Tag: rant

Russell Wilson and Fifty Shades and Why Do I Bother

Pavowski5 Comments

I don’t follow social media kerfuffles. For the most part, I don’t follow social media period. Mostly this is because I can’t stand people, and I doubly can’t stand the egocentric narcissism that too often goes hand in hand with extensive social media use (and yeah, I grok the irony of expressing such a sentiment on a blog — is there a more narcissistic endeavor? — but what can I say, this is my platform, big or small as it may be. In other words, I avoid social media as a rule. I check facebook once every couple of weeks; usually because my wife tells me to. I have a twitter that I’ve used only once; that, for a writing exercise (the result of which, if you care, is here).

But still, social media chases me down, even when I don’t want to use it. Theoretically, technology evolves to make our lives easier, but in a lot of ways, technology is evolving to take over our lives. That’s a post for another day. One sort-of social media thing I do use is Google+, not for networking and posting status updates, but for following certain topics, writing blogs, and other what-have-yous. Now, I’m a football fan (now that I coach soccer, I feel compelled to say “American football” fan despite it being a mouthful), and as such, in the past month, I’ve googled some American football topics. Super Bowl. Playoffs. You know. Well, Google is posed to become the real-world evil stepbrother of SkyNet, so it has started making assumptions about things I’m interested in, and as a result, this little gem appeared in my Google+ window today. In short, Russell Wilson (the quarterback of the not-back-to-back-Super-Bowl-Champion-Seattle-Seahawks) went to see the new film

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Sorry. the cognitive disconnect knocked me out of my seat when I almost called Fifty Shades of Grey a film. Anyway, Russell Wilson went to see this new skin flick for soccer moms and apparently people are pretty mad about it. Not because he wasted his time seeing a movie that was better left in the imaginations of its undeserved audience, but because Russell is a Christian.

There are two issues here, and they have alternately turned my blood to ichor and scorching mercury over the state of our country.

Thing Number the First: a grown man went to see a movie. This grown man happens to be the very well-paid face of a very successful football team. He also happens to have outwardly represented himself as a practitioner of a particular religious faith. Apparently, I missed a step in the middle there that enables perfect strangers to pass moral judgment on him and to condemn him as a hypocrite, but that’s not even what I’m upset about. Religious nutjobs are going to religiously nutjob all over any and everything; it’s their hobby, whereas normal people, you know, knit sweaters or keep bees or write blog posts about trivial sharknado that irritates them vaguely. No, the problem here came well before any religious element got involved in RW’s choice in Saturday night entertainment, and that problem is people who have no business sticking their noses into other people’s business sticking their noses into other people’s business. (The previous sentence is grammatically correct.) For the record, “people who have no business sticking their noses into other people’s business” is just a fancy way of saying “people”, because once you’re an adult and living on your own, the only people whose business your nose belongs in are the people living under your roof, and even then, there are limits. These idiots have decided that somehow the things a well-paid quarterback (whom they have never met in real life) does affects them in some abstract way — be it moral corruption, distaste, disappointment, whatever — and are now harassing him in a real way about it. I’ll grant that sending messages on Twitter might not count as actual real harassment, but I’ll also bet dollars to donuts that he’s received some similar messages in real life, whether via post or shouted on the street or scrawled on a brick on its way through his window.

What really happened? He went to see a movie. Somebody didn’t like it. Rather than eating their feelings or spouting philosophically high-and-mighty biblical aphorisms over a tense family dinner, these somebodies got all in his face about it. This is stupid. Russell Wilson’s business is Russell Wilson’s business. Taylor Swift’s business is Taylor Swift’s business. Even Lady Gaga (who I can’t stand) has business that is entirely her own and does not deserve idiots getting all up in it. The thought that I might have a moral imperative to call somebody on their bad behavior — or their behavior in general — is a concept that our society would do well to get shut of, sooner rather than later, if possible.

