Tag: funny

Trumped: An Uninformed Overview of the Primaries

Pavowski1 Comment

(As told by a guy who knows of politics only what he learned a long, long time ago in a freshman government class far away)

I seem to be saying it a lot lately, but this is the part where I say that mine is not a political blog; it’s just that politics are, for better or worse, a part of life, and as such, well, they dwell in the mind from time to time. This little post snowballed on me.

TL;DR version: Trump might win the Republican primary — and that should be exactly what non-Republicans want.

We’re exhausted over here in America. In recent decades, our election cycle has bloated and fed upon itself to the point that it stretches out, without blinking an eye, well over a year. I remember seeing on the Daily Show or something similar several months ago that Canada had just gone through an election cycle. It had lasted about a month, and none of the Canadians could believe how long it had taken. Ha! If that’s democracy, you’re doing it wrong. Silly Canadians. No, our elections are interminable affairs; in fact, if you happen to be a fan of the losing party during an election year, have no fear, because the pundits in your corner will begin immediately discussing the ways they can turn the electorate in their favor four years off.

To that end, the current election cycle feels like it’s been about seven years long so far. Quite a lot of people have been really surprisingly upset about our president ever since his election and all through his re-election, and I can clearly remember interviews with high-ranking Republicans wherein running in 2016 was referenced even a full year or two ago. Now we’re within a year of the election, and people are really freaking the fargo out.

Let’s calm the hell down. The president has not nearly as much power as anti-Obama types would have you think; he’s hamstrung by the checks-and-balances system established by those founding forefathers that pundits so love to idolize.

Second, if you think this election cycle — featuring over 20 presidential hopefuls at one point (and maybe still? surely some other backwoods senator has wandered into the light and declared a presidential bid since lunchtime) — is anything other than idolatry and pandering at this point, you are deluding yourself.

Take Trump. (No, seriously. Take him. To Saturn, if you have the means.)

I’m going to go ahead and put my dollar down: he will not be the next PotUS.

Never gonna happen.

He’s gotten a lot of attention in the current cycle for saying some, uh, inflammatory things. People are freaking out because he’s leading in the polls. But there is no cause for concern. (Well, I guess that depends on where you stand politically.) Trump is not going to be president, and the reason for that is that most people don’t care who the president is.

Don’t believe me? Join me in a thought experiment.

You go to the polling place, sign in with the elderly, cheerful volunteer, and wait in line for your chance to do your civic duty. You approach the booth, and go to place your vote — but you find that the names have been blacked out, and all you can do is vote Republican, Democrat, or Other.

Looks a bit too much like a line of urinals, doesn't it?
Looks a bit too much like a line of urinals, doesn’t it?

I submit that an overwhelming majority of people in this situation would go ahead and vote Republican, Democrat, or Other, without making too much of a stink about being unable to see the name of the person they’re voting for. Hell, I probably would. That’s because we don’t care who the president is, we just want to make sure it’s one of our guys in the White House.

But everybody needs to remember that Trump is not currently running for president. Sure, he says he is, and his campaign literature says he is, but what he’s really running for is to be the Republican Nominee for president. A subtle, but key, difference.

For those of you looking at the American election wind-up and scratching your heads or vomiting in the corner, we have these things called Primaries, wherein hopefuls from each political party battle to the death for the right to represent their party in the national election.

What, sorry? They don’t fight to the death? Oh.

If only.

No: in the primary, candidates do battle with members of their own party for the right to represent that party. In other words, the republican candidates must prove they are the most republican, the democratic candidates must prove they are the most democratic, the libertarians must prove they are the most libertarded.

Thing is, to prove that you’re the best something, you must epitomize every aspect of that something. This will prove to your “base” (the faithful voters who will always vote R or D without a second thought) that you are the right man for the job. So what you end up with is a gaggle of otherwise intelligent politicians scrambling like hell to get as far to the right as they can to appeal to the base: those voters who are really concerned about politics.

And here the Republicans have a problem: what has their party been about for the last seven years (and yes, I’m talking specifically about the Obama presidency) outside of being against everything the democrats, specifically Obama, do and say? Republicans have to contend with the fact that a big swathe of their voters are really pissed off that Obama is the president, and nobody — NOBODY — is more vocal about how pissed off over the Obama presidency he is than Trump.

I’m not going to postulate on why this is the case. I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me. But for every possible Republican stance — clamp down on immigration, free market, women’s (lack of) rights — Trump turns it to 11. No immigration, Mexican or Islamic especially. No regulation of the market. Women? More like crazy PMSing baby factories, amirite? (His words, not mine. Okay, maybe not exactly his words.)

