Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Operation Turtle Rescue Is A Go

Pavowski3 Comments

It’s not that I’m trying to find these guys, really it’s not. But I keep doing it. Amidst all this rainy, lousy, unrelentingly gray weather here in Atlanta, I came across another turtle wandering far from home.

This one, lost in the parking lot at my school.

OH MY GOD IT'S SO ADORABLE.
OH MY GOD IT’S SO ADORABLE.

We’ll say nothing of the fact that I was caught out by the football stadium in a downpour that I could literally see coming as it rushed down the highway, shooting the valley in between the trees. We won’t even talk about the subsequent fact that I had to spend the rest of the day in damp shirt and tie, explaining to my colleagues and students that yes, in fact, I was outside during that cloudburst and no, there really wasn’t anywhere for me to wait it out; I just had to hightail it for the school building, a mere 400 yards away.

But more to the point, JUST LOOK AT THAT THING. It was about the size of a quarter, and so small that there was no way for me to photograph it sitting on my hand without my hand looking freakishly huge and misshapen by contrast. The moment after I snapped that picture, it peed all over me (though to be fair, the release of turtle urine could have filled maybe a quarter of a thimble).

Needless to say, I scooped him up out of the parking lot where he sat fifty yards from anything green and spirited him off to the edge of the woods, where I can only hope his chances of surviving in nature are a little bit better.

This is the second turtle I’ve rescued in a month.

I am starting to wonder if they are starting to find me.

You Don’t Need NaNoWriMo

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It’s that time of year again, when the leaves are changing, the temperature’s dropping, and established and would-be writers around the country are hunched over keyboards and stacks of paper, pounding with slowly numbing fingertips on worn keys as they push, strive, claw and crawl to make the 1667 words per day needed to add up to a 50k word novel at the end of 30 days.

It’s NaNoWriMo, and that means if you travel in writerly circles, as I do, your feeds are blown up with this weird unsayable moniker, with the braggings and boastings of those who are shattering their daily word count goals, and the wails and lamentations of those who aren’t. It’s cacophonous and wearying, viewed a certain way, or inspiring and invigorating, viewed another.

Personally, I won’t be partaking. I didn’t last year, I won’t this year, and I don’t see the need in years to come, for that matter. But that owes more to my personal feelings on what motivates us than it does to the little internet carnival that NaNoWriMo has become.

As a motivational tool, I think NaNoWriMo is pretty awesome. Anything that can get people thinking creatively and telling the stories locked away in their dark, squishy little hearts is a good thing by me. And there is certainly something empowering about seeing the hordes of writers taking to the internet, each with a dragon to slay that is unique and personal and wholly their own, but which is at the same time a dragon that the writing community sets out to slay together. Swords made of words, axes of pages, slings and arrows of plots and characters all fly at the beast with the intensity, voracity, and — it must be so — insanity that the task requires.

People working together can accomplish things that, apart, they never could, and one of the really neat things about NaNo is how it transmogrifies writing — almost by definition a solitary, lonely act — into a communal rite.

And that’s pretty cool.

But the task is gigantic. It’s a moonshot with a trebuchet. A marathon without a day of training. A climb up Everest without a pack. And while the challenge surely motivates some, it’s too much by half for others. To make 50k words in 30 days requires 1667 words every day, no weekends off, no mental health days, no excuses. It’s no surprise, then, that the path to the dragon’s lair is littered with the bodies of the fallen, the strewn pages of the slain, the half-formed words of the faint of heart.

And that’s a shame.

But writing takes all stripes. Some are motivated by the challenge while some would break themselves upon it. Personally, I know that attempting a challenge like NaNo and failing would fill me with more writerly self-doubt than already hangs over my head on any given day.

I’m also leery of the gimmickiness of the whole affair. Whether you’re an accomplished or aspiring writer, going balls-out to draft 50k words from scratch smacks of spectacle rather than substance. It reeks of bluster and swagger rather than actual accomplishment (“I’ve written a novel this month, what did you get done?”). There’s a desperation behind it, I think; a frenetic surge of energy that cannot be sustained.

Really, what bothers me about NaNo is the same thing that bothers me about New Year’s Resolutions, birthday gifts to the self, and any other extrinsic sources of motivation that we come up with to push ourselves out of our comfort zones: the fact that they’re arbitrary and manufactured. We choose this day or that month to try something new, to make a change that we have apparently been wanting in our lives, but why that day? Why that month? Does the fact that it’s a new year make it easier to lose weight, start exercising, keep a cleaner house, stay in touch with friends, reconnect with family? Of course not. Does the fact that it’s November make it easier to write fifty thousand words? Naturally not, doubly so if you live in the U.S. and have the Thanksgiving holidays to contend with. We take these steps, we attempt to make these changes, not necessarily because we’ve decided it’s time for ourselves to do these things, but rather because everybody else around us is doing the same thing.

