Tag: rant

You Are Not Perfect, But We Can Make You So

Pavowski6 Comments

Picture day came last week in my school, and with it, the students in their shirts and ties, fancy dresses, suit jackets.

…

BAHAHAHAHAHA, No, just kidding. They came in their t-shirts with rude slogans and their ripped jeans and their bed-heads.

Which is fine. I mean, it’s school. I certainly don’t need to look any further than my own high school yearbook to see kids in my own generation who couldn’t be bothered to class it up for a day for their pictures.

But my gripe today isn’t with the kids (for a change). My gripe is with the photographers. Or maybe with society. More correctly, with society by way of the photographers.

Specifically, this:

wpid-20150925_155833.jpg

For a low, low price, you can alter your stinky, horrible, eye-abrading face in the yearbook into something altogether prettier, normaler, and far less likely to shatter the camera lens. Remove blemishes! Lighten your teeth! Disguise and conceal your every imperfection!

Look. Memory is fragile enough to begin with, unless you’re one of those unfortunate souls shackled with an eidetic one. I can personally count on one hand the number of clear memories I have from before the age of 15; that’s specific memories of specific things with the faces of recognizable people and events which actually transpired. The rest is all cobbled together from secondhand accounts, like the time my dad tells me I locked myself into a high school locker while he and his buddies were playing pick-up basketball. I know it happened, but I have no memory of it. After 16 it gets better, but only just.

And it’s no great shock to learn that eyewitness testimony is some of the least reliable evidence that police have. People imagine things that weren’t there, or forget about things that were there. Ask two dozen witnesses of an event “what the bloody bollocks did you see here?” And you’ll likely get two dozen different answers. The big stuff is the same. But the details are all different.

All the same, though, our experiences make us who we are. Personally, I had acne in high school. Not soul-crushing face sores, but certainly a scattering of little eye-blisters dusting my face. You can see them in my yearbook pictures. It’s awful. But those pictures at least give an accurate representation of who I was.

But it’s 2015 now (and I guess this has been going on for a while, but I only saw this ad this year, so … once again, the party started without me), and the option is here to alter the fabric of reality for a few extra dollars. Sure, NOW, when everybody is looking at your yearbook picture from this year, they’re saying “where’d your swamp-creature face go?” But give it a few years, and instead of remembering you as you are, people will be saying “man, that guy/girl was pretty incredible-looking. I wonder why I didn’t try to jump his/her bones under the bleachers back then.”

Isn’t there a danger in screwing with our memories and our perceptions of ourselves, especially given that those things are already super screwed-up to begin with? And, furthermore, isn’t there enough of a problem with self-image and trying to live up to unattainable standards of beauty in our society in the first place, without feeling like I have to shell out extra dollars on picture day just to look normal next to my classmates?

But, Pav, you say, it’s just a little airbrushing. What’s the harm?

If we can reinvent the past, then it never really happened. If my face in my yearbook picture doesn’t look like a dog chewed on a piece of pizza, then for all intents and purposes, I never looked like that. A friend of mine swears up and down that once, his mother caught an injured squirrel and nursed it back to health, and that during that time, I came over to his house, tried to pick up the squirrel, and it ran amok, scrambled into my shirt, and I did a lunatic jig across his living room trying to get the critter off me. I don’t remember this at all. You would think an incident like that would, I dunno, leave indelible marks in your brain and your psyche like so many tiny rodent claw-marks in your torso, but nope. I’m not nervous around squirrels or chipmunks. I don’t wake up in cold sweats feeling critters scampering across my chest. For all the effect this incident has on my life, it may as well have never happened. I have re-invented my past.

Just like in Total Recall, where a mild-mannered guy gets the memories of an interstellar space adventure implanted in his grey matter; the truth gets re-written and spiced up a bit. And it’s been a while, but I don’t seem to recall things going so great for that guy.

Do I overthink? Probably. All today’s drivel is probably as likely the product of an exhausted brain trying to claw its way through the closing pages of my first draft and lashing out at anything even slightly untoward, like the boss blowing up and assigning extra paperwork and calling an hour-long arse-chewing meeting because the coffee was too cold.

But still. The implication that you could give your yearbook picture “Star Appeal.”

As if you didn’t already have it.

Or maybe it’s just that dorky kid’s smug grin and his stupid Adam’s apple. With its perfect soft complexion and ideal look.

8 Writer Excuses (That Are Total B.S.)

Pavowski6 Comments

As I get closer and closer to the end of my project, it gets harder and harder to write. Like a magnet that simultaneously pulls you in and repels you, the finish line of the first draft is a daunting milestone in the life of a novel, one that looks impossibly bigger and bigger the closer you get to it: an alien obelisk growing out of the horizon of an uncharted planet that never actually seems to get any closer.

As such, it becomes easier and easier to make up excuses not to write, and those excuses become more and more reasonable-sounding.

