DO ON PAPER.

So in short order, this happened:

wpid-IMAG0912.jpg

What can I say. It’s hard to take it away from him when he’s feeling so pitiful.  We’re pretty much resolved to the fact that if we ever want to move we’re just going to have to burn the house to the ground.  What harm are a few more marks on the wall?