Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

The War On The War On The War On Christmas

Pavowski14 Comments

Two things:

  1. Christmas is not under attack.
  2. Even if it were under attack, there are few things in our society so likely to survive an attack as Christmas.

Still, you can’t swing a pixelated cat this season without running into something like this:

Which, holy crap, is awesome. But frightening. But mostly hilarious and awesome.

The opening salvos in the perennial “war on Christmas” sounded a few weeks ago, when Starbucks had the gall to roll out a “holiday” cup design that had a little less vaguely Christmas-themed adornment than in years past. The valiant defenders of Christendom and Christmas quickly recognized the slight and wasted no time returning fire upon the hapless soldiers on the front line: the poor and uninterested baristas who put the cups into their hands. Which is a little like if I, upset over all the prematurely wilted spinach I’ve gotten lately from my Kroger, go in and dump a bin full of rotten greens on a bagboy. In classic smug (and most importantly, easily bandwagon-able) fashion, throngs of Christmas crusaders took back the coffee bar by claiming their names were “Merry Christmas”, thus forcing the disinterested twenty-somethings to make the totally-not-Christmasy-at-all red cups absolutely Christmasy.

(Fixed, apparently.)

Still, blink and you might have missed it. Already nobody cares about the cups anymore, much like nobody cares about the religious lunatics who felt slighted by the cups. There is, after all, actual persecution and marginalization happening in the world without entitled yuppies inventing more of it.

But we know what’s coming.

Because Thanksgiving is almost here. And Thanksgiving, for all that most of us look forward to guzzling gravy straight from the boat and possibly embedding our heads inside the cooked turkey’s flavor-cavity (what, am I the only one that starts Thanksgiving dinner that way?), is nothing these days but the red carpet leading up to Christmas’s door. The decorations are going up. The soundtrack at the mall is changing from inane pop music that nobody listens to to the heartwarming Christmas songs none of us listen to. (The previous sentence is correct.) (And seriously, give me Elvis Presley and Burl Ives and keep the rest of the holiday tunes.)

Fox News will cry persecution first. Actually, they probably already have. Then, under pressure from … people, apparently, or maybe just because they see Fox doing it so they feel they should jump in, CNN will “investigate”. Then it’s only a matter of time before the local reporters in your city are standing in front of a nativity scene in your neighborhood, as stony-faced as if they were standing witness at a murder scene, to tell you about the protests outside such and such government building and the pushback from whatever organized blah-blahs. (I seriously got weary in the middle of typing that sentence and just gave up.)

Let’s be honest. Christmas is not under attack. And even if it were, the “attack” means about as much as an army of clowns attacking Fort Knox with toothpicks. Christmas is woven into the thread of our collective national consciousness. Atheists and Jews celebrate Christmas: it’s a good way to feel involved, and it’s too exhausting not to. Christmas is going nowhere. It’s too much a part of who we are.

But neither are the eternally put-upon going anywhere, which means that every year we will have to put up with the rhetoric (and let’s be honest, the whining) of those who feel that the rest of the world is at war with Christmas. And, internet society being what it is, mockers of those who complain about the world being at war with them live for this season too. The War on the War on Christmas is as predictable as December 25th itself.

It’s endlessly amusing to me that in this season which is supposed to be about lifting each other up and expressing warm feelings and charity and giving and vaguely-defined general good will that throngs of idiots will take to the internet and the street and whatever soapbox is to hand to get good and wound up about this invented conflict.

Which is why, this season, we need to declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. All of these people need to go. People are allowed to say “Merry Christmas”. People are allowed to not say it. Government buildings should maybe not decorate themselves in explicit Christian iconography because, you know, that irritating little Constitutional bit about the separation of church and state. But that doesn’t stop you from decorating your house, or from going out and seeing other houses decorated, or from going to the mall and wading around in the Santa Claus orgy that’s been going on there for weeks. Fargoing live and let live.

But of course, that also means that we need to stop giving attention to the squawkers who ridicule the idiots getting upset about this stuff in the first place. Live and let live. Just like anything else on TV and in the news: if you don’t watch it and don’t care about it, pretty soon, they’ll stop running it.

So declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. Ignore all the hate-babble and go and have yourself a merry little whatever.

Just make sure you spend lots of money.

That’s the real reason for the season.

That, and Rambo Jesus. Sorry. I just had to post it again.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.

wtf wordpress?

Pavowski7 Comments

Why, when wordpress redesigns their drafting page, do they always get rid of the word counter down at the bottom? And why does the drafting box always shrink?

The word counter is a thing I’m constantly concerned with (because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but like faculty meetings at my school, I tend to run a little bit long). Especially for my fiction, which I’m working on getting tighter, but for my everyday posts, I’m making an effort to keep things concise. Wasted words are wasted time, and I don’t like wasting my time or anybody’s who reads the site. Without that counter, I can feel myself (already even within this post, and the parentheticals aren’t helping) adding words in one after another just by dint of the fact that nobody’s there to stop me, and no word counter is there to shame me.

And the layout. I swear, the webpage is using about 50% of my monitor’s horizontal space to display the text box, with great blank swathes down either side of the page, like they mowed the center of the yard down nice and neat but left the sides on “jungle” setting. Add in the toolbar creeping from the top and I can see my words taking up about 33% of the available space.

33% of the space, when the words are all I care about.

Did I accidentally tweak a setting? Or has wordpress just “fixed” my “problems” for me?

Science Sunday with the Mythbusters

PavowskiLeave a comment

I’m a big nerd.

I dunno if you know this or not.

I love science fiction, astronomy, physics… I can’t get enough. I subscribe to Crash Course Astronomy on youtube. I am counting the days to the new Star Wars movie. So I guess it was inevitable that I would love a show like Mythbusters, which takes a scientific look at everyday turns of phrase and bits of movie magic to see if there’s any actual truth to them.

After filming their final season, the show’s hosts have been on a tour lately, doing speaking engagements and sharing some of their favorite moments about the show around the country.

Last night, they were in Atlanta.

And because my wife is awesome, she got me tickets to the show for my birthday back in July.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the show is a little nichey; that while it has its fans, it’s probably not widespread enough in popularity for most people to even be familiar with it outside of maybe seeing a rerun of it on the weekend. Still, they basically sold out the Fox theatre in downtown Atlanta. Further, the audience was wonderfully diverse: people of all ages and all ethnicities filled the rows, but maybe more impressive were the families, especially those with kids as young as six or seven. And I will happily admit that I spent the bulk of the show with a big dumb fangirly grin plastered to my face.

Still, I didn’t know exactly what the show was all about. I thought they’d show some clips from the TV show, answer a few questions, maybe do a few live demonstrations. But it was a lot more than that.

The show was full of lovely little moments. My heart warmed when they called their first volunteer up onto the stage — an eleven year old girl — who proudly proclaimed that math was her favorite subject in school. Adam talked about some experiments they had run but never been able to use on the show, like a ridiculously explosive, easily accessible chemical that they are forbidden to disclose, and a lab rat that turned cannibal during a food experiment. The usually stoic Jaime got emotional when asked about his most frightening moment on the show.

Simply awesome.

(My brother and I are about thirty rows back on the left.) You can tell based on my formless face-shaped dome head.)

But what I really want to talk about is Adam Savage.

Adam Savage is one of the nerdiest nerds around, putting a gusto and chutzpah into his geekiness that’s really enviable for a more low-key geek such as myself. While I expected to see a few neato science experiments and hear a few funny stories about being on the set (and there was certainly plenty of that), what really resonated with me was the opening moments of the night, wherein Adam told some stories about growing up geeky and what led him to the sort of thinking and experimentation and self-instruction that would eventually lead to a career doing special effects for movies and television and web series about science.

Being the big nerd that I am, I whipped out my pencil and notepad and began scribbling.

Out of the evening, I came away with a list of reading material that I need to look into (100 Years of Solitude, and the works of Raymond Chandler) and some lovely poignant aphorisms about science in particular and learning and being human in general. They were even, believe it or not, applicable to writing. So I thought I’d share a few of them here.

