Tag: not really science

Why I Like “Like”

Pavowski10 Comments

This post is part of SoCS:http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-2114/

Trying something a bit different here, a non-fiction based prompt from another blog.  The topic?  Write about the word “like”.

Well, there’s a lot to like about “like”.  The straightforwardest (yep) and simplest is the fact that “like” is used to build similes, which are like the connective tissue holding the loose clunky bits of your prose to the solid, enduring ideas that everybody’s familiar with.  Similes are just those little bits of language where you say “this thing over here is like that other thing over there.”  They can be as simple or as complex as the situation demands, but they are infinitely adaptable and always appropriate.  In fact, I’m going to step out on a ledge here and say that the simile is perhaps the most important literary technique out there.

Why?  Because it creates inroads.  Pointing out that two essentially unlike things actually ARE alike, that they do share characteristics — whether their similarities are immediately apparent to the casual observer or not — is one of, if not the, most effective way to make the most opaque of subject matter clear to your reader.

Example?  Let’s say I took creative writing instead of calculus in college.  (This is true.)  Therefore I’m not particularly familiar with arcs and curves and the best method for calculating trajectories or … okay, I’m probably making my point perfectly about not knowing anything about calculus.  Let me try again.  Physics.  As the saying goes, I know a little about physics, enough to get me into trouble.  Say I’m trying to explain a concept in physics to somebody who knows nothing about physics.  Somebody who, for example, might prefer to watch Titanic again rather than branch out and watch something new and exciting, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.  Just hypothetically speaking.  This is not a real person.  But this person’s perception of gravity, let’s say, might be that it makes objects fall down.  In a highly specific way, that’s accurate: here on Earth, gravity makes things fall down.  As far as capital “G” Gravity goes, however, that’s a horrifically simplified view.

Sharknado, I’m meandering off-point.  Let me return to the simile.  Right.  A simile allows me to explain to this person whose thinking is a bit myopic that gravity, capital “G” Gravity as it exists in the Universe, not just on Earth, is a bit like the attraction between Jack and Rose in Titanic.  Once they affect each other, they forever feel one another’s pull.  When they are close, they are nearly inseparable, but even when they are apart, each one is aware of the other’s presence, and is always trying to find a way to get back together.  Now, it’s not a perfect description of gravity by any imaginable stretch, but it’s allowed me to (hopefully) shift the way that this particular person thinks about gravity by tapping into what they know about something else.

So, similes are awesome.  They allow me to paint pictures in your head by saying for example that “the blood pooling around the dead man smelled like so many old, grimy copper pennies” or that “the colors of her eyes were blue like the bluest blue sky; endless, perfect, infinite” or, in a favorite quote of mine from Douglas Adams, that the alien ships “hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don’t.”  Each one lets you see one thing in another way, lets you consider my experience and my retelling of a thing, which then colors your interpretation of that thing in a way that’s perhaps different than the way you already thought about it.

Damn, that feels circular.  What I’m trying to say is that “like” is like a vicegrip — a simple tool with a thousand different applications.  “Like” is like water — you find it everywhere, always adapting, always flowing, always enriching.  “Like” is like salt: sure, you could eat without it, but would you really want to?

This has been an exercise in language analysis.  Those don’t tend to read well here on the blarg.  That’s okay, I’ve got a humdinger of a flash fiction coming in my next post.

What Day Is It, Even? (Or, a teacher’s ode to Summertime)

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I mentioned several posts ago how babies are basically localized black-holes that wander through your house and crash into your coffee table, sucking up space-time and stuffing stale Cheerios in their mouths, those slobbery, germy little event horizons.  So time has no meaning in my house at all right now.  Basically, if it’s daylight out, we try to remember to eat and wash the stale sweat off ourselves.  If it’s dark out, we try to put the kids in their beds so that we can put ourselves in our beds.

