Tag: rant

The Problem With Stella

PavowskiLeave a comment

Spoiler Alert. Okay? My wife and I are finishing up Orange is the New Black. So I’m here to talk about it. Which means if you’re the kind of person who gets uptight about shows getting spoiled for you, you may want to stop yourself right there. The bridge is out. KNOWLEDGE AHEAD.

So.

Orange is the New Black is doing a lot of interesting things and has a lot of people talking about it. One of those things in particular is the introduction of a new character this season, Stella. (STELLAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Okay, it’s out of my system.) She’s a sort-of-spunky, sort-of-aloof androgynous type with a Bieber haircut and enough ink on her to keep HP in business for a few years, at least. And there’s a lot of buzz about this character, particularly by way of the actor portraying said character, one Ruby Rose.

What’s got people talking about her is the fact that, apparently (and I heard this only secondhand from my wife… research is not really my thing around here, and I trust her sources because she’s a lot smarter than me) miss Rose identifies as female some days and male on others. And yeah, okay, it’s the new hotness to identify as this or that. (Personally, I’m a thirty-something white dude who identifies as that piece of gum you stepped in and tracked all over the floorboards of your car. That’s just how I feel.) But the show has always been pretty stern about its characters being who they are regardless of what you or anybody thinks about it (and especially if you happen to be a dude). The show works because of the personalities represented in it; they’re off-the-wall but somehow believable within the literal four walls the characters are stuck in. So, you know, kudos to the show for including an actor who plays, in real life, by the rules that the show plays by in our heads.

But I’m not here to talk about her identity or her sexuality or her gender-bending or any of that. I’ll leave that to Buzzfeed. (Seriously, they have something like a dozen “articles” about her in the past week.)

What’s bugging me about her is her character’s narrative drift.

See, if OITNB teaches us anything, it’s that you don’t have to like characters in order to care about them. Hell, some of the show’s most memorable, quotable characters are the least likable. A mother who emotionally blackmails another woman over the adoption of her own grandchild? A former socialite who takes to bilking the system and profiting off the perversion of the underbelly of the internet? A prison social worker who’s sometimes got a heart of gold and is sometimes a racist, sexist, insecure piece of sharknado? They all do terrible things, but we care about them because, as twisted as the things they do may be, we understand on some level why they’re doing those things. Daya’s mother knows how hard mothering can be OUTSIDE of prison so she conspires to get her daughter to give up her baby, and hey, why not make a little scratch in the mix? Piper feels betrayed by the world she thought she knew; her values are shattered, so why not embrace her criminal side and profit at the expense of people who are worse off than her? Healey, for all the good he tries to do, is married to a loveless transplant from Russia who emasculates him every chance she gets, so to remind himself he’s a man, sometimes he has to swing his man-parts around and show everybody what a big jerk he can be.

We don’t like them. But we understand them, and that makes us care, even if we’re not necessarily rooting for them. (On that note, does the show even have a protagonist at this point? Maybe it’s Caputo, but it’s hard to tell. Not that that’s stopping anybody from watching.) All these characters, for better or worse, want things, and because we care about the characters, we either want them to get those things in sympathy, or we want them not to get those things out of schadenfreude.

Which brings me to Stella. (STELLAAAAAAAAAA. Okay, last time.) I don’t care about her. At all. She’s been on the show for half a season, and I don’t give one randy sharknado about her. Why?

Because she’s a husk.

A pretty husk. A wrench-in-the-works husk. A will-she-or-won’t-she distraction and world-turner-upside-downer hurricane kind of husk. But she’s like a tree that’s rotted from the inside out, or a wax figure dressed in a thousand-dollar suit. Looks nice on the outside, but looks kinda disgusting or even creepy up close.

As far as I can tell, Stella was drawn up to provide a fork-in-the-road for Piper. She was designed to be pretty and devil-may-care to show the polar (and scornful) opposite of Alex, who has grown haggard and consumed with worry and fear. Where Alex is driven slowly mad by the confines of the prison and the perceived inevitability of her situation (she’s stuck exactly where a man who will in all likelihood kill her knows exactly where she is), Stella is so indifferent to her situation that she’s almost literally untouched and unfazed by it (see the scene where she dries naked in the communal bathroom because the prison’s “harsh towels” are too much for her “sensitive skin”, for example). Stella is a bird on the wind, whereas Alex feels like a sinking stone.