Thing Number the Second: Why is this a news story on any outlet, even one as lowest-common-denominator as Bleacher Report? It’d be one thing if it were an isolated incident, but it’s not at all uncommon to see “news stories” about this or that celebrity arguing with another on twitter, or this trashy thing that this politician said. What that means is that you have this one pocket of individuals who are involved in this little online “incident”. Other people “witness” this “incident” and tell other people about it, and like a fight in the schoolyard, suddenly every mouthbreather in shouting distance has gravitated to see one snot-nosed fool land a couple of punches on the next. And then what? It gets broken up, or the parties get bored and go home, and everybody at school blathers about it for a couple of days until the next set of chumps with nothing better to do dust off their dukes for their turn to go a few rounds.

Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but there is actual news going on. There are atrocities in the world. People are murdering each other. Rights are being violated. Children are starving. Governments are rising and falling like the tides. But also, Russell Wilson went and saw a terrible movie that apparently, maybe, compromises his integrity as a Christian, and that’s apparently, maybe, worth more than a few idiots in their basements flipping their collective sharknado over.

And here’s Thing Number the Third, which occurred to me in the writing of this awful rant. I — me, personally — was dumb enough to click on the thing, stupid enough to read the thing, imbecilic enough to put myself into the dog-poo-encrusted shoes of the people involved to try to understand their thinking, and finally moronic enough to put this much effort into writing about how wasteful the whole thing was.

I think this is the part where I stop writing, and this entire post vanishes in a puff of self-aware irony.

Free Money (Somebody Has to Win, Right?)

Pavowski1 Comment

Apparently the Powerball is up to $500 million.

I know this because my wife made me go get a ticket tonight. I protested that if we wanted to throw money away, it would be easier, faster, and in fact cheaper to simply take my cash out on the back porch and burn it. But ours is a typical American patriarchal marriage, so I got in the car and headed around the corner to the gas station.

Did you know you can now buy lottery tickets online? Of course I didn’t, or I wouldn’t have wasted the extra money in gas to drive to the station to throw my money down the gullet of Big Lottery. But when I arrived at home, my wife had pulled up the website to see when the drawing was, and lo and behold, you can buy your lotto tickets online. This shocked me, because I can remember a time not so very long ago when I tried to buy a scratch-off ticket to go with my Snickers bar and Icee (it was a rough time in my life) in a convenience store, and the clerk happily rang up my frozen sugar but told me I couldn’t buy lottery tickets with a card. Cash only, he said. Why, I said. Because you can run out of cash, he said. I asked if that was really a problem; if people would really spend more money than they had for the privilege of rubbing a quarter against a lacquered piece of paper for a dopamine hit. He got a little dead in the eyes and told me I had no idea, then proceeded to tell me about customers — regulars — who would come into the station and buy one scratch-off ticket after another, winning three dollars here, ten dollars there, and using the winnings to buy more tickets, then going to their pockets for more cash when the wins ran out. I know a guy who’ll come in on a Friday and burn through a hundred bucks in fifteen minutes, he said.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. There are entire towns in our more-or-less-great nation built on the broken hopes and dreams of citizens trying to get rich quick, thinking that if they play the odds in just the right way, or at just the right time, a tidal wave of cash will sweep them out of their miserable existence. I’m torn between complete apathy and really soul-crushing sadness over that, because there are individuals out there who have gambled their lives away. On the one hand, you make your own bed by playing a game that’s rigged against you. On the other, the system that rigs the game rigs it by making you think it’s rigged in your favor. You win a little bit here, maybe a lot there, and you don’t notice the steady stream of dollars out of your bank account.

But we’re hardwired to think that way, aren’t we? Somehow each of us thinks, “I’m not like everybody else.” “It’ll never happen to me.” “Somebody has to win, so why not me?” And it takes us by great surprise when the universe reminds us, sometimes in the harshest of ways, that we are, in fact, just like everybody else. We are all unique little snowflakes, but nobody cares about your delicate crystalline structure when they’re shoveling millions of you and your inimitable brethren off their sidewalks or scraping you off their windshields. Everybody thinks they’re different, and maybe they are, but we’re different like all the ingredients in a borscht are different: they all bleed into the same red, gloopy, tomato-ey mass. I’m reminded of this little Gary Larson gem:

The lottery takes advantage of this defect in our thinking, and paradoxically its effect is greater the more people play it. More buyers mean a bigger jackpot, which draws in more buyers, which increases the jackpot, until it’s 9:45 on a Wednesday and my wife is sending me out in my gym shorts and sandals to buy a slip of paper that will be as useless tomorrow morning as the roll of toilet paper sitting on the back of the john. No, wait, sorry — the toilet paper is thick and absorbent and two-ply, and has a very specific and necessary function, while the lotto ticket I bought serves only as a badge of shame that I allowed myself to be taken in, even for a moment, by the thought that maybe, just maybe, my wife and I could be millionaires tomorrow.

