Tag: humor

Things You Could Do Instead of Playing Pokemon Go:

Pavowski10 Comments

Literally anything.

Already a guy has admitted to crashing his car into a tree (and I mean totaling it) because he was playing while driving.

Police departments across the country (if not the world? International readers, help me out) have been issuing statements: exercise caution while playing. Do not trespass while playing. Do not play while driving. etc.

My Facebook feed (YES I STILL USE FACEBOOK DEAL WITH IT) is lousy with jokes and memes and “funny” pictures of Pokemon popping out of people’s pants.

And people I know personally have expressed anger — ANGER! — at being run out of graveyards late at night because they were playing the game.

The game might encourage people to get up off the couch. It might encourage them to get out and socialize. It might rekindle a long-lost love for a game that many people apparently enjoyed in their youth. (I never saw the appeal, but hey, it takes all kinds.)

But it also encourages loitering. It encourages wandering more or less blindly into unfamiliar places. It encourages walking around with your face glued to your phone screen — which is something we already do too much of.

It is TEARING COMMUNITIES APART.

This fad cannot run its course soon enough.

Now get off my lawn.

Tone-Deaf White People

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I’m not sure if I’m on high alert what with all the bad juju in the air, or if the stupid really is going around like a bad case of the clap, but today — TODAY ALONE — I bore firsthand witness to some serious stupidness on display from white people, particularly given the climate (can you call it the climate when it’s the past week we’re talking about?), or maybe just the weather, of the past week.

I’m talking specifically about the culture of rediscovered racial tension and unrest between civilians and police.

Look, it’s hard on white people. I don’t mean it’s hard on white people like it is on people who aren’t white. I mean we face our own series of challenges. Specifically, there are things we can’t understand and will have a hard time grasping just by dint of the fact that we’re white. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try, and it doesn’t mean we can’t stop and think about a thing before we slap our balls on the table and do the thing.

But the problem with people? Too many of us don’t think.

So, here are two balls-on-table moments that I witnessed TODAY.

#1:

Wife and I are out shopping at the Kroger. Early, no less — about 8 am. (This is the best time to shop, by the way. The aisles are largely empty, the employees are just beginning their shifts so they haven’t been filled to the brim with customers’ bullsharknado … it’s the best.) As we’re checking out, I look up.

And here comes this guy.

He’s older. Upper fifties, maybe early sixties. Overweight, but moving spryly, like an ex-NFL player or something. Cargo shorts. Hawaiian shirt. And a motherfargoing gun belt with a gun on each hip. One looks, I dunno, standard? I’m not a gun guy, but it looks like you expect a gun to look. The other gun is a straight-out-of-a-John-Wayne-cowboy-flick six-shooter pistol. He grabs a cart and scoots over toward the tomatoes. Guns just hanging off his hip.

I double take. Then triple take. I nudge my wife. Duck my head in the suburban cowboy’s direction. I ask the cashier: do you know that guy?

Oh yeah, she says, he comes in here all the time.

I blink. “Strapped up like that, though?”

She looks. Double takes. “No, can’t say I’ve ever seen him carrying any weapons.”

My wife and I share a look and beat it out of the store.

Look, I am sure this dude has all his permits in order. Maybe he’s retired military or police; I dunno. But here’s the thing: sure, you can have your guns. And I guess if you’ve got your open-carry business in order, that’s fine and swell. But you’re not flying TWO weapons — one of which is a bonafide antique — for self-defense. You’re flying two weapons, including the Wyatt Earp boomstick, to show out. Fly your 2nd Amendment flag. Let everybody know that you’re the dude who carries his guns to the grocery store.

And I couldn’t help but wonder two things:

Why do you need all that firepower on Sunday morning in the produce section? Are you planning on overthrowing a terrorist plot in the deli?

And what would have happened if he were NOT a white dude?

I mean, I blinked and stared a bit, but nobody else did, really. Just a white dude with his guns, NBD. But what if he were a black guy, or a Muslim wearing a head scarf? The cops would have have been on scene before he could squeeze an avocado.

Just a little bit of white privilege cruising toward the Frosted Flakes.

#2.