And that’s fine. That’s even great. A nicely-turned dichotomy, a troubling love triangle for Piper, stuck between Alex, with whom she has history and allegiance and yeah, they do it a lot in the showers and stuff; and Stella (STELLAAAAAAAAAA. Sorry), who is mysterious and intriguing and probably does the weird stuff. In bed. That conflict works, and it’s even making people mad. (Which, again, just shows that we care.)

Here’s where it breaks down for me. Alex is a little old and busted this season, but we know why. Piper ratted her out. Got her sent back to prison after she thought she was out. Alex fears that her former boss will have her killed for implicating him when she got sent in. She’s tired. She’s hurt. She’s afraid for her life. Again, we don’t have to like her, but we understand.

But what’s Stella’s story? What makes her so light and carefree? The show doesn’t tell us. Why is she interested in Piper? We don’t know, outside of perhaps a raw physical want-to-bone feeling (which doesn’t necessarily come across, I humbly offer). What is she even in prison for in the first place? These are things the show doesn’t bother to share with us.

All we know about her is that Piper wants to do her, and that’s making problems for her relationship with Alex.

We don’t know what she wants. We don’t know why she does the things she does. So we (or, at least, I) don’t care.

It’s not a deal breaker for the show. It doesn’t make me not want to watch. But for a show that does so many things right with its characters, it feels like a pretty glaring misstep.

Maybe my feelings will change when I see the last episode tonight. But I maintain that, if you’re going to have a character appear for half of season, and that character is going to play a major role in the show, I should at least care about that character a little bit by the end.

Am I overthinking this? Am I wrong? Let me hear it.

Comparison Shopping (or, Dirty Writer Secrets)

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Writing is like running, I think. If you’re doing it, you’re winning.

Sounds cliche, but I believe it. For a couple of reasons.

First of all, there is no way to actually “win.” In running, the fastest person in the hundred-yard-dash won’t be able to hold a candle to a marathoner’s pace. And a marathoner won’t be able to touch the explosive energy of the sprinter. He who wins a marathon this year will get edged out next year. There is no “best.” So it is with writing. There are bestsellers, sure, but they rotate as quickly as the windmill blades on that damn mini-golf hole that you can never score less than seven strokes on. And there are popular writers within genres, but the question of who is “best” is always a matter of personal preference. So, in both endeavors, you win by simply doing the thing to the best of your ability.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that by and large, running is an individual activity. Okay, on race day you might meet up with 1000 of your closest friends to pound the pavement in your town, and maybe you run with a group on the weekend, but most of the time it’s just you and your shoes (if shoes are your thing). So, too, with writing. At some point you bring in readers, and if you’re at a certain point you might have editors or agents or reviewers, but most of the time it’s just you and the computer. Or typewriter. Or notebook. Or yellow snow.

And there’s really no point in comparing yourself to anybody else, right? I could compare myself with Meb Keflezighi (yep, I definitely had to google to see how to spell that), but what would be the point? He’s been running his whole life, and I will never perform at that level, so why beat myself up about the fact that I won’t be winning any marathons? Likewise, it’d be pointless to measure myself by such yardsticks as Stephen King, or Douglas Adams, or Jasper Fforde, or Neil Gaiman (and I’m just now recognizing that I need more female authors in my go-tos); I might as well be an ant shouting obscenities at the boot descending toward my segmented thorax.

So you run for you, and you write for you, and if you’re doing those things, and doing them well enough to feel good about what you’re doing, that should be good enough, right?

Well, that’s true. But there’s something else in us, I think, that makes it impossible for us not to compare ourselves to others. We may not mean to, we may actively try not to, but, come on — can you look at the person with a bestseller credit and not feel a little pang of, “man, maybe one day?” Can you watch Meb crossing the finish line and not think, “if only I could do that?”

I think the focus, in writing and in running, should be inwardly-focused. Your concern should be yourself and your improvement, and if you can say that what you did today was better than what you did yesterday, then you’re doing all right.

But. (There is always a but.)

I have a dirty secret. I like to compare myself to those lower on the ladder.

Right? Makes me feel good to see the people struggling with things I no longer have to struggle with.

Okay, so, when I drive around and see people out slogging it in the heat, running at a pace barely above a shuffle, I gloat a little inside. Poor sap, I think. Look how hard you’re working, for so little return. I think about how much faster I am, or how much farther I can go, and I feel better about me. I get a thrill if I pass another runner when I’m out on my own run, no matter what the situation, because in that moment, I’m better.