We won’t be. Somebody may be, but probably not me, and probably not you, either. And our lives won’t be any different, except that I’m a few dollars poorer.

Unless I win.

*crosses fingers*

*slaps self across face*

Except I won’t win.

*secretly crosses fingers behind own back*

Newton’s Laws of Writing

Pavowski9 Comments

A while ago, there was this guy.

He sat under a tree for a while — a really long while — until eventually the tree sharted an apple on his head, and instead of just finding a different tree to sit under, this enterprising fargoer went and derived the laws for all freaking motion in the universe from that one little incident. I’m pretty sure he also went on to invent some awful cookies, although the real depth of his genius might be measured by the fact that he convinced people that those little bits of sandpaper wrapped around pseudo-fruit-filling were cookies in the first place, and not, in fact, aardvark turds rolled in discarded cicada husks.

But yeah, his more important contributions to the world were probably the three laws. But what Newton didn’t know (or at least, I have on good authority from this absinthe fairy that’s twinkling around the room at the moment) is that the three laws apply not just to the motion of things in the universe, but they apply to everything. And that means they apply to writers, too. I’m one of those, so here’s how it works:

First Law: An object in motion tends to stay in motion. That’s inertia, which is married to momentum, which is a concept I’ve found myself a little … obsessed is too strong a word … we’ll say “fixated” with here on this blarg and in my writing journey. I’ve written about it a few times before. In the universe, it means that if, say, you’re a planet hurtling through space, you will continue to hurtle until an asteroid many times your size smashes into and pulverizes you in a gigantic horrifying cosmic fender bender, or until a burgeoning sun swallows you up like the gnat I swallowed on my run this morning. To writers, it means that it’s easy to keep writing as long as you keep doing it. In other words, if you’re writing, and you want that writing to turn into something other than pointless scribbles in a forgotten word document, you have to forget the excuses and make sure you write a little bit, like, every day. Or at least almost every day. You’re only human, after all. Unless you’re a planet, in which case, I’d love to read your autobiography, except maybe try writing it in English instead of the eldritch tongue of star screams and soul-tearing that you probably write in.

Second Law: Look, the metaphor falls apart here in the middle. This is a stream-of-consciousness post, okay? I only planned it so far. I’m going to be honest. I remember the 1st and 3rd laws of motion from high school physics but I had no idea what the second law was. So I googled it, and found some highly technical descriptions of it, and then I got smarter and wikipedia’d it (is wikipedia’d a valid verb? It should be) and I still couldn’t figure it out. Essentially it’s about force and acceleration (F=ma) and all this other sciencey stuff I can’t be arsed about as a purveyor of fiction and dubious thoughts about writing. How does it apply to writing? Fargoed if I know. Let’s play acronyms. Freaking metal, always. Funky math: avoid. Fight me afterwards. Let’s just forget I talked about the second law. I was just killing time until I got to the 3rd law anyway.

Third Law: For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law explains why people get black eyes from shooting guns, or so I’ve heard. And why, when you’re walking barefooted across the carpet that was harmless before you had kids, a Thomas the Tank Engine figurine can stab upwards with all the force of an icepick wielded by an angry yeti into your tender underfoot. But, see, this one is great with writing, because it works in a couple of different ways. First, there are days when the writing resists you, and the harder you lean your shoulder into it the harder it leans back, unmoving, until you collapse at its feet, sobbing and gibbering about your inadequacies. By the same token, of course, if you don’t try to force the writing — if you write what needs to be written rather than trying to force words that don’t fit — then the whole task becomes ridiculously easier, and in fact, your story can end up working with you rather than against you. Second (and I’m twisting the law harder than a kid I knew in seventh grade, who shall remain nameless, delivering a purple nurple) it means that for every good day, there’s gonna be a bad day. For every day that the words and ideas and plots and characters flow from your fingertips like so much cosmic radiation pouring off of the sun, there will be a day that finds you as productive as my old and worthless cat who just keeps swatting at my ankles and crapping on the carpet. For each brilliant idea that seems to solve all the problems in your story at one fell swoop while choirs of angels sing in the background and golden sunlight suffuses the whole, you will lay an egg from which hatches a deformed, pitiful, limping abomination that squeals pitifully to beg for narrative death. You have to learn to ride the wave when the 3rd law is flowing in your favor and weather the storm when it isn’t.

