Tag: funny

What’s Your Weird? (Or: Coffee Snobs, I Hate You)

Pavowski2 Comments

We all want our stuff a certain way.

Well, let me back up.

We all want certain things a certain way.

For example, somehow, some way, I’ve come up against this thing several times in the past few months:

This is a Chemex, and if you haven’t heard about it, BOY OH BOY it’s time to buckle up. A Chemex is a coffee pot. But it’s not your ordinary coffee pot. Well, yeah, it’s an ordinary coffee pot, but it also has MAGICAL POWERS. The power to transform an otherwise ordinary human being into an absolutely insufferable coffee snob. The power to infuse said human’s vocabulary with nonsensical coffee jargon like “brewology.” The ability to cause friends and acquaintances of that person to, in tiny, almost unnoticeable ways, hate that person.

There are videos dedicated to the Chemex and how to best use it. There are detailed, multi-step guides with entire nested webpages devoted to it. In particular, one of my favorite authors of late and one of my favorite youtube channels have both written and explained in great and grating detail how much they love their Chemex.

The secret behind it (apparently, if you buy into all that neo-hippie coffee-infatuada nonsense) is: you like coffee, sure, but you’re not getting the most out of your coffee.

With that, you fall down the rabbit hole. You buy the thing. You have to get the right filters to go with the thing, filters made from recycled thousand-year-old rainforest wood. You have to get the right coffee beans for your particular demographic and unique taste. You have to hand grind the beans using stones purified in the bowels of goats. You have to boil your water in a kettle, preferably one consecrated by an aged, castrated bishop. The boiling must be done using a hand-torch crafted by the elders of unnamed tribes in the heart of Africa. The steam must not be allowed to escape; you must inhale every molecule to open up your nose for the taste explosion that’s about to happen.

And I hear about this, and I ponder on my life and the choices I’ve made, and I find myself starting to think, well, hot holy hell, maybe I should get one — I AM missing out on this vital part of the coffee experience. Except I don’t drink coffee. And I really find all this gobbledygook about filters and glass and grinding and inhaling to be utter nonsense. Not only nonsense, but wasteful and snobbish nonsense, the worst kind. If you want a cup of coffee, just make a cup of coffee and get on with your life — why do you need to devote twenty minutes of your morning to it?

So I prepare to make a scathing diatribe about exactly how foolish it is. An all-out attack, not just on users of this product, but on anybody who gets at all uptight about their coffee. IT’S JUST BEANS.

But when I pull back to let this stone fly, I pause, because I catch my own reflection in the walls of this glass house I live in.

Sure, I couldn’t give two randy Sharknados about coffee, but you’d better believe I’ve got my own series of oddities.

I could go on and on and on about the “right” running shoes and the “right” way to run. How your shoe needs to provide protection from the ground but not insulate your foot from feeling the bumps in the road. How you need to adjust your footstrike (and there I go using nonsensical jargon) to properly engage the musculature of the leg and the back. How the average runner should aim to run on trails from time to time rather than pounding pavement all the time because of the instability the body has to deal with.

I could ramble for ages about my writing process. The right music to help empty and focus my mind, the right programs to capture the draft and insulate myself from distractions. When writing longhand, I much, much, much prefer pencil to pen; the faint skritch of graphite on paper is soothing beyond words. Preferably, it’s a .7 gauge mechanical pencil: smaller and the lead breaks too easily, larger and I feel like I’m writing with a freaking crayon. But if it must be pen, then it’s got to be a Pilot g2. The ink slides out like a seal slathered in syrup, and there’s a crease in the grip that settles right into the grooves in my index finger, and let’s just leave it there before it starts getting uncomfortable in here.

Or shaving. I’ve become one of these guys about shaving recently (though not as bad as some); I use soap or cream from a tub, lather with a brush, shave with an old-school double-edged blade (1000 blades for $10, how could this not be for me?!?!).

For that matter, here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive, by-no-means-in-order-of-importance list of things I feel unnecessarily strongly about, that I have to have just so:

  • The angle at which papers should be stapled (Diagonal, about thirty degrees from horizontal)
  • The consistency of scrambled eggs (still moist but not runny)
  • The position of my hands on a steering wheel (either one resting on top while the other holds at about eight o’clock, or at 10:30 and 1:30)
  • The delay between when a traffic light changes and when I have a right to honk at you for not noticing the light has changed (three seconds; less is draconian, more and … well, we have places to be, don’t we?)
  • Shoes in general (the flatter the better, and I could very well give up on dress shoes altogether tomorrow and feel not a bit upset about it; in fact, I could almost give up on shoes as a whole altogether)

The amount of thought and mental distress I’ve experienced over these things is probably much more than I feel comfortable discussing, but suffice it to say, I have realized that humans, as a rule, are a weird bunch.

