Tag: funny

It’s Defective!

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My brain, that is.

The number of idiotic occurences piling up in my rearview is only getting bigger. It started about a month ago when I lost my editing notebook. I looked everywhere for it — at home, at work, in the cars, in the bedroom, under the sofa, in the freezer … you know, all the normal places where you might leave the single most important object in the writing of your novel outside of the novel file itself. For all intents and purposes, the thing had slipped from the earthly realm and vanished to join the lost left socks and misplaced ballpoint pens of the world.

But I’m a forgetful sort, so distressing as it was, losing the notebook wasn’t all that surprising.

Then, a trip to the grocery this weekend. We arrive home and unload the foodstuffs and all is well, until my wife goes looking for the mixed nuts. She doesn’t remember unloading them, I don’t remember unloading them. We scour the cupboards, the countertops, the pantry, the fridge; no dice. I go to check the car to see if maybe I overlooked them while unpacking the car. Negative. Finally, she finds them stuck on top of the fridge behind a bunch of half-empty boxes of cereal, because of course mixed nuts belong on top of the fridge where they can’t be seen–where else would they go?

Today, I go to get in the van to head home from work, and it stinks. The inside of the van smells like a dead raccoon moldering in a ditch. This is patently weird because by and large, we don’t eat in the van. The kids do, though, and on reflection I decide it’s possible the sprout spilled some milk and it’s going bad under the seats. On the hunt I go, only to discover, lying between the second and third row seats, a grocery bag with a four-pound pack of chicken. Two days in the sun, rotting away and befouling the plastic bag that’s thankfully still wrapped around it. Let’s not forget that this very chicken was sitting in the floor of the van the very night before, when I was out looking for mixed nuts, and I completely failed to notice it. Of course I don’t misplace a box of crackers which would be perfectly good after a few days in a hot car, or even a box of popsicles which might melt harmlessly in their wrappers; no, I mislay ten dollars worth of chicken which has to be thrown right out.

Well, today wasn’t done with me.

I found the notebook.

This would be a good thing if it didn’t make me feel so very painfully idiotic. It was on my desk at work. Right there, plainly sat on the desktop, albeit obscured under another, larger, notebook. For four weeks, it was right there, within arm’s reach. Were it a snake, as my dad likes to say, it would have bitten me dozens of times over. I’m happy to have it back, but … really? For all the digging through closets and rooting around file cabinets and dumping out of desk drawers, I couldn’t bother to displace one notebook on my desktop?

I’m starting to think it’s not just my aging brain, not just simple forgetfulness or absent-mindedness. I think my subconscious was actively trying to keep the thing hidden away from me all this time. How else could it hide for so long in virtually plain sight? Had I stayed locked in with the notes I was taking, would the narrative-shattering idea which struck me yesterday have ever lit in my brain? I think it far more likely I would have finished my first pass and rolled on with the rewrite without pausing to re-evaluate the work as a whole — something I was forced to do on account of having lost my notes from the beginning of the edit.

Or maybe, as I am wont to do, I’ve made entirely too much of a meaningless coincidence. Things don’t always have to mean things. Nah, it’s probably just my brain rotting away from the inside. I’ll be in the shower, looking for my keys.

Here, Hold This Pork Chop

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Some days, working in a school is everything you fear.

Other days, it is transcendent.

Here’s an actual thing which was actually said by an actual student. “Girl, hold this pork chop while I go over there and beat that girl’s ass.” She actually held out a fried pork chop to her friend, who took it for safekeeping, and proceeded to go over there and beat that girl’s ass. And the cafeteria wasn’t even serving pork chops that day.

A classic case of too crazy to be made up. Sometimes, being a teacher is awesome. Thank you, pork chop beat down girl, for bringing joy to my day.

An Organic Being

Pavowski5 Comments

Here’s a riddle. What combines the flu, flirting, horrible awkwardness, and a fantastic bargain?

If you said my day earlier this week (mine, not yours), you’d be right. Well, I guess to be fair, you might be right about yours, but you’d definitely be right about mine.

So, yeah, the drugstore isn’t the first place I think of when I think of picking up dates, but apparently that’s why I’m losing the game to this guy who, for lack of a better idea and because I have to call him something, I’ll call Dave. And the funny part about this story is that Dave’s not all that much unlike me. He’s socially awkward, a bit of a geek, and probably ultimately harmless. But all I know of Dave I learned from the other side of a partition in the vaccination administration booth at the back of a Walgreen’s, so it’s entirely possible I’ve misread him. If that’s the case, Dave, my bad, bro.