And I’m no different in writing. In fact, I’m worse in writing. I know a blogger/writer much in the same vein as myself, an aspiring novelist working to get his/her feet on the ground (or off it, choose your metaphor). I read his/her work semi-regularly. And he/she is just awful. Every story turns to over-the-top melodrama. Every character is an unjustified badass. Every turn is so heavy-handed and abrupt that I feel thrown into a narrative ditch while reading. The grammar errors could bleed an old typewriter dry. The spelling makes me want to punch kittens. (No, I won’t name the writer. Or link the blog. I am relatively sure he/she is not a regular reader of mine.) I read his/her work and I think, man, I’m so much better than that! And it makes me feel good about my little pile of turdlets I’ve amassed in my swampy corner of the internet.

I know I shouldn’t. I feel bad as soon as I catch myself doing it. But just like reaching for one more Nacho Cheese Dorito, I just can’t help myself. Because I want to feel like I’m making progress. I want to feel like I’m, if not the best, at least better than somebody.

And I think it’s worth remembering that, while it’s true that there will always be somebody out there who’s better than you, there will also always be somebody out there who’s worse than you. That goes for writing, running, filing your tax returns, animal husbandry, and crocheting. I am probably, for example, worse than you at crocheting.

So use me. Because I’m using you. If I think you’re better than me, I’m using you as motivation; I want to get what you’re getting. If I think I’m better than you, I’m using you as motivation; I want to make sure you don’t catch up to me, or worse, pass me. Because even though I may think I’m better than you, and you may think you’re better than me, we are all better than the folks who always say, “man, I would really like to take up running,” or “I want to write a novel someday,” but still haven’t gotten off their donks to actually try it.

I can’t be the only one that thinks like this. Come on. Admit it.

Wal-Mart Thinks We’re All Criminals

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I am not a crook.

Just as a rule, I don’t break laws. That may put me in the minority, especially if you consider traffic violators to be lawbreakers (by the way, the days when cars will automatically drive us where we need to be cannot get here fast enough for me. I firmly believe that driving, like the internet, somehow brings out the worst in people just by its very nature), but I take some pride in being a guy who follows rules, does what’s meant to be done, and by and large and as often as I can, considers the people around him when making a decision.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that I look about as likely to go on a crime spree as to spontaneously break into a ballet dance, Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries think I’m a criminal.

I mean, they must, right? Because I can’t exit their establishment with any amount of goods in my possession without displaying my receipt. It’s been that way at Sam’s Club for a while, but today it happened at the regular old Wal-Mart as well.

Yeah, I know, here I go again with the first-world problems, and this is me making a big gripe over a really minuscule inconvenience, but I’m not so sure it’s minuscule.

Let me be clear: I don’t mind proving that I bought and paid for the things I’m carrying out of the store. That’s fine. What I mind is being detained (let’s not split hairs here, you get stopped on your way out the door while they “check your receipt”) for no other reason than that the store has to double-check and make sure I’m not stealing from them.

Because that’s what they’re doing. There’s really no other way around it. Checking your receipt at the exit isn’t designed to make sure you have the everything you paid for, it isn’t designed to safeguard the nutritional value of the food you’re buying for your family, it isn’t even designed to create jobs for retirees and veterans — that’s just a byproduct (though the fact that they have to take jobs like this is a subject for another post, probably too depressing for me to cover here). No, the business of checking your receipt is designed to ensure that you aren’t walking out with stuff you didn’t pay for.

In other words, that person at the door is there to say to you, “let me make sure you didn’t forget to pay for something,” which is another way of saying, “let’s make sure you aren’t a dirty, stuff-taking thief,” all while they (hopefully) smile at you and (sometimes) wish you a nice day.

And I get it. People steal stuff. Some people steal a lot of stuff. The whole self-checkout thing is throwing a wrench into the works, whether it’s the way forward or not, and there have to be some safeguards in place to make sure people aren’t taking advantage. A company’s within their rights to protect their property through reasonable means (reasonable, I guess, would be an action short of shooting you in the kneecap if you accidentally stuff a bottle of salad dressing into your pocket because your kid started having a fit in the store and you needed both hands on him to wrangle him and usher him out of the store in a hurry, forgetting to pay for the bottle of salad dressing in the process, NOT THAT THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO ANYBODY AROUND HERE *whistles*), and having a person there to check what you’re walking out of the door with certainly isn’t an invasion of privacy or a denial of your human rights. I’m not about to stage a sit-in because a low-wage employee came at me with a highlighter. But does that mean that the company has to operate under the assumption that everybody is a criminal?