I was browsing facebook again (yeah, I know. What can I say, it’s summer) and I saw a post from a girl I went to high school with.

Turns out, she was out driving and went through a DUI checkpoint. Sped through it, actually. Got flagged over and screened for DUI. Which, okay, that happens, I guess. She gets put through the paces, but she’s one hundred percent sober, so of course she gets sent on her way with just a warning, despite the speeding.

Fine and dandy.

Here’s the tone-deaf part: she said that her nerves had her shaking, even though she was sober, and wrapped up with this: “He let me go without a ticket and thanked me for not driving drunk. Still processing the whole thing. I wonder what my rights were if I denied the test?”

She, a liberal. She, who, this very week, has posted her disgust over the needless killings that have spawned protests and outrage.

And all I could think was, you’ve got to be kidding. You entitled b-word.

How about THANKS FOR KEEPING MY STREETS SAFE, OFFICER.

How about THANKS FOR NOT SHOOTING ME DURING AN OTHERWISE ROUTINE TRAFFIC STOP.

How about THANK GOD I’M A WHITE FEMALE, HE LET ME OFF WITH JUST A WARNING.

How about maybe not posting something so horrifically tone-deaf complaining about a minor inconvenience in a week where, yet again, two black men were killed by police ON CAMERA. To say nothing of what may have happened off-camera.

You were inconvenienced for about ten minutes — because you were SPEEDING, by the way — and you are pondering your legal standing with the officer who had the audacity to delay you.

And even worse! The comments section was filled up with friends saying “glad you’re okay!” and “that sounds very scary!” …WHAT?  Glad you’re okay, as if she faced some harrowing experience that will haunt her for the rest of her days. That sounds scary, because anybody reading her story will think for any amount of time that she was in any amount of danger.

There were about a hundred things I wanted to say, that I didn’t, mostly due to not wanting to start a fight with somebody who’s been out of my life for almost twenty years now (and thank goodness, by the way, given this idiocy).

And also, my wife convinced me not to.

So I’ll just say it here.

Be glad you’re not black, or else you might have had real reason to be nervous at that traffic stop. Be glad you’re white, and can worry about your rights as you drive away from the encounter instead of being thankful you weren’t arrested or shot.

And more, along the same line, in all sorts of permutations and combinations.

We have to wake up.

Part of the reason race continues to be an issue in this country is because stupid white people don’t pause for a SECOND to think.

Think about the privilege we have.

Think about what life might be like for somebody who doesn’t share that privilege.

Think about what somebody without that privilege might think, seeing you doing the things that you do.

In short, start thinking about the bigger world, start thinking about more than what’s right in front of you, start thinking about what it might be to be somebody who isn’t you.

Better yet?

Just start thinking.

 

Your Kids Are Not My Kids

Pavowski2 Comments

The same thing happens everywhere we go.

Strange kids come running up to my wife and myself, imploring us to “watch me,” or “look what I can do,” or “check me out!” It happens everywhere. The playground. The neighborhood pool. The waiting room at the doctor’s office.

Your kids want US to watch them. Watch them climb up the slide backwards. Watch them do a crappy somersault. Look at this dumb toy with the detachable attachments. Watch them run around in circles and fall down. Basically, they want us to look at all the stupid kid stuff that they’re doing.

We’ve looked. We’ve examined this phenomenon. These kids don’t just go approaching adults willy-nilly. We’re not random targets. They seek us out. They find us. Like tiny heat-seeking missiles with grubby fingers and Cheetohs dust on their shirts, they abandon the swings and the slides to come get in our faces.

Swing, Playground, Children Playing, Park, Child, Play

Why us?

It certainly isn’t because we care. Well, I shouldn’t speak for my wife, but I certainly don’t care. I would be hard-pressed to care less about anything anybody’s kid does, anywhere, at any time. Hell, I can barely summon up enough Fargos to give when my own kids do something mediocre (oh, good job, you stacked some soda cans on top of each other! Oh, wow, look at that formless scribble you drew on the TV Guide! [just kidding, who even has TV Guides anymore] Wow, listen to that garbled nonsense that just poured out of your mouth!). The only reason I do care when my kids manage some dubious toddler achievement is because I’m biologically compelled to do so: some bizarre alchemy of genetics and instinct overrides my default response, transforming a gruff “leave me alone” into a half-hearted “aw, that’s great!”

