Tag: funny

Rookie Move (or, why writers should keep pens and paper handy all the time, even when it’s impractical to do so)

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One of the sort of take-it-for-granted bits of writing advice I once heard was, “make sure you’re always able to write something down.”  It makes sense.  If you believe in inspiration as I do (for the most part) then you know that it can strike you at any moment, without the slightest provocation, and that it can depart again with as little warning as it gave you when it arrived.  This is why, in my work bag, I keep a composition book and two pens at all times, no matter where I’m going or for how long.  It’s why I keep a stack of note cards binder-clipped in my back pocket and a pencil on my ear just about everywhere I go.  It’s why I keep a pocketknife ready to carve strips of flesh from my arm in the semblance of words I can later affix to a page, though I’m happy to announce I’ve not yet been reduced to that particular method of transcription yet.

Still, ideas sometimes slip through.  Occasionally I’ll have a brilliant idea strike my cerebellum only to bounce off like so many hailstones on the pavement.  Or, more often, something will seem earth-shatteringly clever to me as the thought strikes, but then when I try to articulate it, I realize it’s so foolish it doesn’t bear further thought.  Then there are the days when the fountain seems to dry up entirely and no amount of coaxing, cajoling, pondering or preening will make the ideas come forth.  It’s a crap shoot, in other words, whether the good ideas will get through or not, which is why it’s doubly important to always have the net ready to catch them before they crater in the vast depths of the ideas I will never write.

Let me back up.

The wife and kids and some extended family and I were all on vacation in a fairly swanky condo in Florida over the weekend.  I mentioned it last time, and then in a dutiful showing of a man on vacation, I didn’t write again until today.  Anyway, I had to come back for work, but my wife and kids stayed on and are staying on for a few more days of sun and surf (NOT THAT I’M JEALOUS OR ANYTHING), which means I’m at home by myself for a few days.  No kids.  No wife.  No distractions.  Perfect conditions to get some writing done.  And I did, and I plan to, and night one was brilliant and night two is shaping up just fine so far.

But at night the monsters come out.

Routine is a powerful thing, and when your routine is shattered, it tends to snowball out of control, like a tiny crack in your windshield spiderwebbing like a mutant octopus every time you hit a bump in the pavement.  With no kids, there is no bedtime.  With no wife, there is no meditative glass of wine before the bedtime I don’t have.  I found myself in bed at the appropriate time last night but unable to get to sleep for lack of the vague comforts that knowing your children are asleep in the next room can bring.  No warm backside to press my cold, bony toes into.  The actual night part of last night was, in short, all wrong.  In addition to staying awake for an hour and a half before sleep took me, I woke up of my own volition several times in the night: something I never do (if only because the kids will make noise and wake me up before I ever have the chance to wake myself).  But something else happened unexpectedly in the night: inspiration struck.

It struck with the illumination and voltage of a 1.21 gigawatt lightning strike direct to my cortex, and unfortunately departed just as quickly.  Because for all my various preparations and eventualities for capturing the most fleeting of writerly ideas during my waking hours, I’ve somehow never had the good sense to stash pen and paper next to the bed.  I just don’t get great ideas at night (or if I have, I’ve forgotten them).  But inspiration struck hard and fast enough to wake me and make me think, “gosh golly, I should really write that down,” which lasted me roughly until I remembered that I didn’t have pen and paper at bedside, and I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those writers who is going to huddle over and mash my latest screenplay snippet into my phone with my mutant monkey thumbs.  I’m just not.  No, the inspiration struck, and I realized I had no way to write it down, and I assured myself that this idea was so good, so inescapably awesome, that I would surely remember it in the morning.

So here I am, grasping at the straws that may once have stuffed its scarecrow, but which more likely were the bed for some flea-bitten ox with a penchant for pooping literal poop rather than the brilliant story ideas I might prefer it to poop.  I know it involved either Sherlock Holmes or some Holmesian character.  I’m pretty sure there was genetic modification involved.  There may have been a jetpack.  Also a rhinoceros on a train.  But it’s all one big useless jumble.  No more good to me than the vague idea that I really should have gotten up early and gone for a run today.

Lesson learned.  Paper is going on the bedside table tonight, where it will probably lie untouched until, months from now, I wonder what the hell I put paper on the bedside table for, and move it back downstairs where it belongs.