But that’s life as a new (repeat) parent.  (As soon as I typed “repeat” before parent, just there, it immediately struck me that the phrase was not so very different from “repeat offender.”  Which is horribly apt.  Parents of multiple children should be referred to as repeat offenders: obviously they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around and they need to go into the penalty box again.  The penalty box filled with poop, urine, vomit and tears.)  I’m down with that.  Trouble is, I’m also a teacher, and for teachers, a similar phenomenon takes place annually.Read More »

The Minivan Effect

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There was a great episode of House, MD wherein Greg House was opining that people’s treatment of an individual lies flatly on a sliding scale related to the empathy they feel for that person.  More specifically, that because he walks with a cane, he can get away with being an enormous asgard-hole and never catch crap for it.  He then goes on to (deliberately) crush a woman’s toe with his cane and beams a smile at his friend, Wilson, as she apologizes to him for being in his way.  Great moment, great show, at least in the early seasons (ah, television shows, why do you ever make your late seasons?  Stop early before it turns to sharknado).  In fact, I could go on and on about the reasons that show was tops on my list while it was on the air, and that’s even without pointing out that the entire show is inspired by Sherlock Holmes, one of the greatest fictional characters in existence.

But anyway.  As usual, House was right.  And not just about Lupus.  (It’s never Lupus.)  If people feel sorry for you, they’re much less likely to dump on you.  Now, me being a heteronormative white male living on privileged white male island, what could I know about people feeling sorry for me?

I drive a minivan.Read More »

The Stupidity Constant

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I have a theory.

It’s more correct for me to say that my wife had the theory.  All fairness, she thought it first, all I did was flesh it out.  But it’s brilliant, and it fits, and it has changed the way I think about my life in the past twelve hours.

The theory is this:  Our house — more specifically perhaps, our household — is a closed system of stupidity.  There is a constant amount of stupidity contained within the space inhabited by my wife and I and our son and our animals, and that amount of stupidity cannot be altered by the comings or goings of any of us in or out of the house.

Let’s review the relevant data.

Jasper was our dumbest dog.  Our dumbest critter, really, but “dumb dog” has a lovely alliteration to it that I can’t stay away from, so there you have it.  He’d run into the glass door.  He’d go into a yip-dog frenzy when the mailman or other interlopers approached the house, or in fact drove past the house.  He’d follow at our feet, pardon the expression, like a lost puppy, any time we had any sort of food, in the hopes that we’d take pity and give him a bit, knowing full well that we wouldn’t.  He would jump up and down like he was spring-loaded on any new visitor to the house despite our multiple attempts to divest him of this behavior.  He’d follow the sprout around and take food from his hand even though we would fly into a murderous rage when he did so.

A sweet dog, make no mistake – but dumb as bricks.  Well, Jasper couldn’t stay with us.  Without getting into too much detail, he and the sprout were not a good match, so my family generously adopted him.  So he left us.  (We still see him on the weekends and he’s doing awesome.)

Now, it’s not a thought that we had consciously at the time, but in retrospect we kind of took it for granted that with Jasper leaving, the incidences of, ah, stupid behavior would lessen.  But the Stupidity Constant began quickly to stabilize the closed system without us even knowing.

Little by little, our other animals began acting dumber.  Penny, our other dog, for example, has begun pushing her food bowl all over the place and spilling food everywhere.  She’s always been a little skittish during storms.  Lately, though, she goes into fits during storms, trying to squeeze into tiny cubbies and knocking over furniture, chewing on shoes and baby toys, shaking like she’s stuck in that paint mixing machine at the Home Depot.  Now, she’s never liked storms, but since Jasper is gone, she descends into idiocy and terror whenever it begins to rain.  She barks and howls when strangers come to the house.  She runs under our feet tirelessly; my wife and I have tripped over her more times than we can count.

Okay, so maybe she’s upset over the absence of her “brother”, which I’d buy, if it had not been six months.  But she’s getting worse, not better.

Then, there are the cats.  The Alpha (yes, cats have Alphas, I know, I thought it was insane when I heard it, but trust me, this cat is an Alpha), Marty, has always been a bit, hmm, special.  But lately he, too, has been dumber, for lack of a more eloquent term.  His most egregious ridiculous behavior is one I can find no explanation for.  He’ll splash in the water bowl, trying to tip it over, leaving sad little stupid pools of water all over our brand new $2000 floors.  Why does he do this?  TO INFURIATE US.  He’s also more guilty than ever of running under our feet, especially on the stairs.