But I have no such genetic hard-coding when it comes to your kid.

I don’t love him. I don’t hope for her well-being (outside of a general, future-of-the-species vaguery). And I double definitely don’t give a sharknado about your kid and the fact that he can spin around in a circle until he falls down, or that she can almost but not quite balance on one foot for two seconds. I just don’t. And the only reason I won’t tell your kid exactly that is because society frowns on shouting at children, unless those kids are your own. Instead, I will summon up an even more (or would it be less?) half-hearted smile than the one I give my own kids, show them my teeth, and hope like hell inside my head that they just go away.

But they keep coming. They keep approaching me. Showing me dumb things that nobody cares about, seeking my attention when my own kids have already used up all of it.

Why are they seeking out my attention?

Because they don’t have yours. The only thing I can count on just as much as a strange kid coming up to beg me for a few seconds of attention is that while said kid is bugging me, I can cast my gaze across the playground/waiting room/pool pavilion and see that kid’s parent completely ignoring him. You got your kid to the playground, cut him loose on the slides, and buried yourself eyeballs-deep in Facebook or Twitter or whatever the cool kids are doing these days. You took your kid to the pool, slapped some floaties on her, and dove into a real deep discussion with your neighbor about your nails or your hair or the way that other part of the neighborhood is really going to sharknado. You got to the doctor’s office, and doctor’s offices are BORING, Goldfingerit, so you picked up an issue of Sports Illustrated from three years ago and became real interested in the Packers’ midseason woes.

Meanwhile, your kids are looking for somebody, anybody to pay them an ounce of attention. Just a wisp, a hint, an inkling on a summer breeze that somebody gives a damn about who they are and what they’re doing.

And why are they coming to ME for this vindication?

Because my wife and I pay attention to our kids in public. We have to. I mean, what’s the alternative? We follow them around at the playground — mostly to make sure they’re not running up to other kids’ parents and getting on their nerves. We get into the pool with them, partially because it’s fun, but mostly because they could slip an arm floatie or overturn their dumb float in half a second, and we want to make sure the kids don’t waterboard themselves. We keep an eye on them in the doctor’s office because that’s bloody GERM CENTRAL, and we don’t want them bringing home more of the plague than they have to. We are there. We are present. We pay attention to what they’re doing, and as a result, OUR KIDS DON’T BOTHER OTHER ADULTS. (The unfortunate by-product is: your kids think I care about what kids are doing in general. Sigh.)

I get it. You’re tired. Every parent is tired. Every parent wants nothing more than to disconnect for a few minutes and not have to hover over every little thing their kid does. To just kick back and read for a minute. To sneak away and drop a deuce in peace, even. But you can’t do it at the playground. Ignore your kids at home, where the only other person they can bother for attention is the cat.

Not to be preachy, but when you’re out in public, that’s when you need to pay attention to your kids THE MOST. Not just because they’ll go up and talk to strangers (obviously they will), but because a few seconds is all it takes for somebody to make off with the little bundle of joy that you’re ignoring. And while that might not be a big deal if you’re the only people on the playground, when you’re there at midday and there are twenty kids flying around and a dozen parents on cell phones around the outside … I mean, really? How hard would it be for me to walk off with your kid? Or, let’s make it less sinister — how hard would it be for your kid to just follow me and my kids off the playground?

Look. I’m not out here trying to abduct your kid (as far as you know). The two I have already drive me up the walls six days out of seven. And those are kids that I love. That I’m required by law to care for.

I don’t care about your kids.

It’s your job to do that, so they don’t come looking for vindication from me.

 

The Weekly Re-Motivator: On Not Belonging

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You can’t get there from here.

That thing you want to be? It’s an elite club. Elaborate membership initiation. Dizzying ivory tower across a raging, flood-fed river from where you are now. They actually get money to do the thing you’re trying to do for fun. They probably even have a secret handshake, and even if you made it across the river and climbed the tower, they wouldn’t teach it to you.