I’m standing in line waiting to get the flu vaccine (a thing I have to do since 1)I’m a teacher and 2) I have toddlers and infants living in my house) and I hear a technician (what do you call the person who gives you a shot at Walgreen’s? Not a nurse, certainly. Orderly? Clerk? Technician sounds best, so I’ll go with that) explaining to her patient (again, it’s the best word I can think of under the circumstance) that he’ll feel a pinch and then some pressure, and then it’ll be done.

Without batting an eye or hesitating at all, Dave responds, “yeah, I might pass out, so if you could just keep talking to me, that’d be great.” And the technician stutters and stammers a little bit, obviously somewhat taken aback. So Dave goes on. “Yeah, I kind of get grossed out if I think of myself as an organic being, so I really need to keep my mind off the needle.” And the tech says, “Oh, I see.”

“Oh, I see” is one of those phrases which almost never means in context what it literally says. “Oh, I see” is one of those things you say when a stamp collector explains to you the differences between his 1919 French Revival printing (or whatever) and 1921 New Orleans Renaissance iterations of the same stamp. It’s a thing you say when you accidentally wander into a room and everybody’s wearing masks and holding daggers and they point to the sign on the door that says “invite only”. “Oh, I see” really means, “god help me, how do I get away from this situation?”

And I bet that she would have actually gotten up and walked away had Dave not kept talking. He starts asking her if she likes beer, and then starts rattling on about this local brewery that makes a wicked (his word) ale this time of year, and she should really try it. Then she excuses herself, because y’know, she actually has a job to do, and Dave asks if he can just sit in the chair for another five minutes or so because he’s afraid he might pass out, and could she come check on him again before he leaves?

Look, I know that you can’t pick the moment when fate throws that special somebody into your path. And in some ways, I kinda admire Dave and his tenacity — the way he kept on trying not to let her walk away from him like some poor little broken robot just trying like hell to fulfill its programming. But, dammit, the fargoing Walgreen’s is not the place for romance, okay? It’s flu season. This poor woman is probably overworked and in contact with sick people for the better part of every day, she does not need you making a pass at her under the cover of your vaccination. Okay, Dave? Okay!?!

In my mind, Dave slipped her his phone number as he left, and she blushed a bit, and the whole encounter left her flattered and curious and maybe a little bit twitterpated and weak in the knees, and THAT is why she inexpertly jabbed the needle into my arm and kept me there impaled like an insect in an entomologist’s study for what felt like an eternity. Because I refuse to believe that she’s that bad at giving inoculations on the regular. She can’t be. There would be lawsuits.

In short, I really hope things worked out between Dave and the Walgreen’s Tech. Because if she fargoed up my arm for no good reason, that would be a shame, but if she did it for love, then I guess that’s okay.

Oh, I forgot the part about the fantastic bargain. My insurance covered the stabbing attack on my arm, so it was free of charge. (I know, kind of a let down, right?) No, actually, upon further reflection, the bargain is that I am now in possession of the phrase, “I get kind of grossed out when I think of myself as an organic being,” which I am totally working into my next novel somehow.

This post is part of SoCS. The prompt this week was one of the five words, “bat”, “bet”, “bit”, “bot”, and “but”. I’m pretty sure I snuck them all in here.

Double Space, I Hardly Knew Ye

Pavowski7 Comments

I’m always afraid I’m going to be found out.

I’m that guy in the movies who’s walking backward against the current and the only thing saving me from annihilation is that somehow the other berks in the matrix haven’t scented me out yet. I’m covered in zombie entrails walking amongst the walking dead, counting on the smell of dead things to keep me incognito. I’m the wolf covered in tufts of cotton, only invisible because the sheep haven’t bothered to look my way.

I’m making it up as I go in every facet of my life. As a husband? Yeah, I’m five years into that and have no idea what I’m doing. As a father? Don’t make me laugh. What parent really knows what he is doing? It’s my baseline goal to make sure the kid doesn’t grow up to be a mass-murderer, anything beyond that is gravy. As a teacher? Let’s just say I fear for the future. Even now, as I write this blarg post, I’m inescapably aware that in no way am I qualified to be writing the things I’m writing about, whether in my novel or here on this lonely corner of the web. I don’t know what I’m doing.

The only reason, as Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black, that I’m able to go on with my life is that most of the time, I do not know about it. There are probably better ways to write, but I am merrily unaware. Doubtless there are better parenting methods, but mine is working well enough for me so far. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. And I sure as sharknado thought I was doing a decent job as an English teacher.