Writing is a fickle mistress. Luckily, if you are up on Newton’s laws, you can predict some of her irrational moods and get out of the way when she comes at you with a knife. Of course, if you were thinking, you wouldn’t have written a razor-sharp butcher knife into your third act for her to use in the first place, but NO, you just had to have it there for “dramatic tension,” didn’t you?

Oh, THAT’S what the second law stands for.

Female Machete Assassin.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. We’re going with that. Newton’s 2nd law for writers: Female Machete Assassins. Include them in your stories. Or avoid them. Or something.

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This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt was “opposite.”

You Are Not Your Brain (Except That You Are)

Pavowski5 Comments

Probably confirmation bias at work here, but ever since I started mulling over New Year’s Resolutions and my objections to them, I’ve been seeing relevant ideology everywhere I look. Case in point: sometime in the last two days, and I can’t recall which store I was in at the time, I saw a book on display titled “You Are Not Your Brain!” It was crammed in there with some other self-help titles and weight-loss crash-course books somewhere near the checkout. It might have been a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I can’t remember, and it’s not important. What’s important is the title.

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I’ll go ahead and disclaim that I didn’t have time to look at the book. I was shuttling the two sprouts around, and if it’s not written down on my itinerary, it doesn’t get done. And I do hate to judge based on surface impressions rather than an in-depth analysis of content. I’m sure there’s something to the book; I’m sure it’s a fascinating read. (I may be giving more benefit of the doubt than is necessary or merited here, but we’ll go for it.) But the book itself isn’t even important. The title is. Because first impressions matter. Titles matter. You are nothing if not your brain.

You may not like the person that your brain has made you into. You may not appreciate all the things that your brain compels you to do. You certainly may not understand certain tendencies that your brain has. But to say that “You Are Not Your Brain” is to make the fatal mistake of assigning power over your decisions to somebody or something that is not yourself. As if there’s this evil spider-demon perched in your skull, making you eat extra cookies and watch reruns of The Biggest Loser. “I didn’t do that, my brain made me do it. This book can cure me of that bad decision making by helping me to countermand my brain.” No. Get a life.

(There’s a corollary here, for the legitimately chemically unbalanced and mentally ill. That sharknado is for real. And if you suffer from those conditions, then your locus of f’ed-up-ed-ness certainly is external.)

No, we are our brains. We are nothing if not our brains. Our hearts? Our souls? Whatever. Our souls are no more forced into making bad choices by our brains than my minivan is forced to go from zero to 60 in about five minutes and corner like a drunken ox by virtue of not being a cherry-red Lambo. (Lambos are fast, right? And do we still call them Lambos? … whatever, I don’t cars.) Facts are facts. Heart of a Mustang, Mind of a Minivan… sorry, you’re driving like a minivan, because that’s what you’re wired to do.

Which is not to say, of course, that you can’t don some electrical gloves and welding goggles, get in there and rewire the thing. If it’s spewing sparks and leaking plasma and pumping doubt and misery and desperation into your airways, making bad decisions and ruining your life, you can change that. Not overnight. It’ll take hours and days — or more likely, months and years — of studying schematics and learning about triggers and tendencies and fighting urges and really taking a good hard look at the way the spluttering gizmo works. You can change the way you think. But — and here’s the problem with a concept like “you are not your brain” — if you can’t identify the problem, you can’t fix the problem. If you’ve got a flat tire, it does you about as much good as a stack of hundred dollar bills in a starving dog’s mouth to know how an internal combustion engine works. You can stand at the side of the road and blather and bark all you want about how the engine is FINE, the car SHOULD be running, but that ain’t gonna patch the tire. If you don’t own the problem and look at it objectively and truthfully, you can’t fix the problem.