Italy, Pisa, Tower, Sky, Monuments, Buildings Italy

In short, you’re a pretender, and you will always be a pretender. You don’t belong there. This is impostor’s syndrome, and it’s a bitch. Impostor’s syndrome speaks with the voice that came pre-installed in your own head, which makes it particularly credible. And worse — it’s true! For the first (insert arbitrary period of time here), you will suck at the thing you’re trying to do.

(Here we talk about running and writing, since those are my two primary extracurricular jams.)

Those first runs suck worse than anything has ever sucked. You can’t even finish them, the best you can hope for is to do a little bit better than you did last time before your legs give out and you literally dissolve into a puddle of sweat on the pavement. You’re as graceful as an elephant on roller skates. You wheeze like a Chevy Malibu on its last legs (god help the designers of that car if I ever meet them in an alley).

Somewhere in the distance, you see the Ivory Tower of the real runners. Olympic Athletes, sure, but not even that — just people that run races for fun are in the tower. Marathoners. Half-marathoners. Even running a 5k seems a monumental and impossible goal at this point. And that voice kicks up in your head: you don’t belong, you’re not a real runner and you never will be, this is stupid, you’re stupid, stop trying!

Or writing. You set out to write a book or a story or a play or whatever, and maybe you start off okay, but soon the work turns into real, actual four-letter-word-WORK. The inspiration won’t come no matter how much you crank the engine (metaphors, whee!). The words that do come feel idiotic, stilted, hackneyed, or worst of all, just fargoing boring. You are the World’s Worst Writer, and it’s immediately obvious to anybody who reads your fetid pile of word-gerple.

And there, the Ivory Tower again. Real authors making real money with real readers, writing two or three or a dozen books a year, their books on the shelves at the mother-trucking Target, for god’s sake, so you can’t even pretend not to be aware of them while you’re buying TP and Chex Mix. Then the voice: your crap will never be on the shelves, just think of all the time you’re wasting, you don’t belong, you’re not a real writer, stop fooling yourself!

And maybe you believe it. Or maybe you don’t. Perception is reality, after all, and that Ivory Tower, metaphorical as it may be, exists in your mind, and all the barriers keeping you from it exist just the same. Hours, weeks, months, years of training and practice. A few lucky breaks along the way. Tenacity. Bull-headedness. Maybe even a little dash of crazy. Even if you’re doing the thing a little bit right now, it’s all pretend. You’re not a runner, you’re not a writer, you’re not THAT THING, whatever that thing is.

You’re just you, playing in the sand. Building up a joke of a castle and watching it wash away with each new wave.

Castle, Beach, Sea, Sand, Sand Sculpture, Artwork, Wave
You suck so bad.

But here’s the trick:

To build a castle, you actually need a bit of water. You can’t build anything without a healthy dose of the stuff that will bring it all tumbling down. And that Ivory Tower on the horizon?

It’s just a sand castle that somebody else built while they were feeling just as doubtful as you feel right now.

The trick is not to find the magic key to get into that Ivory Tower. You don’t have to guess the password, you don’t have to break yourself doing exactly what everybody else did to get there. The trick is to build your own Ivory Tower out of the sand, no matter how many times the ocean knocks it down for you, no matter how many times you wreck it yourself because you don’t know what the hockey-sticks you’re doing.

And it won’t be their Ivory Tower. You don’t have to belong to the super-secret, super-elite club, to be able to call yourself THAT THING THAT YOU WANT TO BE. It’ll be your Ivory Tower, where it’s okay to suck, where it’s okay to miss a day because you feel like puke run through a garbage disposal, where it’s okay to do something the completely wrong way and then turn around and re-do it the next day if what’s what it takes.

You build your own Ivory Tower.

Sand Sculpture, Structures Of Sand, Tales From Sand

And then you shine the beacon out to the other poor souls who think you did something magical to get there.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Fruity-Smelling Guy

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Note that the title of this post is not “The Fruity Smelling Guy” (the somewhat effeminate dude who goes around sniffing things). Come to think of it, do people even use “fruity” as a pejorative anymore? Anyway…

We’re back from vacation now.

I could write about the beach and how relaxing it was: the soft ocean breeze, the sand that gives way beneath your feet like so many microscopic gremlins and then swallows your feet up just as quickly, the tireless wash of the surf, the alligators cruising by just off the coast.

