Tag: rant

Double Space, I Hardly Knew Ye

Pavowski7 Comments

I’m always afraid I’m going to be found out.

I’m that guy in the movies who’s walking backward against the current and the only thing saving me from annihilation is that somehow the other berks in the matrix haven’t scented me out yet. I’m covered in zombie entrails walking amongst the walking dead, counting on the smell of dead things to keep me incognito. I’m the wolf covered in tufts of cotton, only invisible because the sheep haven’t bothered to look my way.

I’m making it up as I go in every facet of my life. As a husband? Yeah, I’m five years into that and have no idea what I’m doing. As a father? Don’t make me laugh. What parent really knows what he is doing? It’s my baseline goal to make sure the kid doesn’t grow up to be a mass-murderer, anything beyond that is gravy. As a teacher? Let’s just say I fear for the future. Even now, as I write this blarg post, I’m inescapably aware that in no way am I qualified to be writing the things I’m writing about, whether in my novel or here on this lonely corner of the web. I don’t know what I’m doing.

The only reason, as Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black, that I’m able to go on with my life is that most of the time, I do not know about it. There are probably better ways to write, but I am merrily unaware. Doubtless there are better parenting methods, but mine is working well enough for me so far. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. And I sure as sharknado thought I was doing a decent job as an English teacher.

The problem with living happily in ignorance is that sooner or later, somebody will point out the ways in which you never knew you were wrong, as evidenced by any nimrod who’s anti-vaccinations will be glad to tell you. Even now, this very instant, I am struggling with a bit of information I’ve just learned which is shaking up my very existence, fighting against the habits and automatic thinking which have been a part of me for over twenty years.

Seriously, how did I make it this far in my life not knowing that you only press space once after a period?

I’ve been typing with the double-spaced period for ages. AGES. I learned in my keyboarding class in middle school that a period gets two spaces behind it, and I’ve been typing that way ever since. Then today, it’s pointed out to me that two spaces after a period is nigh-archaic. I ask my wife who writes for a living, and in typical I-can’t-believe-I’m-married-to-this-idiot fashion, she says, “obviously. How did you not know that?” Somehow in twenty years I’ve missed the memo on this and nobody ever bothered to tell me.

Recently I heard a story about a guy who went into Home Depot to buy a new toilet and asked if, since he lived alone, he could just get a toilet without the seat. He lived by himself, no women in the house, so no need to put the seat down. Innocently, a worker asked him how he would be able to go #2, and the guy said, “what do you mean?” After a bit of embarrassing questioning, it came out that the guy had never sat on a toilet seat in his life, he always just squatted over the bowl. Certainly it never hurt anybody. He just never learned the right way and continued on, living his life in the complete wrong way until by mistake somebody set him straight.

So it is with me and the period. The humble period, of all things. Only the most common punctuation mark in the written language. Only the simple symbol of the end of a sentence, the building block of the paragraph, and therefore of all language itself. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to hit backspace, in this paragraph alone, to go back and erase one of the extra spaces I’m inserting as automatically as breathing.

The double space is a habit it’s going to take me months to unlearn. I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back, find my sixth-grade typing teacher, and punch her in the neck.

What’s next? Will I find out I’ve been spelling my own name wrong? Mispronouncing the simplest of words? Wearing my shoes on the wrong feet?

NaNoWriNOPE.

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You can’t swing a cat the last couple of days without hearing about NaNoWriMo.  Well, I guess that’s only true if you travel in writerly circles.  Outside literary circles the talk, I’m sure, is just more football, more Ebola, more elections, and if you’re really unlucky, the start of the Christmas season.  Down here with the writers and the would-be’s, though, it’s all NaNoWriMo all the time.

I think NaNoWriMo is awesome.  I’ve never done it, but I’ve had friends who tried.  Anything that motivates an otherwise stuck writer to unstick himself and put pen to paper, keys to screen, voice to dictaphone, is a thing that’s fighting on the side of good.

That said, I can’t personally get excited about it.