We gravitate toward others who are weird like us.

We are repelled, or at least puzzled, by others whose weird we don’t understand.

Point is, you can take your gross weird coffee snobbery and your gross weird birdwatching and your gross weird homemade macaroni replicas of famous renaissance monarchs and stay the hell away from me. Go over there. In the corner. Where it’s dark. And weird.

Of course, you can have all you like of my awesome, cool, somewhat-nerdy-but-ultimately-enviable weird.

But I’ll ask, just because I’m curious.

What’s your weird?

Day Care Damage Report

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For the third time now, we’ve had to sign a form acknowledging that one of our kids was damaged in day care.

First, it was a tumble on the playground. Okay, that happens. It’s a rare day that your kid doesn’t come out of a visit to the playground with a shiner or a scrape.

Then, it was a bite to the cheek. Look, kids bite. Literally and figuratively. Especially little ones. I’ve had more than a few chomps taken out of my own shoulder in my time. My wife’s nipples have been chewed on like a Rottweiler’s rope knot. Little kids are gonna bite each other.

Now, the kids in Sprout the first’s class were doing some activity (and bear in mind, of course, that something as simple as washing your hands or singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” qualifies as an activity) and, while getting up from the mat, they got tangled up and my kid got kicked. IN THE FACE. Sure, it was an accident. Sure, he’s only got a tiny little red mark on the thumb of his jaw.

But dude. DUDE. He got kicked in the face.

It’s a different world, putting the kids in day care. Time was when I was the only one getting face-kicked or stomach-bit or junk-stomped by lunatic rugrats hopped up on applesauce and 2% milk from a carton. Now, they’re getting a taste of their own medicine, and rather than them freaking out about it, it’s me.

Because kids are made of rubber. Anything short of a compound fracture or blood-spilling mouth or head wound, and they bounce back within minutes if not seconds. Sprout couldn’t even tell me how he got hurt; his teacher had to tell me. A few hours later, he didn’t even know what I was talking about when I asked him if his face hurt. The hits keep on coming, and they bounce off like golf balls in tile bathrooms.

My wife and I are another story. We’re trying hard not to be the over-protective mama grizzly and papa… what’s the male equivalent? Anyway… we’re trying, but when you have to sign paperwork three times in the space of a week and a half acknowledging the dings and dents your brood have picked up in the care of (conceivably) qualified adults, you really start to wonder just what the hell is going on in these places.

Look, I know. Every three-year-old is a Tasmanian devil on a Starbucks triple espresso coffee bucket, and every newly-learned-to-walk one-year-old is a terrified jackrabbit bouncing full-bolt off the walls and furniture. It’s next to impossible to watch them every minute, even between my wife and me when it’s just our own two kids in our own house. So what can I expect from a couple of people charged with watching a dozen of the rugrats for eight or nine hours every day? Of course they’re going to come away with some scratches, with a bit of paint on the fenders.

We’re trying to focus on the positives. Certainly, there are positives. The kids are learning to get along with (and follow directions from) adults who are not my wife and myself — a necessary life skill. They’re learning to play with other kids, to share, to take turns. These are things it’s hard to learn in your own house when it’s just you and your sibling. They’re learning that mommy and daddy go to work during the day and that this is how life works. And it’s hard to put a price tag on that stuff.

As with all things, there is good and bad in this.

There is suffering, and there is growth.

I just wasn’t expecting quite so much paperwork.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: We Are Not Enthused

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I’m a teacher, as I believe I may have mentioned before, and it’s back-to-school week in Atlanta. Which means, from one perspective, a brand new crop of impressionable young minds, ripe and ready for me to rain upon them a bounty of knowledge that will allow them to flourish and grow into the pillars of tomorrow’s society. From another perspective, it’s another motley crew of jaded, disinterested teenagers, just marking time in my class until they can graduate from high school, go out into the world, and infect society with their brand of poisonous, dull humor, ridiculous taste in music, and skewed views of entitlement and overconfidence in their abilities.

Either way, they’re in my class, and we’ve got several months of together time ahead, which means it’s time to be on my toes. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from five years teaching (wow, has it been that long?) it’s that if you want them to care about the material at all — outside of those rainbow-encircled few who have Ivy League dreams and would probably flay and flambe an elf at Christmas if I promised them an A — you have to find a way to make them care about the material. If they aren’t having at least a little bit of fun, then, well, neither will the teacher.