This is why he’s leading in the polls. The Republican core is mad as hell and Trump is expressing thoughts that they agree with. And if you’re a functionally intelligent Republican, then, yeah, I might start getting nervous. Because the challenge that sane Republicans now face is, how are we going to get a majority of our non-zealot population to turn out and vote for just one of these unimpressive faces in the crowd? How can we mobilize people who don’t care all that much about all this against the horde of slavering, racist, sexist, Trump supporters?

It’s a problem the Republicans are going to have to solve very soon, or they’re going to reap exactly what they’ve sown over the last seven years.

But by the same token, I see a lot of Democrats and other non-Republicans getting nervous about the Trump bid. His racism scares them, his intolerance scares them, his flightiness and willingness to say or do anything scares them.

But the fact is, if you’re a non-Republican, a Trump ticket is exactly what you want to see.

Why?

Because even though most people don’t care who the president is, people will still turn out in droves for the general election. Something about deciding the fate of the most powerful man (or woman, Hillary’s running after all, and so is that woman who isn’t Donald Trump on the Republican side) in the world gets our American juices flowing. And on election day? The horde of Trump supporters will be as a speck in a fly’s eye compared to the rest of the electorate. Democrats will never vote for Trump. Most independents will never vote for Trump. Even a lot of Republicans will never vote for Trump; just look at their rhetoric: he doesn’t represent the party, he’s not a Republican, etc. Some will vote 3rd party, others will just stay home; either way benefits the Democrats.

If Trump wins the Republican primary, it’s the closest thing to a guaranteed victory for Democrats that you will ever see.

Insert your own conspiracy theories about how this is exactly what Trump wants below.

Zombies Among Us

Pavowski7 Comments

We hear it all the time, right? Kids today are ungrateful, lazy, entitled; they’re flushing the future of the planet down the toilet, they couldn’t math their way out of a paper bag, if it’s not on google they can’t be bothered to learn it.

It’s all true, of course, and it’s all also woefully simplified. Kids by and large are going to use the technology and the means of the day to put in the least amount of effort and get away with what they can. Of course, if life is a slippery slope, then the automated chairs that keep us from even being forced to do so simple a thing as walking in a movie like Wall-E are not so very far off.

They’ve got this new thing — maybe you’ve seen it — called a hoverboard.

It’s kinda like a Segway, keeping the rider balanced using gyroscopic technology. But with a minuscule footprint and using literally only your feet, it’s the hottest hot thing, especially among the youths.

youths

I’m a high school teacher, so I have a pretty high tolerance for youthful entitlement and sass, not to mention casual indifference to the world in favor of a tiny glowing screen. But even I was taken aback by the display my wife and I saw in Target the other day. (Why do so many of my stories take place at Target? Why am I always seeing stuff to get good and twisted about at Target? More evidence, I think, that Target is the glowing sun at the center of our capitalist universe.)

We’re shopping, somewhere around the hair products aisle (it’s funny how much I still notice the hair products aisle, as if they made an ounce of difference for a baldy like me), when two teenage girls swing into the main aisle in front of us: one walking, the other riding a hoverboard.

Now, if you haven’t seen these things yet, you really are limited when riding one. You have to hold your body very still, lest you throw yourself out of balance and wipe out in dramatic and delightful fashion (just do a youtube search for “hoverboard crashes”, and laugh away a few hours). So you’re limited in the first place to a sort of zombielike pose. And, hey, since you’re standing still while you roll around the store anyway, why not entertain yourself on the go with a book? HAHAHAHA of course not. The hoverboard girl was, of course, staring into the magical world of her cell phone as she trawled the aisles of the ‘Get.

Then she and her friend had to turn around. Presumably because they forgot to pick something up, or — this is Target, after all — some subconscious advert suddenly took root in their brains and they realized they needed to go back and spend more money. So they turn, and I get a look at them face-on.

And the walking girl looks perfectly normal and average. Face blank but engaged, looking around, you know — signs of life. But the hoverboard girl lowers her phone for a moment and looks where she’s going. (Presumably so that she doesn’t end up in the search results for “hoverboard crashes.”) My god, her face.

If you were to try and personify “disinterest,” her face would have been a good candidate. If you wanted to try to explain to somebody what it felt like to watch C-SPAN for fourteen hours, you might start with a picture of her face. A torture victim, deprived of food and water for days and given to believe that there was no escape in this life, might adopt an affect as empty and hopeless as hers.

I wish I’d taken a picture, but I wasn’t a quick enough draw with my phone. Also, I’m way too much of a chicken to take a picture of somebody doing something dumb to their face. (Unless I know you. Then it’s open season.) The eyes were half-lidded, like the collapsing blinds in an abandoned house. The mouth, open and slack, as if waiting for a train of ants to march in and start retrieving crumbs. A tiny line of drool from lip to shirtfront would not at all have seemed out of place. She looked, in short, as if she had just emerged from a nice, deep coma, except for the whole standing-upright thing.