  1. The deeper you go, the harder it gets. Adam told a story about learning to juggle, starting with the absolute basics and eventually undertaking to learn tricks. At first, the gains and improvements came quickly and readily, and he was able to master new facets of the skill every couple of days. (As a fellow novice juggler, I can certainly identify.) But very quickly, you come up against a wall beyond which the improvements become harder to achieve. While he mastered basic juggling in under a week, it took him well over two weeks to master even a few simple tricks, and he found he simply didn’t have the drive or the time needed to undertake it further. As a result, he’s a decent if not impressive juggler. And, well, that’s like writing, or hell, like anything really, innit? Anybody can do it, anybody can undertake to string sentences together and even craft a narrative. But if you want to be good, if you want to impress people with your talent, well, you’ve got to slay a whole other sort of beast. You’ve got to live and breathe with your work for long months and years, you’ve got to study, practice, think about language, try and fail in a thousand different ways. In short, you have to put in the miles. I’d wager that most would-be writers don’t have the gumption to do that. It remains to be seen whether I do.
  2. The Champion of one notch above mediocrity. As a result of all this, he became just barely decent at a lot of things: he had fascination with tons and tons of different skills and ideas, but didn’t have the follow-through to devote himself to get really good at any one thing. As a result, he was seasoned in lots of areas and knew a little bit about a lot of subjects, but never became an expert in any of them. I think we could all take a page from that book. There’s value in trying lots of things, even things you don’t expect to plumb the depths of (see my collection of Flash Fiction for examples). Out of those tiny forays comes growth, comes a broadening of the experience.
  3. Failure is always an option. If you watch Mythbusters, you’re familiar with this little epithet already; rare is the episode that doesn’t feature an experiment blowing up — sometimes literally, often dramatically — in their faces. But this isn’t a setback. In fact, they seek this moment because if you simply skate through an experience and everything goes to plan, you maybe enjoy a bit of success, but you don’t really learn much. Failure, however, is a fantastic and ruthless teacher; nothing teaches you how not to suck like picking over the charred and smoldering remains of your failed forays beyond mediocrity. Unless you failed at skydiving. No second chances in skydiving.
  4. Art and science are just two different kinds of storytelling. This one shook me to my core. I like to think there’s something magical and even otherworldly about storytelling, in the artistry of a nicely turned phrase, the cleverness of a well-tuned plot. But as with so many things, the moment I sat down to think about it, the pieces started sliding into focus like a Magic Eye painting. Stories tell us why people do the things they do. Science tells us why the world is the way it is. We love art because it speaks to worlds and people and emotions that might be, and we love science because it shows us the magical things we never knew about the world we currently inhabit. Furthermore, I don’t think you can have a good story without science — even if it’s just the inexact science of human interaction — nor can you have good science without a bit of art — the elegant organization and tracking of variables, the spiraling recursion of repeatability.

I’ve gone on enough, but suffice it to say that while I went to the show expecting a bit of fun, I came home with a whole new respect for a show I once thought of merely as a diversion.

 

I Wish I Had The Words

Pavowski17 Comments

Usually I use Saturday to post a reflection about writing and its process, hoping through that rumination to unlock some secrets about my own work or to unblock the filters that periodically need cleaning out.

But I’m not in the mood to ruminate, or to make light, or to ponder the mysteries of life and the blank page.

This morning I’ve got an indescribable rage in my heart over the events in Paris.

I could say it’s a white-hot point of light in my chest, but that doesn’t explain the cold detachment I feel. Maybe it’s more like a stabbing lance of pain in my gut, but that doesn’t jive with the dull numbness all over.

One way or another, over one hundred people are dead this morning in yet another terrorist attack, and I’m just dumbstruck. My heart is breaking.

How long can we allow this to continue?

How many more sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters have to die in the name of a twisted religion before the rest of us agree that it’s time for that religion to go?