Here are a few of them (not that I’ve used any of these myself during this project or any other, OF COURSE.) Eight, to be precise. Why eight? I don’t know. Eight is musical. Eight is my lucky number. Eight is also how many I happened to think of before I realized I was using this blog post as an excuse not to write.

So.

  1. I don’t have time. This is probably the easiest to claim and the easiest to dispel. Unless you’re one of the rarefied few doing this writing thing for a living, this is probably true on some level. (Then again, those rarefied few are long past making this excuse.) But the fact is, we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and time can be stolen in bits and snatches from any number of sources: lunch breaks, wasted time in front of the TV, hell, I’ve been known to forego an hour or so of sleep to get it done. The fact is: if it matters to you, you will find time or you will create it from the raw fabric of the universe.
  2. I’m just not inspired to write today. We tend to think that writing is a sort of magic, and on some level, it is: Where else does the average person get to play god like a writer? And on some level, some sort of inspiration is required, but not in the way we think. You need a decent (not awesome) idea, and you need the willingness to work at it, to stick your hands into the clay time and again, shaping it and molding it and firing it and destroying it to start again. That’s it. And some days, the writing does feel like the gods themselves are pushing your cursor around the page, spilling their divine wordseed through your brain and onto the page. But far more often, writing is a little bit like playing nose tackle: it’s a whole lot like getting your brains smashed in, again and again, and crawling back to take another one on the chin. To reiterate: inspiration may strike now and then, but you’re a whole lot more likely to be struck if you drape yourself in tinfoil and wander out in the storm carrying the biggest TV antenna you can find.
  3. I can’t write when I have xxxxx going on. Again, anybody could claim this at any time, really. Life happens to us all, bringing with it a stew of relationship difficulties, livelihood uncertainties, existential doubts, or, well, just name it, really. There’s always something going on that we could use as an excuse. And sometimes, to be fair, it’s a valid excuse. When your house has burned down or you’ve just lost your job, it’s maybe a good time to take some time off the writing project, because that sharknado will bleed through into your work. The thing to be wary of is allowing yourself to continue making this excuse beyond the time when it is reasonable to do so. Momentum matters, and this excuse will destroy your momentum if you let it.
  4. I’m not any good at writing. Well, pardon me for saying so, but who the hell is? Writing is a skill like any other. No budding musician picks up a guitar and starts shredding like Steve Vai. No wannabe singer just spontaneously spouts the perfect lyrics and harmonies one day while driving to work. This thing takes time, and the beginning writer is allowed — if not expected — to suck. It’s a thing to be embraced and accepted and forgotten about. We’re all toddlers that have been chucked into the deep end, and we’ll either figure out how to keep our heads above the water, or we’ll half-drown and be terrified of water for the rest of our lives.
  5. My idea isn’t going anywhere. Ideas are as wonderful and varied as the fishes of the sea; some of them have huge, smoke-belching jet engines, while others are lost puppies trembling in the thunderstorm. Some slide along under their own power for a while (but, really, THE POWER IS YOU) while others have to be dragged along by the wrist, kicking and screaming and whining every step of the way. But the fact is, if you’re not working on it (and as tempting as it is to think that thinking about it or outlining it or in any other way laying the groundwork for it counts as working on it, none of those things actually increase the idea in any way, none of them move it closer to the goal), then at best, it’s a tricked-out Bugatti sitting abandoned in a ditch. At worst, it’s a busted-out, multicolored hoopty sitting abandoned in a ditch. The constant, of course, is the ditch. Your idea won’t get out without some pushing.
  6. It’ll never sell. I’m probably unqualified to be dispensing this sort of advice, but I’ll do it anyway: if your primary concern for a story is whether or not it will sell, then maybe, I dunno, you need a new idea. What sells your story is that it’s your story, told in a way that only you can tell it. Plus — frankly — it probably won’t sell anyway. The market is a bloated jellyfish floating around on unpredictable currents; maybe your story will get snared in the tentacles and carried off to the promised land, maybe it won’t. But if you don’t love your idea, if you’re not burning to write it whether it sells or not, then the story is going to languish in the unpublishable depths, whether the jellyfish scoops it up or not.
  7. My idea isn’t original. Yeah, sorry, but this one is absolutely true. I’m one of those pessimists that feels every story has been told before, every arc has been explored, every wrench in the gears has already been thrown there, multiple times, by multiple monkeys. (See tvtropes.org if you don’t believe me.) The upside to all this is that it doesn’t matter. As I mentioned above, what sells a story — what people love about a story — is not the nuts and bolts of the story itself. That stuff should be practically invisible. What sells it is all the you-juices oozing out of all the nooks and crannies you build into the story. And that stuff only gets in there if — again — you love what you’re writing.
  8. I just don’t feel like it. Here’s where the real harsh truth sets in. Again, outside of the rarefied few, writing isn’t a job. It’s not something that people are depending on you to do, it’s not like paying your taxes or fixing that loose board in the back porch or taking the car in for an oil change. The world will keep on spinning, and you won’t go to jail or into the doghouse if you don’t write. But if you really don’t want to write — and that’s true for, I dunno, a week? A month? — then maybe — just maybe — it’s not that important to you, and maybe — just maybe — you ought to just save all of us the trouble and stop beating your head against this particular wall.