I could write about the weather and how backwards it was. We spent the week leading up to the vacation with lovely, cool (for summer) days in the low 80s and nights in the 60s. We traded that for a monstrous heat wave all week of temperatures in the upper 90s, with a heat index of well over 100 every day. (Keep in mind, this is the South — specifically Savannah — where even a moderate amount of heat can quickly transform your average city street into a slow-cooker thanks to the humidity.) Then, the day we came back — literally, that evening, and possibly while we were on the highway — the heat wave broke, a cold front moved in or something (I don’t know, I don’t weather) and we returned to the calm and really delightful 80s-60s range. Had we had that weather on the vacation, I think, at the very least, the kids would have asked about 80% less “WHY DID YOU BRING ME HERE”s and “DADDY WHY IS IT SO HOT”s.

Or I could write about the really amazing thing about vacationing with family that wants to help out with your kids: Grandparents putting kids to bed, grandparents getting kids dressed, grandparents changing diapers, grandparents waking up with the kids at the crack of dawn. I really can’t recommend bringing your kids’ grandparents on vacation enough, at least assuming that said grandparents are not the sort who will sit idly and ignore the kids’ screaming in a restaurant (they’re only children after all).

But what’s really on my mind?

What, in some strange way, I miss about vacation most of all?

Smelling like fruit.

Not because I eat a lot of fruit on vacation, or anything. (If anything, I slack in that department. Because who can manage a diet on vacation? If you can, please ship yourself back to Mars so you can resume life with the other non-humans.) But because when I’m on vacation, I use my wife’s body wash.

This isn’t a conscious decision or anything. (At least, it wasn’t always.) We’ve been vacationing together for about eleven years now (help!), and this is a trend that started some time ago, though I’d be hard-pressed to identify the first time. The fact is, I’m a forgetful Ferris, and on one of these vacations, I forgot to pack soap. I pointed this out to my wife in explanation of why I was grabbing my keys to head for the nearest overpriced island-monopoly grocery/convenience store, and she hit me with something I really hadn’t thought of:

“Why don’t you just use mine?”

I followed her to the bathroom, where she showed me a bottle of fragrant orangey gunk with little beads of alabaster foam floating in it. Blood orange extract. Orchid essence. Jojoba juice. She saw the look on my face and popped the lid for me to sniff it. With trepidation, I did. It smelled even fruitier than it looked. Like a produce truck carrying a million melons had crashed into a perfume factory and exploded in a fireball of flower-smell and aerosolized pheromones.

“No way,” I said, with a characteristic macho folding of my arms. Man’s soap, I explained, is supposed to smell like the woods, or the earth, or something blue and cool and vaguely industrial.

“So you’re going to go spend five dollars on a bottle of something you have at home anyway?”

That appealed to my spendthrift spirit, and I lathered up with the fruity goop. I spent the rest of vacation smelling like an orchard that’s maybe just a little past ripe, and I’m happy to say that I was no less manly for the transgression.

These days, I don’t pack soap for our trips at all, of any length — not because I forget, but because I know my wife will remember, so I don’t have to. (It’s surprising how much easier your life becomes when you adopt a maxim like this. Or maybe that’s just when you have a wife like mine. This is a woman who starts packing five days in advance for a two-evening trip.) Rather, I happily embrace the fact that, when I’m on vacation, I’m going to smell like whatever aromatic mixture of scents was sitting on my wife’s shelf waiting to be used. Gingerbread Cookie, Tropical Tango, Peppermint Dream, Lavender Lullaby (some of those names are made up, but some, I assure you, are real) — I have used them all and paraded my un-manly-smelling self around the locales of much of the Southeast.

20160620_184640.jpg
Note the absolutely useless comb that I still keep next to the sink, for some reason.

And why not? Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory, and when I’m on vacation, smelling like the entryway of a florists, I’m reminded of the other vacations I’ve had with my wife (and, more recently, of my awesome — if exhausting — kids). Which is not such a bad thing.

Plus, it’s one less thing I have to remember to pack. And that’s a good thing, too.

I wonder if my wife will notice if I just start using it all the time…