Thing is, the stupidity rotates.  When Penny is low-key, the cats are all keyed up.  When the cats are chilled, Penny starts chewing on the baseboards.  No, really, she’s chewed up baseboards.

Not the markings of an intelligent creature.
Not the markings of an intelligent creature.

Anyway, we were talking about it this morning while cleaning up the latest slurry of puppy chow (spilled by the dog) and water (spilled by the cat) and I tripped over a different cat while coming back through the living room and my dear wife said, “god, I swear, the other animals are getting dumber.”

And it clicked.

“Like the house is a closed system of stupidity?” I said.  She nodded.  “Meaning that there is a fixed amount of stupidity that has to exist in the house at any given time?”

“Exactly,” she said.

“In other words,” I said, feeling brilliant and self-important, “as Jeff Goldblum so eloquently put it in Jurassic Park, the stupid will find a way?”

Both our eyes got wide as the truth broke over us like my brother breaking wind: sudden, inescapable, undeniable.  Oh, and simultaneously impressive and terrible.  Our household is a time-space anomaly, a Grand Central Station of idiotic animal behavior.

I have suspicions that a similar anomalous field exists in a bubble of about a hundred feet around my person, but one theory at a time.

Don’t Fargo with Nature

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Here’s a little something different.

I usually don’t do these, but saw this one and thought it’d be fun.  Wordpress’s daily prompt is here: Change One Law of Nature.  I saw that and I went into high gear, because boy howdy, I love a good thought experiment.

My first thought was: gravity.  Lower the force of gravity by a factor of, oh, I dunno, maybe five or six.  Give us moon gravity, basically, and turn the whole earth into a giant bouncy house.  Whee, fun!  But you change the law for earth, you change it for the rest of the universe.  The sun loses its gravity, too.  Earth goes spiraling, screaming, into the void of deep space and humanity is wiped out in a matter of years if not days.  Whoops.

Then, okay, how about friction?  (Is friction a natural law?  On a molecular level I know it’s not, but I’m pretending it is.)  Friction sucks.  It ruins the gas mileage on my new minivan, it slows me down when I’m running, it’s a major party pooper.  Scale it down, or get rid of it.  Whoops, now you can’t use the brakes in your car.  Nor can you accelerate for that matter, in a car or otherwise.  The only method of propulsion that’s left is to spring away from things at high angles of incidence, and soon everything in creation is sailing around with no chance of stopping, just careening off other maddeningly unidirectional objects — some of which are achieving breakneck speeds because they got pushed by things like jumbo jets for example — until you achieve an escape vector and, again, go spiraling off into the void of deep space.  So yeah, maybe keep friction.

What’s left?  One of my favorite words-of-the-day, Entropy, or the tendency of energy to leave a system (yeah, I know, that’s wickedly oversimplified, but I’m not a rocket scientist; I took creative writing in college, okay?)  Yeah, that one’s a bummer.  It’s why we die, it’s why stars burn out, it’s why your pizza left on the countertop gets cold and then your dog eats it.  The cold.  Not the dog.  The dog behaves according to her own laws, most of which involve acting like a fool all the dharma time.  So get rid of entropy.  But then we live forever, until we get ourselves killed.  There is no “natural causes”.  (Don’t tell me that “is” should be “are” there.  It shouldn’t.)  So we begin to overpopulate.  And because the energy doesn’t dissipate, the sun doesn’t cool.  In fact, it never cools.  In fact, it never cooled, nor did the Earth, so life on our planet would never have existed in the first place.

It’s all well and good to think of these things in the pocket of our own experience, but the Laws of Nature are laws for a goldfinger good reason.  If nature didn’t follow them, then the Nature we know would not exist, it would be something else entirely.

Don’t Fargo with Nature.  Don’t do drugs.  Stay in school.