I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s my innate anti-herd mentality, my inherent distrust of groupthink.  If a lot of people are doing a thing because it’s trendy, most of the time, that alone is enough for me to not want to do that thing.  And NaNoWriMo is definitely trendy.  The website claims that over 300,000 people completed the challenge last year, to say nothing of the untold scores that fell off the wagon.  And I have a feeling that, faced with the mammoth task of slaying a 50,000 word novel, there were more than a few that fell off the wagon.

NaNoWriMo should appeal to me on every level.  It invites anybody who feels they have a story to tell to get off their donk and tell that story.  That’s a message I believe in; just look at what I’ve done with this place since I suddenly decided I had stories worth telling, oh, seven or eight months ago.  It encourages you to pour your heart and soul into a thing and work doggedly at it against all odds to get it done.  Yeah, I feel that.  It tells us that anybody — anybody — can do this writing thing, no matter what job you work at or don’t work at, no matter what demands your family makes on your time, no matter  what else you have going on in your day.  All this is relevant to my interests.

But I won’t be doing it this year.  And I probably won’t be doing it for many years to come.

I think my problem with it… no, that’s not right.  Problem is too strong a word, and I’m not here to take a bold stand against NaNoWriMo.  I think it’s awesome, as I stated above.  So, not a problem, as such.  More a misgiving, a lurking doubt.  My lurking doubt about NaNoWriMo is that it’s a gimmick.  And before I wander out onto this very tenuous, very no-actual-leg-to-stand-on branch, let me make it clear that this is just what I think for me.

When I thought about whether or not I would try for NaNoWriMo this year (and I did ponder it, briefly), I realized that it struck me as a gimmick. A potentially useful gimmick, perhaps.  A gimmick which would push me toward my goal of becoming a better and hopefully published writer, probably.  But a gimmick.  It’s imposing a ludicrous daily writing goal.  An insane deadline.  A Herculean writing task.  And if I were to fail at it, to come up short, I’d tear myself up over it.  That’s my MO, that’s what I do.  A missed deadline, a failure to produce, is crippling to me.  Insecurity about whether I’ll be able to produce is why I’m starting to stress out NOW, at the beginning of November, about whether I will in fact finish my first editing pass by the year’s end as I arbitrarily set out to do.

No, working on this edit and pushing out another short story every week and unspooling my brain on the blarg here are quite enough writing goals for November and the near future, for that matter.

I don’t need NaNoWriMo to feel like a writer.  Neither, for that mater, does anybody taking part.  But if it helps you, more power to you.  If it motivates you, then let it motivate you, and embrace the headache and the stress and the adrenaline and the frenzy of it.  I’ll just be over here, plugging away at my novel already in progress, occasionally tossing off posts about how amusing it is watching the NaNoWriMo’ers flailing around.

At any rate, if you’re NaNoWriMo’ing, go get it.  But just remember that you don’t need it.  If you’re a writer, you’re a writer without NaNoWriMo.

Five Things I Learned Serving Jury Duty

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I’ve just finished serving jury duty, and I learned a few things from the experience.

First of all, it is stressful holding another person’s fate in your hands.  I know this a little bit from being a teacher, but it’s one thing to be the gatekeeper stopping a kid from passing on to the next grade and another thing entirely to be a juror sending a grown man to jail.

Second, it is humbling and empowering, fascinating and exhausting to become a cog in the justice system.  You see it on TV and you know in an abstract way that it’s been embellished, but to actually dip your toes in the water and see it all spinning up close… well, it’s something.  Yes, it’s a huge drain on your time, yes, it’s horribly inconvenient, but the judges and the lawyers really let rip with a bunch of speechifying about the system and how it breaks down without the service of “people like you” and it’s enough to make you feel almost important for a few days.

Third, don’t be a stalker.

Fourth, don’t encourage a stalker.

So the case I was on was a stalking case.  And they encourage you, when you first sit down and hear opening arguments, to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions.  But you hear “stalker” and you think, okay, that’s a bad guy that needs to be stopped.  And I’m sure in many cases that turns out to be exactly the situation.  However, in this case — which sounded a lot more like real life — there was nothing so simple.  To simplify things to a point of ridiculousness, this couple dated for nine months, then broke up.  To be specific, she broke up with him, and he was still, to unironically use an over-cliched phrase, madly in love with her.