Jury Doody

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It’s not that I mind getting the summons for jury duty.  This is something we must all face sooner or later.  No, what bothers me — and I’m going to go on a limb and say it bothers me not even as English teacher, but as a human — is that on this letter, which goes out to literally thousands of people in the community monthly, is a typo so obvious and egregious that I think my high school students could spot it.

Using “who’s” when you meant to use “whose”?  Scrub city.  For that matter…

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It may be hard to read in this picture, but that sentence positively makes my brain boil.  If you can’t read it there, it reads:

I hereby affirm that I am a: a full-time student at a college, university, vocational school, or other postsecondary school who, during the period of time the student is enrolled and taking classes or exams.

Is it a subject/verb agreement error?  A misplaced modifier?  This one, I think, falls into the category of scratch the whole thing and try again.  Is it too much to ask that if I’m going to be summoned to do my civic duty — which I am happy to do! — that the means of the summons at least make sense in the language we will presumably use for the service?

 

Toddler Life, Chapter 117 – Parenting Win

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Parenting is a zero-sum game, most of the time.  I mean, it’s an upward trend, but that trend is only measurable if you zoom in real close and look at it over a scale of several months.  On the day-to-day stuff, you’re lucky to break even.  To be more specific:

One day you’re up because the kid takes his first step.  Next day you’re down because he blows out a diaper and floods his bed with liquid poop.  One day you’re up because the kid says “bye, daddy, I love you”, and the next day you’re down because you’re trying to put the kid to bed and he says “I don’t want daddy, want mommy to read.”  One day you’re up because you manage to put the infant to bed by yourself without the help of her mom for the first time literally ever, and then three hours later you’re down again because you’re up (awake) with the infant screaming because you screwed up putting her to bed.

Point is, parenting is hard work: thankless and grueling and pushing you to the limits of your sanity and patience just about every day, and somehow — somehow — you learn to temper the good with the bad.  You learn to rein in your elation at a breakthrough because you know the monsters will cut you off at the knees when you least expect it.  You learn never to sink into the depths of despair because the little blessings will be lighting up your life again with some adorable bit of cuteness or some flash of brilliance you could never anticipate.  In other words, you become very, very adept at taking what you can get when the good stuff rolls along.  You become an optimist out of necessity.  The alternative is too horrible to ponder.

So you chart your victories and you squeeze all the enjoyment out of them because you know that that joy can be snatched away from you at any moment.  The big stuff, you don’t have to worry about.  The light goes on for the kid and suddenly he wants to use the potty fifteen times in an hour — you don’t have to milk that victory, that one’s going to burn bright for a while.  He suddenly makes the connection that you’re not leaving forever when you leave for work and begins happily waving good-bye in the morning and giving you big squeezing bear hugs when you return… that’s not going anywhere.  No, to stay ahead of the curve of frustration because he still wants to grab the dog and yank its fur out, or because he still wants to stack a roomful of toys on top of the sleeping cat, or because he still wants to wake up at 5 AM for some goldfingered reason despite the fact that he gets frustrated that there’s nothing to do at that hour, you have to grab hold of the little victories and suck them dry like a wanderer in the desert sucking the sweat out of his headband.

There are little victories everywhere, if you know where to look for them.  But the ones worth the most points are the ones disguised as failures.  Case in point: Sprout #1 loves the movie Cars.  Loves it so much it’s wrong.  He’ll watch it twice in a day if we’re not careful.  As a result, he’s memorized bits and pieces of it, and he peppers his primeval dialogue with it, sometimes in an appropriate way, sometimes not so much.  There’s one line that he loves toward the beginning of the film:  “Lightning’s not going into the pits!” which basically never makes sense outside of the context of the movie, and which I only grasp at vaguely even during the film.  That one, then, is essentially harmless.  Then, toward the middle of the film, Lightning, voiced by Owen Wilson, is driving on a dirt road, trying to absorb a bit of driving wisdom from another talking car (what else would cars talk about, anyway?), when he realizes that the advice he’s received makes no sense, and he discounts it at once with a brilliantly-inflected “What an idiot!” which the sprout can recreate perfectly, right down to the intonation and the roll of the eyes.