Which is a good reminder of the relationship between author and reader, actually. Because unlike my captive audience in the classroom, whose attendance I can count on if not their attention, the author has no hold at all over the reader. The vast majority of my students aren’t gonna walk out of the room if I fail to entertain them — they might check out, but they’ll suffer through, because they need my course to graduate. But a reader is a different animal. Not only does a reader not need my course to graduate, but a reader can choose from any of the myriad other teachers out there and take their class instead.

So a writer has a tougher job than a teacher, because a writer can’t really have an off day. If I lose focus or just don’t have energy one day or come in wearing a bad mood like an oversized, angry “fargo the police” shirt, I can put on a movie or give them a crossword puzzle or any number of distracting activities to give myself a break. The writer, on the other hand, who brings sub-par writing to the table, who leaves in his story those things that are boring, or nonsensical, or that just don’t move the story, loses his audience immediately.

And how does one keep an audience enthused? Well, I think a first step is to stay enthused oneself.

The middle of my current WIP has been sodding boring. It’s trudged along with its narrative feet in treacly mud, losing its boots and its socks and its gumption in the muck. Partially, that’s because I have been trying to figure out where the story wants to go next, and partially, it’s because after an actiony bit at the beginning, the narrative (I felt) needed a bit of time to breathe and relax before gearing up for more actiony bits toward the end. And that may be true — there may be a need to take the foot off the gas here and there — but perhaps most telling of all is the fact that while writing it, beyond the first 25,000 words or so, I haven’t been having much fun.

And if I, the guy writing and inventing the story, am not having any fun, how can I expect a reader to have any fun?

So I took that thought and poured it into a syringe the size of a blood sausage, and I injected it straight into the heart of my story. I axed a major character who was a ball-and-chain on the leg of the story, had the schemer stop scheming and start doing, and threw in a sneak attack from the villain who had been lying dormant for far too long. The result? The story lifted itself out of the water like a speedboat zipping along at full throttle. The writing became less like performing invasive dentistry on an angry shark and more like trying to keep your laptop bag dry in the rain (hey, writing is never easy, it’s only varying degrees of wish-I’d-never-started mixed with have-to-get-this-story-out-before-my-brain-explodes). And, big shocker here, but I was suddenly having fun with the story the way I haven’t since those first 25,000 words.

In other words, I was enthused, and I think and hope that a reader reading will be enthused at this point in the tale.

Now, first drafts are pretty much universally sharknado. Getting it right the first time is neither expected nor necessary. You can always fix it in post, and you can keep it in post for as long as you need to. But when you’re fixing up a first draft in the editing stage, it’s a lot easier to shape it into a sleek, aerodynamic sports car if it at least looks something like a car to begin with. That task is a lot harder if the first draft is an elephant braying as the tar pit sucks it slowly down.

So, when writing, have fun. Stay enthused. Or else you can’t be mad at readers for giving up on you.

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.

Toddler Life, Chapter 121: Mornings Mean Nothing

Pavowski10 Comments

A toddler’s life is nothing but phases. A biting phase. A throwing things phase. A take-your-pants-off-and-ride-the-cats-around-the-house phase. Some phases are over in a few days, others drag out for weeks. But rest assured, if the little ones are waist-high or lower, they’re in a phase.

The newest phase is one that needs to be over immediately if not sooner, though I fear it’s one of those marked end date indeterminate. This is the morning means nothing phase, AKA the sprout is his own alarm clock phase, AKA abandon all sleep ye who enter here phase.

Parental sleep deprivation is no joke. To be honest, my wife and I have been somewhat lucky in this department. Big brother started sleeping through the night around 6 months, and little sis at about 8. They still have their moments — the cutting of teeth in an infant is enough to make grown daddies and mommies cry — but for the most part they sleep okay. This is in sharp contrast to a co-worker of mine who wakes up eight or nine times PER NIGHT with her rugrat. Look, it may be a tiny human, and it may need your utmost care and attention, but eight or nine wakeups per night is not really even in the range of the Geneva conventions. You could break Navy SEALS with that kind of treatment.

But the morning means nothing phase is a new animal. Because with your run-of-the-mill midnight baby wakeup call, you get to go back to sleep. It may be fitful sleep, and it may take you a while, but you get to drop off again. In the morning means nothing phase, your only hope is to go to sleep as soon as possible after the child goes down, because the kid is going to wake up, for good and with no hope of going back to sleep, whenever he damn well feels like it. 5 AM? Bet on it. 4? The sprout laughs at 4.  3:30? Challenge accepted.

It’s bad enough that we’re coming out of our summer coma, still drunk on the heady fumes that sleeping until 6:30 brings. School schedule has us waking up by 5:30 on a regular day, so those last few minutes of sleep are critical. But the sprout cares not for those crucial final minutes.