Now, breakups happen.  And one-sided breakups happen.  The problem here arose because she wanted to be cordial and nice.  So she sent him e-mails and text messages to the effect of: “I don’t want anything more to do with you, please don’t contact me again, I’ll talk to you later.”  Or, “Your last message was inappropriate, I don’t want you in my life, but I may speak to you if I see you around, and I may dial your number if I need to.”  I’m not one to victim-blame, but if you want a person to leave you alone, and you know that person is still determined to feel a certain way about you, you can’t leave the door open for contact.

Now, this guy stepped over the line.  He drove by her house unannounced, he sent some fairly ugly text messages her way when she started dating another guy, but he was not hiding in the bushes outside the house or parking across the street for hours on end or following her around in public.  It was an ugly, ugly situation.  No doubt about that.  But he wasn’t a stalker, so we acquitted him.

I’m not sure how much more detail would be useful and I’m not sure how much is really ethical to share, so I’m going to cut that portion of the program short.  However, there are some lessons to be learned from all this.

The first is this, and it goes for everybody: If you’re going to press charges against somebody, and the situation involves the dealings and behavior of both individuals in some way, you’d better be sure that your house is in order, because the lawyers and the investigators and everybody and their mother are going to go through your metaphorical house, drag all your metaphorical dirty laundry onto the lawn, smash it to pieces, burn the pieces, sort through the ashes, and then arrange the ashes into lovely grey mosaics for a jury of your peers to peruse ad nauseam. In other words, if you’re going to press charges, make sure the juice is worth the squeeze.

The second bit of advice is for the ladies.  If you want a man out of your life, and you feel it may eventually come to legal measures, slam the fargoing door.  None of this nicey-nicey, cordial-kitty crap.  I’m reminded of that moment in Dumb and Dumber where the girl tells one of the Dumbs that the odds of her getting together with him are a million-to-one, and he responds with vigor, “So you’re saying there’s a chance!”  Leave no chances.  Make yourself abundantly clear.

The third bit of advice is for the guys.  NO MEANS NO.  When she tells you she wants to be left alone, do yourself a favor and assume she’s serious.  The case I sat on was flimsy as hell and we still almost found him guilty.  And even though we acquitted him, he still had to give up tons of his time to stand trial, to have his personal business laid open for the world to see, to stand in humiliation at being accused of, let’s be honest, a crime that’s not going to win you the respect of your comrades.

The fourth bit of advice is for anybody hoping to avoid jury duty.  Wear pajamas to court.  Nothing shows the lawyers you’re an idiot incapable of using your critical brain to ponder the minutiae of a case which may send a person to jail for a long time like a refusal to put on proper pants.  Stupid me, I wore slacks and a collared shirt every day, and look where I ended up.

The fifth bit of advice is: Pajamas won’t save you.  In the jury pool room, waiting to be called to a courtroom, I was sitting next to a woman in hot pink pajamas and a hoodie, who did not look up from her cell phone the entire two hours we were waiting to be called to court.  Next day, I saw her again, standing in the waiting area outside another courtroom.  Still, of course, glued to her cell phone, and damned if she wasn’t still wearing pajamas.

Seriously.  Do your civic duty and put on some pants.

Rookie Move (or, why writers should keep pens and paper handy all the time, even when it’s impractical to do so)

Pavowski1 Comment

One of the sort of take-it-for-granted bits of writing advice I once heard was, “make sure you’re always able to write something down.”  It makes sense.  If you believe in inspiration as I do (for the most part) then you know that it can strike you at any moment, without the slightest provocation, and that it can depart again with as little warning as it gave you when it arrived.  This is why, in my work bag, I keep a composition book and two pens at all times, no matter where I’m going or for how long.  It’s why I keep a stack of note cards binder-clipped in my back pocket and a pencil on my ear just about everywhere I go.  It’s why I keep a pocketknife ready to carve strips of flesh from my arm in the semblance of words I can later affix to a page, though I’m happy to announce I’ve not yet been reduced to that particular method of transcription yet.