The problem with living happily in ignorance is that sooner or later, somebody will point out the ways in which you never knew you were wrong, as evidenced by any nimrod who’s anti-vaccinations will be glad to tell you. Even now, this very instant, I am struggling with a bit of information I’ve just learned which is shaking up my very existence, fighting against the habits and automatic thinking which have been a part of me for over twenty years.

Seriously, how did I make it this far in my life not knowing that you only press space once after a period?

I’ve been typing with the double-spaced period for ages. AGES. I learned in my keyboarding class in middle school that a period gets two spaces behind it, and I’ve been typing that way ever since. Then today, it’s pointed out to me that two spaces after a period is nigh-archaic. I ask my wife who writes for a living, and in typical I-can’t-believe-I’m-married-to-this-idiot fashion, she says, “obviously. How did you not know that?” Somehow in twenty years I’ve missed the memo on this and nobody ever bothered to tell me.

Recently I heard a story about a guy who went into Home Depot to buy a new toilet and asked if, since he lived alone, he could just get a toilet without the seat. He lived by himself, no women in the house, so no need to put the seat down. Innocently, a worker asked him how he would be able to go #2, and the guy said, “what do you mean?” After a bit of embarrassing questioning, it came out that the guy had never sat on a toilet seat in his life, he always just squatted over the bowl. Certainly it never hurt anybody. He just never learned the right way and continued on, living his life in the complete wrong way until by mistake somebody set him straight.

So it is with me and the period. The humble period, of all things. Only the most common punctuation mark in the written language. Only the simple symbol of the end of a sentence, the building block of the paragraph, and therefore of all language itself. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to hit backspace, in this paragraph alone, to go back and erase one of the extra spaces I’m inserting as automatically as breathing.

The double space is a habit it’s going to take me months to unlearn. I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back, find my sixth-grade typing teacher, and punch her in the neck.

What’s next? Will I find out I’ve been spelling my own name wrong? Mispronouncing the simplest of words? Wearing my shoes on the wrong feet?

Parental Exhaustion

Pavowski11 Comments

When you’re a parent, the exhaustion creeps in by degrees.  You don’t even notice it.

I’m not talking about when the sprout is first born and you go from sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours a night to catching three hours at a stretch and being supremely thankful for it.  No, everybody knows parents of newborns don’t get any sleep.  I’m talking about a few months, if not years, later.  The tantrums, the waking up in the middle of the night, the stampeding around the house for hours on end, it’s just a part of life.  You don’t notice it.

Somehow, you find yourself subsisting on less and less sleep.  You get by on five or six hours and you think you’ve won the lottery.  The raccoon rings under your eyes look less like black circles and more like stylish pirate eyeliner (to your mind at least).  On the weekend, you sleep until six AM and it feels like the angels have delivered you to a downy bed of heaven feathers.  You’re still shambling through the day like a hamstrung zombie, but you feel almost normal.  This is your life, and it isn’t so bad.

What you don’t realize (because you’re too tired to realize anything that isn’t whacking you over the head with a pool noodle, despite the fact that you don’t own a pool to necessitate a noodle) is that that exhaustion is piling up like collectible whatzits in the closet, and there comes a point at which the exhaustion you’re sweeping under the rug is now seeping out through the edges like so much asbestos particulate.  And as much as you develop an ability to power through and function on minimal amounts of sleep, the time comes when the exhaustion can no longer be denied.  You find yourself resting your eyes at traffic lights, resting your entire body on the couch during the third episode in a row of Power Rangers, and dashing to bed at the hallowed hour of eight o’clock because you just can’t take it anymore.

The sprout’s bedtime routine has become a little bit more manageable in the past few months.  He’s gone from demanding three or four stories and two songs to just two bedtime stories and a bit of a cuddle, followed by five or ten minutes of me lying in his floor so that he doesn’t have to fall asleep by himself.  This is not a bad arrangement.  He gets the comfort of his big bad daddy being there in the room with him as he drifts off to sleep, and I get a few blessed minutes of quiet to recharge for the sprint to bedtime.

But tonight the exhaustion crept in by another degree.

I read a Dr. Seuss double-header, tucked him in, turned the lights off, and stretched out on the floor, and the next thing I knew my wife was poking me in the back in the dark.  In the space of about thirty seconds, I’d fallen into a deathlike, dreamless sleep and logged nearly a full hour of blissful naptime right there on the carpet.

I used to wonder how my dad could sleep anywhere in the house, at any time of the day, for any amount of time.  I think the picture is becoming a little bit clearer.

This post is part of SoCS.