But here’s the thing. If a change is what your life needs, the day to make that change is today, whether today happens to be January 1st or the beginning of NaNoWriMo or the first day of Lent or your birthday or just another day in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable month (I’m looking at you, June.) If you’re ready to start writing a novel, why put it off until November? If you want to start exercising, or gardening, or reading more, or cherishing the lamentations of your enemies or whatever, why put it off until January?

We only get so much time on our little blue speck. You owe it to yourself to do everything you can to make your life better in the time that you have.

If writing a novel will make your life better, then you should be doing it already. Whether it’s NaNoWriMo or not. (Although, again, to reiterate, if NaNoWriMo motivates you within your existing desire and work toward writing, then, hey, go for it.)

And if you’re kicking around the idea of eating healthier, exercising, whatever, and you’re just looking for a good time to start, or you’re waiting until you’re ready, well… we’re never ready.

You just have to go and do it.

Seriously.

Right now.

Go slay the dragons.

Hooray for Time

Pavowski11 Comments

Scientists have determined that the exact measurement of time at the molecular level is impossible.

In other words, time is complete and absolute bunk.

At no time is this more evident than Daylight Savings Time, an outdated and archaic practice that arbitrarily picks a day in the fall and stretches it by an hour, then arbitrarily picks another day in spring and shrinks it by an hour.

Now, a lot of people go about gleefully talking about the extra hour of sleep they get when we “fall back”, which is fine and dandy. But those of with kids know the truth.

DST means NOTHING.

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The kids are still going to wake up when their rhythm tells them to wake up, regardless of any “conditioning” or “preparing” you might have done.

My wife and I thought we were clever. We had slowly been pushing the sprouts’ bedtimes back since about a month ago, so that they could go to bed at the same “time” regardless of the numbers on the clock face.

HA.

Last night was Halloween, so any sort of regular sleep schedule was out. And this morning sprout #1 woke up to poop, which he cannot do by himself yet even though the attending adult is nothing more than a cheerleader and heinie-wiper. Oh, did I mention that he was up thirty minutes before his regular time, which was a full hour and a half ahead of the clock time?

Not only did we not gain time, we actually lost time on this exchange, which has me superjazzed about “giving the hour back” in Spring, let me tell you.

Meanwhile, it’s currently seven PM and it feels like midnight.

Thanks, Obama.

Seriously, DST is a joke. You want a non-arse-over-elbows, earth-specific time anomaly to get psyched about? Try the leap-second.

Words and Whiskers and Woe Unto My Face

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About two years ago I pulled a switcheroo in my daily shower prep. Given that I have less hair than ever these days (at least on my head), it’s hard to make any major changes, but I gave this one a try. I traded in my multi-bladed razors for an old-school double-edged safety razor.

Okay, OKAY. Settle down. I’m not here to go on a long-winded rant about how contemporary razors are garbage and the old-school stuff is way better. There are great swathes of the internet dedicated to such stuff. You can find them if you so choose.

All that really matters is that after an initial period of adjustment, I have found shaving with an old-school razor to be much more relaxing, pleasurable, and satisfying way of performing what was once just a drab, do-it-and-get-it-over-with task in my morning routine. It takes a little more time and a little more care, but the results, in my opinion, are well worth it.

So what? Well, the other morning I found myself in a little bit of a rush. My wife and I had somewhere to be, and I didn’t have the time to do a full and proper shave, But, I needed a shave pretty badly (I go from five o’clock devil-may-care to mountain man in about five hours), and I still have a few disposables in a drawer, so I figured, what the hell, I’ll just grab a quick shave in the shower like I used to do.

But they say you can’t go back, and shaving is no exception.

I got most of the whiskers off my face, sure. But the razor tugged and pulled and nicked, skipping and jumping all over my face in a motion about as smooth as that of an epileptic donkey seizing out at a disco. And when I got out of the shower, I found that my beard was mostly gone, but still extant in patches and stripes and tufts, like a feng-shui garden designed by my three-year-old. I needed a second pass to clean up the scraps, which still didn’t get me to where I wanted to be, but by that time, my time was up and I had to get out of there.

So I got my shave in three minutes as opposed to ten, but at what cost?

Worse still, I was struck with the realization that this used to be my normal. I used to think that that was simply the way you shaved, and without a hell of a lot of time and discomfort and razor burn and ingrown hairs to show for it, you couldn’t do a better job. So I didn’t. I had a sloppy shave every day, and I didn’t know any better. Now, though, I don’t have an excuse.

Okay. Shaving talk over, writing metaphor begins. Here’s the point: when I picked up wetshaving (yeah, that’s what it’s called. I know. I’M SORRY) two years ago, I learned a (for me) vastly superior way of doing something I had to do every day. It required a bit more time than what I was used to, but it was better in virtually every other way. And now, knowing the better way, I almost can’t stand the thought of doing it any other way. Seeing and feeling that patchy, amateurish Mach 3 face-butchering irked me on a deep emotional level. I knew it wasn’t my best work, and I knew I’d cut corners to get a shoddy end result.

So it is with writing. (So it is with anything, for that matter.)