It makes me feel icky about shopping there. It’s hard to look past the subtext: “we check everybody’s receipt because everybody is potentially a criminal.” I don’t care how nice the shopping experience is otherwise (and let’s be clear, I’m not saying it is — Sam’s Club is routinely home to the longest and slowest lines I’ve ever seen in retail, and Wal-Mart is… well, let’s just say there’s an entire website dedicated to the ridiculous/sad/terrifying/I-don’t-want-to-live-on-this-planet-anymore experience that is shopping at your local Wal-Mart), the fact that this retailer is silently accusing me of petty theft every time I pass through their doors kinda makes me not want to shop there.

So, for the most part I don’t. Trips to Sam’s and Wally World are few and far between for us these days, for this among other reasons. But every time I check out, and I see people blithely handing over their receipts, I have to wonder if anybody is really thinking about what’s going on there, if they really consider the fact that the retailer they’re giving their hard-earned dollars to silently and discreetly considers them a possible thief just by virtue of having bought something there.

And there’s the fargo’ed up thing. If you walk out ostensibly empty-handed, you don’t get stopped. So I — having just stood in line for fifteen minutes waiting for a dead-in-the-eyes twenty-something to ring up my economy-sized jar of pickles and twenty-pound sack of potatoes and shambling toward my car while carrying a baby in one hand and holding the hand of my three-year-old in the other, and pushing the cart with my third hand OH WAIT I DON’T HAVE A THIRD HAND, I’m doing all this with only the two hands I was born with — I get stopped to have my receipt checked. But the guy who came in, stuffed a couple of fishing rods down his pants legs, a few astonishingly priced shirts under his armpits, a bunch of grapes under his hat and a half dozen batteries up his ass, and then walked out empty-handed because he “didn’t find what he was looking for” doesn’t get smiled at, doesn’t get a highlighter waved in his direction, and in fact goes on to rob the very store that’s giving me such a hard time for shopping there with an ease I can only dream of.

This is our world. Wal-Mart thinks we’re all crooks, but man, just look at those prices! I guess they can think what they want…

Almost Didn’t Make It

Pavowski8 Comments

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Is there a sadder word in the language than “almost?”

I read this week’s stream of consciousness prompt — the word, almost — and my head began to fill with almosts. He almost won the gold medal, but his ankle snapped in the last hundred meters. She almost got the job, but they found out about her side business selling pygmies as house pets. We almost got married, but my ex showed up at the last minute, burned the church down, and impaled my bride-to-be with my collectible Wayne Gretzky hockey stick, broken off at the handle.

Almost is the language of failure, it’s a word of defeat. But it’s not simply a coming-up-short, it’s worlds worse than a didn’t-quite-make-it, it’s an age away from never-really-had-a-chance. Why? Because with the almost, you can taste the victory.

There’s something comforting in not reaching for the dream, in admitting to yourself that you don’t really have what it takes to even start down the path. The blankets on the bed are warm, after all, and these reruns of Law and Order, Criminal Justice Unit for White-Collar Executives who Only Get Slaps On The Wrist aren’t going to watch themselves. You never start down the path, you never really think of how victory might feel, so you never miss out.

Image result for couch potato

Or, okay, say you start; you make the resolutions, you block out the time, you hold fast for a few weeks, but then you bow out because it’s just too hard. That happens. Nothing to be ashamed of. This failure stings a little, because you “wasted” that time trying the thing, but it’s better to see you’re not cut out for it early than to change who you are, because change is fargoing scary. Nope, this one is a lesson learned, and that lesson is: stay home.

Right, so maybe quitting after just a few weeks isn’t your bag. You’re really determined to make this thing work this time, and you plug away at it for a few months or even maybe a year or so. Maybe even start to think it could happen. But you know what happens to everybody, eventually? LIFE HAPPENS. And work gets hectic, or you get that long bout of mono, or your deadbeat brother moves in, and god almighty, how are you supposed to deal with this thing that MUST be dealt with and that other thing you wanted to do? Something has to give, and we know what it’s going to be. At least you have something to blame this failure on, and blame is good, because you don’t have to own up to the fact that maybe it wasn’t that important to you anyway.