Honestly and truly, just add a little costume makeup and dirty up her outfit, and she’d have been a perfect extra on The Walking Dead.

zombie-apacalypse

And she had just come out of a coma, hadn’t she?

What use has your brain when everything that interests you and excites you is delivered straight to your face by a device you can carry around in your hand? What use have your legs when you can get wherever you want to go by leaning ever so slightly forward? (Except for stairs, I guess.)

Technology is awesome. The science behind these things is mind-shattering.

But for some, it all just seems so mundane.

Not that I think it will happen at this point, but here’s hoping I never lose the ability to wonder at how fargoing amazing the world around us is.

Toddler Life, Chapter 338: Picture Day

Pavowski3 Comments

Being a kid sucks.

I mean, to an adult, being a kid is awesome: you have zero responsibilities, zero stress; all you have to worry about is whether you want mac and cheese or chicken nuggets for dinner, or how many laps you can run around the couch before you get dizzy and fall over, or how many colored scribbles you can get on the wall before your parents have a hissy fit. (The answers, obviously, are chicken nuggets, twenty six, and anywhere from three to a hundred and three, depending on how much you’re laughing like a maniac while you do it.)

But actually being a kid actually sucks.

You’re always getting hauled off to places you don’t care about. Trips to the grocery store or to Target. Stops at the bank. A daily sojourn to day care. Then, you’re being forced to do all sorts of things that interest you not a bit. Eating vegetables. Going to bed at a “reasonable” hour. Not coloring on the walls. (I should confess that both of my kids are actually pretty well-tempered about these things almost all the time.)

But despite these day-to-day inconveniences, I don’t know that, for a kid, there is any indignity worse than picture day.

You wake up, hoping for a day of cartoons and playgrounds, of candy and sunshine, but the parents are up. And they’re a little bit more wound up than usual. Bustling about. Rushing through breakfast. Nipping at each other about time and duties and outfits and responsibilities. Then they’re stuffing you into stiff clothes that — let’s be honest — are a little long in the sleeve or short in the leg: uncomfortable threads that rub and irritate and constrict and ride up.

Next thing you know, you’re crammed into the car seat — but you can’t have any snacks, because you can’t get any gunk on your hands, and you can’t have anything to drink, because you might spill it on yourself. Now you’re sitting around a lobby, and sure, there are toys around, but they’re not great toys, and your parents are getting mad at you for trying to run around and crawl on the seats, and there’s nothing really to do except sit around and not have fun. Anathema for a toddler.

Finally, you’re shepherded into another room with some other lame toys and a weird adult with a fancy camera, poking and prodding at you and telling you where to stand, how to sit, where to prop your knees, and she keeps telling you to “smile” or say “puppies” and all manner of adults-talking-to-kids-they-don’t-know nonsense.

Intolerable.

You can bear it for a few minutes because you’re generally agreeable, and your parents seem really concerned about you doing what the other weirdo asks. But you’re three. There’s only so much you can stand. The ants start creeping in and you have no more patience for holding still. They’re still asking you to smile, but all you can do is bare your teeth like a wild animal. Meanwhile, your baby sister has long ago given up the fight and is intermittently squalling like a hamstrung sheep or swatting you about the face with spit-slick hands.

Somehow, you survive it, and you end up at home again. You’re allowed to put normal clothes on again and have something decent to eat. And what do you have to show for this? A handful of pictures of you, which makes not an ounce of goldfingered sense to you, seeing as the house is full of pictures of you anyway.

20151206_115803.jpg
You may have heard the expression about “herding cats.” It’s much more apt as “herding a 2- and 3-year old.”

 

Thanksgiving for Teachers: A Sample Itinerary

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Thing about teachers is, it’s hard to describe being one. I mean, in a vague way I guess people think they understand it — well, you babysit some students who are sort of vaguely jerkish, you write some lesson plans and quizzes, you grade some quizzes, assign some homework, take an hour-and-a-half lunch every day, and then you get three months off during the summer. Oh and THOSE WHO CAN’T DO, TEACH HAW HAW HAW. And that’s true, in the sense that it’s true that bees are face-stinging forces of evil. Sure, they are, but that leaves out the much more important truth that they power the agricultural engines of the entire freaking world.

Teachers are people. Flawed people. People whose work gets the better of them sometimes, just like anybody else, and people who look forward to their well-earned vacations with a gusto that borders on the psychopathic. Seriously — take a walk through any school building in the days leading up to a holiday. See if you can’t smell the desperation coming off them in waves, if you can’t see the frenetic ecstasy rimming their eyes.