I’ve been whacking away at this writing thing with the equivalent of a Mach 3 idiot-proof blade, cutting narrative swathes out of the lumberjack beard of my creativity with a weird, reckless abandon. It gets the job done, but the end result is hardly something I should be bragging about. (Let me qualify. I still believe that any written novel is worth bragging about. But the rub is: I know I could — and probably should — be a lot better.) And sure, you get better at anything by actually doing that thing, but you’ll get even better with some actual targeted practice and mindful application than you will by blindly flailing around with a razor.

All that is to say that I’m going to be taking some time over the next month or so — in the downtime before I go back to editing the recently finished draft — to do some targeted practice. Less raw creating, less vomiting words and unformed ideas onto the page, more consideration of form and technique.

Which may not make much difference for what you see around here.

But I certainly hope it makes a difference in my capital “W” Writing. You know, the stuff I hope to get people to actually pay for one day.

You Are Not Perfect, But We Can Make You So

Pavowski6 Comments

Picture day came last week in my school, and with it, the students in their shirts and ties, fancy dresses, suit jackets.

…

BAHAHAHAHAHA, No, just kidding. They came in their t-shirts with rude slogans and their ripped jeans and their bed-heads.

Which is fine. I mean, it’s school. I certainly don’t need to look any further than my own high school yearbook to see kids in my own generation who couldn’t be bothered to class it up for a day for their pictures.

But my gripe today isn’t with the kids (for a change). My gripe is with the photographers. Or maybe with society. More correctly, with society by way of the photographers.

Specifically, this:

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For a low, low price, you can alter your stinky, horrible, eye-abrading face in the yearbook into something altogether prettier, normaler, and far less likely to shatter the camera lens. Remove blemishes! Lighten your teeth! Disguise and conceal your every imperfection!

Look. Memory is fragile enough to begin with, unless you’re one of those unfortunate souls shackled with an eidetic one. I can personally count on one hand the number of clear memories I have from before the age of 15; that’s specific memories of specific things with the faces of recognizable people and events which actually transpired. The rest is all cobbled together from secondhand accounts, like the time my dad tells me I locked myself into a high school locker while he and his buddies were playing pick-up basketball. I know it happened, but I have no memory of it. After 16 it gets better, but only just.

And it’s no great shock to learn that eyewitness testimony is some of the least reliable evidence that police have. People imagine things that weren’t there, or forget about things that were there. Ask two dozen witnesses of an event “what the bloody bollocks did you see here?” And you’ll likely get two dozen different answers. The big stuff is the same. But the details are all different.

All the same, though, our experiences make us who we are. Personally, I had acne in high school. Not soul-crushing face sores, but certainly a scattering of little eye-blisters dusting my face. You can see them in my yearbook pictures. It’s awful. But those pictures at least give an accurate representation of who I was.

But it’s 2015 now (and I guess this has been going on for a while, but I only saw this ad this year, so … once again, the party started without me), and the option is here to alter the fabric of reality for a few extra dollars. Sure, NOW, when everybody is looking at your yearbook picture from this year, they’re saying “where’d your swamp-creature face go?” But give it a few years, and instead of remembering you as you are, people will be saying “man, that guy/girl was pretty incredible-looking. I wonder why I didn’t try to jump his/her bones under the bleachers back then.”

Isn’t there a danger in screwing with our memories and our perceptions of ourselves, especially given that those things are already super screwed-up to begin with? And, furthermore, isn’t there enough of a problem with self-image and trying to live up to unattainable standards of beauty in our society in the first place, without feeling like I have to shell out extra dollars on picture day just to look normal next to my classmates?

But, Pav, you say, it’s just a little airbrushing. What’s the harm?

If we can reinvent the past, then it never really happened. If my face in my yearbook picture doesn’t look like a dog chewed on a piece of pizza, then for all intents and purposes, I never looked like that. A friend of mine swears up and down that once, his mother caught an injured squirrel and nursed it back to health, and that during that time, I came over to his house, tried to pick up the squirrel, and it ran amok, scrambled into my shirt, and I did a lunatic jig across his living room trying to get the critter off me. I don’t remember this at all. You would think an incident like that would, I dunno, leave indelible marks in your brain and your psyche like so many tiny rodent claw-marks in your torso, but nope. I’m not nervous around squirrels or chipmunks. I don’t wake up in cold sweats feeling critters scampering across my chest. For all the effect this incident has on my life, it may as well have never happened. I have re-invented my past.

Just like in Total Recall, where a mild-mannered guy gets the memories of an interstellar space adventure implanted in his grey matter; the truth gets re-written and spiced up a bit. And it’s been a while, but I don’t seem to recall things going so great for that guy.

Do I overthink? Probably. All today’s drivel is probably as likely the product of an exhausted brain trying to claw its way through the closing pages of my first draft and lashing out at anything even slightly untoward, like the boss blowing up and assigning extra paperwork and calling an hour-long arse-chewing meeting because the coffee was too cold.

But still. The implication that you could give your yearbook picture “Star Appeal.”

As if you didn’t already have it.

Or maybe it’s just that dorky kid’s smug grin and his stupid Adam’s apple. With its perfect soft complexion and ideal look.