This is going to have to be my last word on New Year’s Resolutions, because I’m exhausted from getting upset over them. So many people making resolutions — and so many people five days into their resolutions (if they’ve made it even that far) — think the problem they’re fixing is external. My job sucks because I hate my boss, so I’ll get a new job. I eat horrible, artery-clogging food because it’s easier than cooking for myself, so I’ll order off the “diet” portion of the menu. I don’t work out because I don’t have time, so I’ll just download this seven-minute workout app and use that.

It doesn’t work like that. Your job sucks because you are not at home in yourself in it, but there are perfectly content telemarketers, gleeful garbage collectors, top-of-the-world door-to-door salesmen. You eat out because you don’t know how to cook, but the answer isn’t to order salads at McDonalds. Learn to cook for yourself and actually exercise some control over what goes into your body. You don’t work out because you haven’t made the time (let’s make that distinction: we all have the same 24 hours every day). An app on your phone is not the answer. Know what is? Cutting out some TV and exercising instead is.

And you know what’s in charge of ALL those decisions that get made? (Because, make no mistake, whether you exercise or not, you made a choice. Whether you grill some chicken or order a triple-extra-fatty-cheeseburger, you made a choice. Whether you stay in your crap job and learn to love it or drop a piano on your boss to escape his corporate lash, you MADE A CHOICE.) Your brain is in charge of those choices. You ARE your brain.

Deal with it.

Worse still, I just went and did some scratch-the-surface research (thanks Amazon) and found out the book is written by a pair of neuroscientists. SCIENTISTS. WROTE A BOOK CALLED “YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN.”

SCIENCE.

A Farewell to Traffic

Pavowski4 Comments

Christmas is over, and I couldn’t be happier.

Not because I hate the season. I love the season. And I love the holiday, and the family, and the spirit, and the things… But I hate the traffic.

See, we live just around the corner from the mall; a mall that attracts shoppers from as far away as Alabama, which means that our podunk little town suddenly begins attracting ungodly numbers of shoppers after Thanksgiving. It’s ridiculous. Our city is not a huge one nor a tiny one — it’s sort of Goldilocks’ed right in the middle — but the city planning and especially the road layouts are sharply indicative of a city office that never planned on the city getting as big as it is or attracting the kind of Christmas traffic that it does.

What that means is that from November to December, you can double or triple or better your travel time to get anywhere, even if it’s just around the corner for a burger. Even getting out of my neighborhood, thanks to its juxtaposition with one of the main arteries leading to the highway, can take fifteen minutes or more depending on the (lack of) goodwill from the holiday drivers. We are consumed with traffic, which leads to headaches, which basically makes me become a hermit from Thanksgiving until a few days after the madness has passed.

It’s funny how much of an effect something like traffic can have upon my psyche, especially considering that I actually enjoy driving most of the time. But traffic sucks the life out of me. And when the traffic is caused entirely as a result of poor planning, is compounded by the jerkish behavior of average joes ignoring the rules of the road in favor of their own rushing around, and has virtually no solution in sight thanks to the cramped layout of buildings and shopping centers preventing any widening of roads, it really makes me hate humanity a little bit. Like, more than usual.

But Christmas is over, and the world is returning to normal after the gift explosions and the candy cane hangover, so the traffic is becoming livable again, which means I can go out into the world again. I can stop hating strangers so much.

And let me just acknowledge how difficult it was, with a prompt word like “consume,” how difficult it was not to write about the thirty pounds of turkey and casserole and cheesecake that I consumed over the break. For a guy like me who’s working on managing his weight, that stuff is pretty much front-of-mind right now.

Short entry today to ease me back into posting now that the holidays are over. Good one coming up about gender roles and expectations (heavy stuff for the blarg here at Pavorisms, but don’t worry, it’ll be characteristically flip and uninformed).

This post was part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. And yes, it’s a day late. I’m consumed with guilt over it.