But as much as we look forward to our time off, we always screw it up. (Or at least I do.) Here’s how this Thanksgiving went in my life as a teacher:

  1. Organize a series of quizzes and essays to grade over the break. You have a week off; that’s plenty of time to fit in an hour or so somewhere to do a bit of catch-up work.
  2. Stuff said papers in your “teacher bag” and carry it home.
  3. On the short drive home, allow yourself to drift away completely from even the abstract idea that you are a teacher.
  4. Bag o’ papers goes in the closet. Enjoy a nice adult beverage with dinner because it’s vacation, dammit.
  5. Spend next few days doing house things and totally not doing teacher things. Bag o’ papers collects lint in the closet.
  6. Organize for your trip out of town. Do not, even for a second, consider bringing Bag o’ papers with you.
  7. Turkey and stuffing and travel whirlwind for a few days.
  8. Arrive home and decompress from seven hours in the car with kids who do not want to be in the car for seven hours. Bag o’ papers is still in the closet, lurking like bad leftover green bean casserole. Nobody is interested in either.
  9. Plan to hang Christmas decorations. Find that on your earlier trip to Home Depot, you got the wrong size staples for your staple gun. Go to Home Depot again. Get wrong size staples again. Give up and watch college football. (LOL what bag o’ papers?)
  10. Last day of the break. Plan to hang Christmas decorations. Watch Inside Out with the kids instead. Remember that you’re a teacher and you have to go back to teaching tomorrow. Write a blog post about the things you did instead of grading papers over the break. Think about taking some time to grade papers today (there’s still time) and remember that the Falcons play at 1 PM. That means: morning for decorating, football in the afternoon, and by evening it’s time for the usual Sunday evening routine of dinner, bedtime, and sobbing over the lost weekend while sacrificing a goat in hopes of buying more time before you go back to work.
  11. Wonder how in the hell nine days passed so fast. Drink wine until you no longer care.
  12. Monday morning. Retrieve ungraded bag o’ papers from closet. Go to work in a panic. Resume regular teacherly duties.

I’m assuming it’s pretty much the same for all teachers.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Stuff of Substance

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I was going to write about the stuff-focused holidays we have here in the States (Christmas of course, Thanksgiving with its frankly embarrassing piles of food, and Black Friday, a de facto holiday with a surprisingly adversarial focus on buying as much stuff as you can’t afford) with this week’s prompt, but the moment I started kicking it around, I realized that even I couldn’t take any more of my bitching about holidays and special events… between my tirade about NaNoWriMo, my grumbling about Daylight Savings Time, and my sermonizing about the war on Christmas, I’ve sure been slinging the negativity lately.

That said, the picture is unrelated.

Today, a positive bent, a return to what I like to use SoCS for: to ruminate on writing.

I’m giving myself a break from Big Writing Projects lately — through the Christmas season, really, by the time all is said and done — and as a diversion, and to keep the grooves nicely greased, I’m working on some short fiction instead. You haven’t seen it around the blarg. It’s a SECRET.

Or rather, it’s in progress, which for writers means it may as well be as secret as the Coca Cola formula — we don’t like people sticking their fingers in our pies until we’re good and ready to have our pies finger-stuck.

Anyway, I went and enrolled in a free short fiction writing workshop hosted over at Holly D. Lisle’s site at How to Think Sideways. She lays out a three-step (with multiple embedded sub-steps, but y’know, that’s not as flashy as saying “3-step”) template to writing flash fiction that doesn’t suck. And what I quickly realized is that a lot of my stories kind of suck. Like, most of them have decent ideas at their cores, but they lack any sort of follow-through or intelligible raison d’etre. (I don’t actually know what that means, but I heard it before and it sounded fancy.) In short, stuff happened, but lacking were the reasons for said stuff happening, or an appreciable understanding of the consequences for the stuff happening.

And with the five stories I’m workshopping, there is a real focus on meaning and significance through brevity. It’s been eye-opening, like that air freshener commercial where they blindfold people in squalid rooms, wave air fresheners under their noses, then remove the blindfolds so they see the cloud of actual sharknado they’d been inhaling.

Anyway, I’m not going to detail the … well, details of the course. They’d be tiresome if you’re not interested, and if you are interested, it’s worth your time to roll over to Holly’s site and sign up for the course yourself. Suffice it to say that while this has been some much-needed down time from my big projects, I’ve not been idle, and that feels nice. Momentum matters and all that.

Which is, I guess, the point of the post this week: writing is something you can only ever get better at by sitting down and practicing at it. And a tremendous obstacle for many would-bes is the simple but enormous leap of faith that it takes to even start screwing up a perfectly good blank page with your awful, stupid words. There’s something to be said, then, for the virtue of just sitting down and banging out words week after week. But there comes a point where you feel safe enough in the habit, and you want to actually start refining your craft. I think, a year and a half into this adventure, I’ve more than established the writing consistently part, and it’s time to start worrying more about writing stronger, smarter, sharper stories. Stories where the stuff that happens is stuff that people will care about.

Stuff of substance.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.