Still, ideas sometimes slip through.  Occasionally I’ll have a brilliant idea strike my cerebellum only to bounce off like so many hailstones on the pavement.  Or, more often, something will seem earth-shatteringly clever to me as the thought strikes, but then when I try to articulate it, I realize it’s so foolish it doesn’t bear further thought.  Then there are the days when the fountain seems to dry up entirely and no amount of coaxing, cajoling, pondering or preening will make the ideas come forth.  It’s a crap shoot, in other words, whether the good ideas will get through or not, which is why it’s doubly important to always have the net ready to catch them before they crater in the vast depths of the ideas I will never write.

Let me back up.

The wife and kids and some extended family and I were all on vacation in a fairly swanky condo in Florida over the weekend.  I mentioned it last time, and then in a dutiful showing of a man on vacation, I didn’t write again until today.  Anyway, I had to come back for work, but my wife and kids stayed on and are staying on for a few more days of sun and surf (NOT THAT I’M JEALOUS OR ANYTHING), which means I’m at home by myself for a few days.  No kids.  No wife.  No distractions.  Perfect conditions to get some writing done.  And I did, and I plan to, and night one was brilliant and night two is shaping up just fine so far.

But at night the monsters come out.

Routine is a powerful thing, and when your routine is shattered, it tends to snowball out of control, like a tiny crack in your windshield spiderwebbing like a mutant octopus every time you hit a bump in the pavement.  With no kids, there is no bedtime.  With no wife, there is no meditative glass of wine before the bedtime I don’t have.  I found myself in bed at the appropriate time last night but unable to get to sleep for lack of the vague comforts that knowing your children are asleep in the next room can bring.  No warm backside to press my cold, bony toes into.  The actual night part of last night was, in short, all wrong.  In addition to staying awake for an hour and a half before sleep took me, I woke up of my own volition several times in the night: something I never do (if only because the kids will make noise and wake me up before I ever have the chance to wake myself).  But something else happened unexpectedly in the night: inspiration struck.

It struck with the illumination and voltage of a 1.21 gigawatt lightning strike direct to my cortex, and unfortunately departed just as quickly.  Because for all my various preparations and eventualities for capturing the most fleeting of writerly ideas during my waking hours, I’ve somehow never had the good sense to stash pen and paper next to the bed.  I just don’t get great ideas at night (or if I have, I’ve forgotten them).  But inspiration struck hard and fast enough to wake me and make me think, “gosh golly, I should really write that down,” which lasted me roughly until I remembered that I didn’t have pen and paper at bedside, and I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those writers who is going to huddle over and mash my latest screenplay snippet into my phone with my mutant monkey thumbs.  I’m just not.  No, the inspiration struck, and I realized I had no way to write it down, and I assured myself that this idea was so good, so inescapably awesome, that I would surely remember it in the morning.

So here I am, grasping at the straws that may once have stuffed its scarecrow, but which more likely were the bed for some flea-bitten ox with a penchant for pooping literal poop rather than the brilliant story ideas I might prefer it to poop.  I know it involved either Sherlock Holmes or some Holmesian character.  I’m pretty sure there was genetic modification involved.  There may have been a jetpack.  Also a rhinoceros on a train.  But it’s all one big useless jumble.  No more good to me than the vague idea that I really should have gotten up early and gone for a run today.

Lesson learned.  Paper is going on the bedside table tonight, where it will probably lie untouched until, months from now, I wonder what the hell I put paper on the bedside table for, and move it back downstairs where it belongs.

Jury Doody

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It’s not that I mind getting the summons for jury duty.  This is something we must all face sooner or later.  No, what bothers me — and I’m going to go on a limb and say it bothers me not even as English teacher, but as a human — is that on this letter, which goes out to literally thousands of people in the community monthly, is a typo so obvious and egregious that I think my high school students could spot it.

Using “who’s” when you meant to use “whose”?  Scrub city.  For that matter…

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It may be hard to read in this picture, but that sentence positively makes my brain boil.  If you can’t read it there, it reads:

I hereby affirm that I am a: a full-time student at a college, university, vocational school, or other postsecondary school who, during the period of time the student is enrolled and taking classes or exams.

Is it a subject/verb agreement error?  A misplaced modifier?  This one, I think, falls into the category of scratch the whole thing and try again.  Is it too much to ask that if I’m going to be summoned to do my civic duty — which I am happy to do! — that the means of the summons at least make sense in the language we will presumably use for the service?