Now, look. I’m hardly an expert, but I do have about 300,000 words in various stages of completion between my second-draft first novel, my nearly completed first-draft second novel, and almost two years’ worth of drivel here at the blarg. Whether any of it is any good is a question for people smarter than me, but I have all that while scores and scads of people out there are just dreaming of writing someday. That’s something. And I certainly didn’t get it by listening to my excuses.

Speaking of which, it’s about time I take my own advice and go work on my project.

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?

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.

Father’s Day, and Social Media is Still Special

Pavowski9 Comments

Father’s Day is one of those weird times of year where weird things happen and I just roll with it. Okay, pretty much every day of the year is like that, but Father’s Day is more so. Because really, think about your father.

All he really wants is to be left alone to watch some football or read or play some video games, depending on how old he is. Give that to your dear ol’ dad, and he’ll be a happy camper. But here we have Father’s Day, wherein you’re supposed to buy ties and wallets and tools and goofy t-shirts and cards for the old man, and don’t get me wrong, he’ll appreciate the gesture, but he doesn’t need any of it. He gets the joy of watching you grow up and do silly things and take first steps and be decent human beings and make him laugh, and occasionally he’ll photobomb you or take you to school in his bathrobe, but you forgive him for that. Because it makes him happy.

That’s what Father’s Day is about. Make the old man happy. But don’t do anything for him that you wouldn’t do on any other day, because he probably doesn’t like being made a big deal over.

Maybe I just speak for myself. But my Father’s Day consisted of staying home with the kids, taking them for a walk in the park, the 1-year-old having a screaming fit for about an hour before she passed out for a nap on my chest while I watched some Football (that’s proper football: the Women’s World Cup is on — and the Americans play tonight — you know), then wrestling with the kids, going out to the grocery store when the wife got in from work, cooking some hamburgers for the family’s dinner (yeah, I cooked, and I chose it!), and having a refreshing adult beverage before bed.

Not pictured: the screaming fit that made me want to die.
Not pictured: the screaming fit that made me want to die.

In other words, a day more or less like any other day. And you know what? It was pretty sweet.

But a weird thing happened this Father’s Day. I’ve been a dad for three years, and this hasn’t happened before. Strangers were saying “Happy Father’s Day” to me. In the park, pushing the sprouts in the double stroller: “Good job, dad! Happy Father’s Day.” Chasing the sprouts around on the playground: “Oh, I know you’re having a Happy Father’s Day.” In the grocery store, carting the sprouts around: “Why are you shopping on Father’s Day?” And it’s not like I crave or even want recognition for doing dad things — that’s just what you do — but I can’t lie, it perked me up and made me walk a little taller. I dunno if there’s something different about this year or different about me or the kids, but those little moments of recognition kinda made my day. (My wife pretty much wrangling 100% of the kids’ nonsense when she got in from work was awesome, too.)

So, there are good things in the world for dads.

But then, there are dumb things, too.

This is Matt McGorry:

He’s an actor on Orange is the New Black (among other things) whose character has done some unsavory things in the wake of fathering a child on a prison inmate (no spoilers beyond that, okay? sheesh.) His character has left a bad taste in the mouth of lots of fans, to the extent that real life fans started harassing the real life actor in real life about things his character did on the show.

He fired back on Father’s Day with a pretty hilarious tongue-in-cheek response on his Instagram (seriously, he and I seem to come from the same school of dubious wit), but it really makes you stop and think. There are people out there watching this show who think that attacking Matt McGorry is the way to resolve their feelings about what his character has done on the show.

As if McGorry has anything to do with what the character does. (Sorry, that would be the writers and the producers.)

As if McGorry would do anything like what his character does in real life. (That’s what “acting” means, boys and girls.)

And as if an irate tweet from @JoeBobDerpSalad266 would have an impact on what McGorry is going to do in his real life, regardless of whether he’s behaving like his character or not.

Similar things happened to Sarah Wayne Callies, of The Walking Dead fame:

Her character was so hated, people would come up to her on the streets to tell her “I [fargoing] hate you.” Because actors actually become their characters when they act.

The people who can’t make this distinction are probably pretty normal people. They have jobs. They have friends and families. They probably look exactly like normal people, except that they lack the ability to distinguish between what’s real and imaginary.

But they have access to social media, which allows them to bring their special variety of crazy into the rest of our lives at any time, without warning, and without remorse. I have a twitter where I tweet intermittently, but this kind of crazy makes me think everyday about just deleting it, and leaving Twitter to burn interminably in the smoldering dumpster fire it is.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Happy Father’s Day.