Which brings us to the almost. The saddest of the sad. Because with the almost, you do the work. You feel the change in yourself. You create or you achieve or you conquer or you otherwise get done the things you’re trying to get done, and little by little you gain on that big goal, that overarching thing that looked so monstrous when you first started, until it’s just a leap away… and then the catastrophe strikes. Broken ankle. Rejected manuscript. New guy gets the promotion over you. And you’re so focused on winning that you maybe don’t even realize that you’ve lost until the parade has started, and then it slowly dawns that the parade is not for you. How do you cope? How do you throw yourself at the wall again? How do you find the strength to go back to the beginning and start over?

But see… that’s one way to look at it.

The other way to look at it is that the almost is just a whisker away from the Mission Accomplished. The almost is one favorable gust of wind away from the parade being in your honor instead of the other guy’s. The almost is the difference between your boss or your book reviewer or your opponent skipping breakfast on the day that matters because he didn’t get a good night’s sleep instead of coming in with guns a’blazing. If you can get to the almost… well… how can you stop there?

I changed my mind from the beginning of the post. Almost isn’t the saddest word in the language. It’s maybe the most motivating ever.

What’s almost within your grasp? What have you almost achieved? And what’s to stop you from going back and trying it again?

The Deuce Horizon (Where did my life go wrong?)

Pavowski2 Comments

I sat down tonight to write a blarg, and all I could think about was poop.

Not my poop. Let’s get that right. Baby poop, cat poop, dog poop… I’m inundated by Poops Which Are Not Mine, and inevitably, regrettably, it oozes over (ew) to my recreational writing. And as I sat here, pondering the poop I was trying hard not to ponder, I realized that my life has taken a series of unfortunate turns to bring me to this point.

To be clear, that point would be the point where I feel compelled to write entire blog posts about poop.

It wasn’t always this way. My life used to be ordinary. Go to work. Talk to some friends. Party hard on the weekend and reload on Monday, then do it again. There’s very little about poop in the cycle that used to be my life, except of course for the unmentionable one or two per day, and it certainly didn’t occupy my thoughts the way it does recently.

But then I got married. And we got some cats. And some dogs. And now we have a couple of kids. And at some point, my life changed over from never think about poop even when poop is happening to poop is the gravitational sun at the center of my universe.

Cleaning poopy diapers. Trying to get the sprout to poop on the toilet. Baby sticking her foot in the poop while I’m trying to clean the poop. Cat poop in litter boxes. Cat poop out of litter boxes. Letting the dog out to poop. Dog pooping on the carpet because we were at work all day. Cats dragging their poopy butts on the carpet. Carrying kids’ poopy diapers straight out to the curb because they’re too horrific to keep bottled up in the house.

Didn’t the Talking Heads have a song like that? This is not my beautiful life! Who knew I would hear that lyric and think only of poop.

Here’s a true statement, without embellishment: I have to deal with Poop Which Is Not Mine at least four or five times a day, which is enough, I think, to cause anybody to fixate a little bit. In short, for me: poop is a problem.

And the problem goes beyond the poop itself (which, let’s face it, is more than enough problem in its own right). Since I deal with it so much, I fixate, as I believe I may have mentioned. And that means it’s floating around in my subconscious, not unlike turds in the crapper, just waiting to back up the septic system of my brain. So I sit down to write a blarg topic, and all I can think of is crap. Literally.

There’s the second problem. Who wants to read a blarg about poop? Nobody, that’s who. To be honest, I don’t even want to be writing about the poop. Even thinking the word makes me feel icky, let alone typing it out over and over again as I’ve done tonight. Sure, I’m desensitized to it in a sense, but then it all comes bubbling back up while I’m sitting here trying not to think about it.

This is not a blarg about poop. This is not my beautiful life. I want this blarg to be a place where I write about writing and funny and quirky and interesting things that happen to me and that flit through my mind like butterflies through a fragrant meadow, but the percentage of posts about poop is really skewing the numbers around here.

And here, I’m exacerbating the problem by writing an entire post solely about poop.

If there’s a poop event horizon, I’m pretty sure I’ve crossed it by now. The poop in my life (Poop Which Is Not Mine, I hasten to add) is taking over, and I am not okay with that.

But the fact is, I don’t know if I can be saved. I have several years yet before I can stop thinking so much about these particular biological functions in my children… and let’s be honest, even when these functions are done, there will be an entirely new host of biological functions I will have to worry about.

If nothing else, I can perhaps serve as a warning.

If there’s Poop Which Is Not Yours in your life… in any capacity at all… run. Get out now, while you still can. The word “poop” appeared thirty-five times in this blog post. That’s too many for any sane person.