I try not to traffic in hatred and despair, because I don’t think there’s much to be gained there. But on a day like this, with over a hundred dead and the savages responsible celebrating in the streets, it’s hard. It’s really hard.

If I were the praying kind, I’d pray for Paris.

As it is, all I can do is hope that maybe our world leaders will decide that this is the line, that this is the time to drop the hammer on these stone-age degenerates once and for all.

The Actor’s Nightmare

Pavowski2 Comments

Why, nearly ten years removed from the stage, do I still get the Actor’s Nightmare?

If you’re not familiar, the Actor’s Nightmare is a simple but prevalent one among denizens of the stage, in which a performer finds himself thrust into a performance for which he is woefully unprepared.

Common tropes of the dream:

  • You learned all your lines, but have forgotten them and everybody stares dumbly at you as you “um” and “uh” your way through.
  • You never learned all your lines, but somehow made it to performance night anyway, and everybody stares dumbly at you.
  • You know your lines, but are unable to speak, and everybody stares dumbly at you.
  • Your costume is ridiculous or unfinished or ludicrously fails to fit you, and you must go onstage in street clothes, naked, or in the idiotic costume anyway.
  • The set is unfinished or worse, still in active construction, and your performance takes you through a minefield of sharply upturned tools, unsteady platforms, and other threats to life and limb.
  • Your performance is brilliant, but the audience is completely empty.
  • Your performance is an utter travesty, and the audience is completely full.
  • Your performance doesn’t matter, because the audience is full of T-Rexes who fall upon you and your fellow actors in a bloodbath of Shakespearean epithets.

Every actor in every performance ever has played out all the ways a show could go wrong in his mind multiple times throughout rehearsal for said show, and in the Actor’s Nightmare they all parade across the screen of our minds with the saucy abandon of a dog rolling in roadkill.

I’ve had the Nightmare ever since I started with theater. I will probably have the Nightmare my whole life, seeing as the theater was such an enormous formative element of my salad days. It’s just too much a part of who I am, I think, for me to ever be rid of it.

Still, why does it persist?

I don’t buy very much into dream interpretation, except in the broadest sense. If somebody tells you that because you dreamed you were falling from the 37th floor of an office building into a dumpster full of unicycles, you will soon find a new job at the office of Forestry under a supervisor named Shwampa or something… that’s garbage.

But the Nightmare, I think, is just another manifestation of doubt, of anxiety, of the rampant feelings of inadequacy that so many of us have. Notice in the list that a common thread is “everybody stares dumbly at you,” as if you’re out of place or you’ve wasted their time. Well, that’s a very real and present fear in the life of this particular writer. Also recurrent is that idea of things being “unfinished” or “unprepared,” which, well, yeah. I never feel particularly ready even to get out of bed in the morning, let alone to ply my trade as a wordslinger (though I did optimistically and automatically call what I do a “trade”, so maybe there’s something there).

Point is, there’s an undercurrent of doubt behind everything I do, no matter how brashly or confidently I brag about it. I don’t know, for all that I love my kids and my wife, how good I am at being a father or husband. I’m maybe a decent teacher, though I am regularly in class thrust up against the reminder that I don’t really know what I’m doing up there. I fancy myself a decent recreational runner, but I’m definitely not winning any trophies these days, and I’m always afraid I’m going to injure or re-injure myself. And as for my writing, well, I talk a good game, but no matter how many words I write, the Howler Monkey of Doubt is right there, with his empty eyes and his judgmental grin.

wpid-scragz.jpg

Of course, the upshot is that the Nightmare fills me not with the abject howling terror of being devoured by an audience of T-Rexes (okay, sometimes). Rather, I wake with the slightly bemused SOMETHING of watching a couple of cats wrestle for a moment and then lick each other’s butts. For a moment, it was scary, but now it’s just a weird thing that happened. The Nightmare is a reminder that, while that doubt can be crippling in the moment, it’s one hundred percent a creation of the mind.

The truth is, I’ve never gone on stage unprepared.

Or naked.

Or in front of a bunch of T-Rexes.

But maybe the thought that I may one day have to will help keep me sharp.