So we’re driving.  And it’s Sunday in Greater Atlanta, which to be brief means that the rules of the road are out the window and the only thing you can count on other drivers to do is anything they’re not meant to do (U-turns in the middle of a road, suddenly slipping into reverse at a stop light, stopping on a green light and putting a blinker on to try to cross three lanes of traffic to make the right turn they didn’t realize was coming up, burning the tires out to zoom past you in the turn lane while you’re stopped at a red light) and the tension is mounting in the car and in a moment of great frustration, I finally let fly with an epithet.  Now, because I know the sponge is in the backseat soaking up everything I say, I quickly start babbling a lot of nonsense in the hopes that the floodwater of extra information will wash away the profanity like a rushing river.  But the boy cuts me off, shouting, a la Owen Wilson, “What an idiot!”

And it’s brilliant and funny and appropriate and all of those things but my wife and I share a mortified look because as brilliant and funny and appropriate as it is, we know that if he can let fly with it in the car, he can let fly with it when he gets to preschool, or he can let fly when he’s playing with some kid on the playground, and that’s a situation none of us want to deal with.  So we start to correct him, but then we realize that he’s certainly heard worse, and in fact just heard worse, and my wife whispers to me, “at least he didn’t say ‘fargoing idiot’.”  And in my mind, I think, or a goldfingered ratbastard, or a motherless piece of sharknado, or afargoing psychopath, or any of a number of other things I may or may not have said in his presence when I forget for an instant that the kid is there and the real world breaks through and you just have to swear.

I nod.  We shrug at each other.  It’s a little victory.  High-fives all around.  “He was an idiot, sprout.”  And life is good.

Then we get home and he pours apple juice on the dog.

Picture taken moments before he faceplants and tears his lip open, leaving him with a scar on his face for weeks.
Picture taken moments before he faceplants and tears his lip open, leaving him with a scar on his face for weeks.

That Time I Gave My Son an Enema

Pavowski4 Comments

Nope, never mind.  I can’t blarg about this.  It’s too gross even for me.  There’s nothing funny about violating the butthole of a two-year-old with a tiny plastic tube.

Okay, on second thought, maybe there is.  Just not perhaps the kind of funny you want.

But there’s definitely nothing funny about the boy walking around with a look on his face like he’s just been told that Popsicles are made out of horses as he squeezes off tiny little duck-quack farts with every step.

…Again, perhaps it’s not the right kind of funny.

Look, there was definitely a scene.  There were towels on the floor and a lot of screaming.  There was talk of breaking out the puppy housebreaking pads.  I can’t remember if it was the boy screaming or my wife or myself, but it was high-pitched and plaintive.  I was really concerned about the state of the tub at one point.  There may or may not have been comparisons to Georgia red clay and mud-hut bricks.

But it was too gross to write about, so this is me not writing about it.

Day two of editing is underway.  Like jumping into a freezing cold pool, it’s not so bad once you actually get in the water.  More to come later.

It’s hard to focus with all this poop I’m not writing about.

Quantum Entangled Toddlers

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There’s a positive feedback loop with staggering implications building in our house.

The kids sense each other.  They pretend to ignore each other, but they’re keenly aware of each other.  Like two quantum-entangled photons carving a helix around one another as they rocket through the cosmos, each sprout picking up the psychic vibrations that the other gives off.

In a lot of ways it’s cool.  Big brother will watch little sister, mimicking her faces and giving her little coos and pokes and kisses.  It’s adorable, really.  He’ll even, properly motivated, allow her to sit in his lap on the couch and snuggle with her like a mother wolf coiling around her cub.  And she, of course, is entranced and enchanted with the idea of another human in the house who’s within a foot of her size.  She watches him with the steely eyes of a hawk tracking a mouse through tall grass from hundreds of feet up, flailing her marshmallow arms and kicking her lizard-skin feet like she’s riding a tiny invisible bike.  It’s enough entertainment to watch for hours, if only it would last that long.

Phase 1 -- distract the adults by looking adorable and harmless.
Phase 1 — distract the adults by looking adorable and harmless.

But it doesn’t.  Not even close.

No, they can feed off one another’s positive energy only so far until one of them will shed an electron, causing the happiness in the system to shift out of phase and become unstable.  From instability it’s only a matter of time — and not much time, at that — until the entire system collapses and one of them starts crying.  Usually, it’s the infant.  Her clementine-sized brain just isn’t capable of holding on to an emotion for longer than a few minutes, and when she doesn’t know what to feel, that’s when the tears come.