File:Trento-Mercatino dei Gaudenti-alarm clocks.jpg© Matteo Ianeselli / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons

The devil on his shoulder nudges him awake at eye-twitch o’clock, and he crashes around his room for a while. (With big brother, there is no such thing as quiet play.) He builds and knocks over towers of blocks. He topples toddler chairs. He hurls stuffed animals about like a twister in a trailer park. Then he’s out into the hallway, where he turns on every light along the way, because he’s terrified of the dark like a vampire flees from the light. Then, because he can only be unsupervised for so long without somebody telling him NOT to do whatever he’s doing before his tiny brain melts down, he comes knocking on our door.

But not so much knocking as tentatively peeking his head inside, like a cat burglar working up his nerve. Let me not omit the fact that he can’t properly open a door yet, so he rattles the knob for a good ten seconds first. He ducks in, then ducks out, then ducks in, and ducks out again, then:

“Daddy?”

We try to ignore him, because that’s sure to work. When it comes to picking up hints, he’s about as sensitive as an elbow wrapped in a steel sleeve. He tries again.

“Mommy? Daddy? I’m ready to be awake.”

I slide one eye open, the lid fluttering like a garage door off its track. The clock reads 3:45. “Buddy, go back to sleep.”

The whining begins. He’s saying words, but I can’t hear them, because the pitch, pace and warble of his tiny voice has short-circuited every brain function outside of the purely survival-oriented lobes. I gruffly snarl at him to just get into bed with us.

I know as I say it that this is the wrong move, because the three-year-old does not make for a pleasant bedmate. He doesn’t so much toss and turn as thrash and burn, rolling over and over like a Tasmanian devil off its axis, beating his head against the pillow and kicking viciously at my kidneys.

Somehow I endure this for an entire fifteen minutes, pretending that I will be able to get back to sleep with the munchkin drumming out Chopsticks on my spine. Then my wife, who was sleeping on the opposite side of the boy and I (me in between them), has had enough and yanks him over to her side of the bed. His bag of tricks continues and we both sit there, steaming in our inability to even catch a whiff of further sleep. But it’s thirty minutes before the alarm goes off, and we are NOT getting up yet.

Ten minutes more is all I can stand, so out into the hall we stumble, him bounding along with infuriating energy, me stubbing my drowsy toes on every toy he strewed across the carpet. Along the way, he bumps a baby toy that begins chirping out a truly lunatic calliope version of the Wheels on the Bus at a volume which, to be conservative, is fargoing ridiculous. Meanwhile, our dumbest cat has launched himself at the dumb, sleep-addled dog — three times his size — and wrapped it in a clawed kitty headlock, and the two tussle, stumble and crash into the baby’s door.

So now the baby’s awake, too.

I trudge into her room and pull her out of the crib — she reeks of poop, because why wouldn’t she — haul her downstairs with big brother squawking like a tone-deaf crow about how he wants cupcakes, he wants to watch Grover, he wants to go to the playground later, he wants chocolate milk. All I want to do is get her changed and put on some cartoons so that I can lie down on the couch and at least close my eyes for five minutes before my actual alarm goes off.

This is the second day in four days that he’s done this.

The morning means nothing. Clocks are obsolete. The day starts when the sprout wakes up, and woe betide any foolish enough to suppose otherwise.

Do You Wanna Go To Target? (A Frozen Tribute)

Pavowski4 Comments

If you love Frozen, like my wife and I do — and you love Target, like my wife and I do — then this is for you.

Inspired by randomly changing the lyrics to every song our kids like — because how else can you make it through listening to them 100+ times over the course of a few weeks?

To the tune of Do You Wanna Build a Snowman.

Do You Wanna Go To Target?

Do you wanna go to Target?

Come on, I just got paid

You never take me anymore

but I get off at four: Today could be the day!

Their clothes are all on clearance

and their movies, too

It’s all fifty percent off!

Do you wanna go to Target?

Come on, we’ll put it on the red card.

I just paid it off.

#

I’m so happy we’re at Target

did you see the dollar aisle?

I’ll get an Icee and a popcorn too

And I’ll get some for you, cause we’ll be here a while

I’ve gotta get some dish soap, and some undies too

Then stop by the pharmacy

Hey, go find a price on gym socks

I’m gonna go and find a bike lock

#

Shopping interlude

#

Honey, hey, I’m at the checkout

and I’m just wondering where you are

I saw you checking out that camping gear, but

I kinda need you here: my wallet’s in the car

I’ve spent a hundred dollars, but that’s just my stuff

We still have to ring up yours

I think we emptied out the checking

but I’m so glad we went to Target

#

#

Yeah, I maybe spent waaaay too much time on this.