Now, big brother can deal with her crying.  He can deal with her screaming.  It doesn’t upset him in any appreciable way.  What he has a problem with is not being the loudest thing in the room.  She’s bawling in terror and apprehension because she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t actually have her mother in her line of vision, and he’s howling gleefully in answer because he’s two and a half and making noise with his mouth is one of his favorite things.

Before you ask, mom and dad are sitting exhausted on the couch, because we, too, can endure the noise to a point.  There’s a threshold of upset noise from the kids below which it simply isn’t energy-effective to respond.  We can’t be hauling ourselves up to see to the sprouts’ every need every two or three minutes, we’d be crazy people.  (Just look at our parents — we are each the oldest of 4.  How they ever managed having four children in the house at one time and not getting carted off to the asylum is a feat which astounds me more every day I pass with our two bundles of joy.)

The noise builds.  If left unchecked, the binary star system will collapse entirely; the infant’s screams becoming more plaintive and actually reaching out to rattle the flesh of our adult eardrums, the toddler, feeding on her unrest, beginning to scream in earnest, upset perhaps because he hasn’t been stopped yet or because he’s afraid that if he stops making noise the Silence will descend forever.  Seriously, I think the boy is terrified of quiet.  If he’s not shouting or babbling or singing as he stomps, runs and crashes around the house, he’s smashing toys/cups/tiny-things-he-should-never-have-gotten-ahold-of into other toys/other cups/tabletops/daddy’s head.  They get louder and louder, the binary stars spiraling faster and more violently around one another until we scoop them up and take them into opposite rooms, thus saving the universe from obliteration and our inner ears from violent decompression.

And they wake each other up.

Sprout #1’s bedtime routine is so finicky, he launched into a bloodcurdling tirade the other night when I tried to bring the wrong blanket into the room.  I wasn’t even going to cover him with it.  It was for ME, and he would not abide its presence in the room.  After his four bedtime stories and four bedtime songs, we leave and he goes into the five stages of grief, coming to rest about eleven minutes later, usually, passed out like a raggedy drunk clutching a Winnie the Pooh plush figurine in his tiny hand instead of a 40.  Meanwhile, Sprout #2 goes to sleep across the hall.  Her routine is simpler if no less demanding — she merely has to suck at the fountain called Mommy for anywhere from seventeen to forty-seven minutes before she goes into a milk coma.

The next ten minutes are critical.  The walls in our house were, let’s say, not designed with kids in mind.  There is no aural insulation.  Every sound carries and the floors upstairs creak like the rusty hinge on the barn in an old horror movie.  Step wrong exiting Sprout #2’s room and Sprout #1 will hear it and start his five stages all over again, adding another stage — blind, frantic screaming — at the beginning of the chain.  This screaming fit will wake Sprout #2 and then the whole cycle must begin again.  Alternatively, if, say, Daddy, after putting his pajamas on upon leaving Sprout #1’s room, finds that he’s for example left his phone upstairs and goes to retrieve it, Sprout #1 is about 80% likely to hear Daddy creeping past his room for up to an hour after bedtime and here come the five stages again, except now it’s more like seven stages and they all sound like I’ve told him Santa Claus is not real and popsicles are actually made of vegetables.

Then, there’s the early morning.  Sprout #2 wakes up anytime from 5AM to 6AM needing more Mommy Fountain, and apparently Sprout #1 sleeps like a secret agent being pursued by the intelligentsia of five different countries, because he wakes up and flies into action at the drop of a hat: banging on the door, howling to be let out, babbling in terror of the scary bugs.  Of course after more than a few hours of sleep there is no consoling him back into dreamland, so 5AM is just when he gets up these days, which means 5AM is just when I get up these days, because there is no sleep for anybody while Mom is with the infant and the toddler is screaming to wake the dead.

Is it any wonder that my wife and I have never felt more exhausted in our lives?  She’s a stay-at-home mom these days, and I work at the school then come home, and we get a scant hour to ourselves after the kids sack out to look at each other and wearily lament the loss of the days when we could, I don’t know, function like actual human beings in a world where said human beings are not held hostage to the whims of tiny despots.

But we love our kids.  Really, we do.  They are miraculous and wondrous and inspiring and incredible and they bring to our lives joy beyond words.

 

Help.