Tag: rant

Excuses

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I spent the last forty minutes typing a great post.

A thoughtful post, a post where I took a good hard look at myself and my habits and my situation.  A post where I leveled with myself about some hard truths.  A cruel post where I questioned what I was really about with this whole blarg and my writing and my life.

And I went to post this post and WordPress ate it.  No auto-saved draft anywhere in my site that I can see it.  Nothing there when I scroll back through my history.

And it’s kind of funny that I’m sitting here now shouting into the void that tomorrow I’ll remake this post, because the post itself was all about not making excuses and getting the goldfingered work done even when life takes a steaming dump on your plate.

But it really is almost three hours past the time when I should have been in bed, and the kids will be up in oh, less than six hours, and I just don’t have it in me to go through that again tonight.  Maybe I’ll find it in the meantime.  Maybe it’ll be better if I rewrite it tomorrow.  In the meantime, it’ll just have to wait.

Sigh.

The New Batch of TV Shows Is So Depressing

Pavowski2 Comments

I’m going to embarrass myself (again) and say that we watch a lot of TV in my house.  Too much, really, for a couple of otherwise intelligent adults.  Now, we read a lot too, but most of our “together time” is spent watching one thing or another on the good ol’ boob tube.  Needless to say, we are enthusiastically anticipating the return of some of our favorite shows and curious about the wave of new entrants to the fling-advertisements-at-our-face race.  We’ve seen some of the new pilots, and the general consensus so far?

Network TV is trying too hard.

I’m going to talk mostly about The Red Band Society, because it was the guiltiest of the parties, but all the shows I’ve seen yet are coming up a mess in one way or another; usually by dint of insulting their audiences.

First and foremost, RBS is trying to capitalize on the The Fault in our Stars dollar by shoving cancer kids in our faces and counting on that fact alone to tug at our heartstrings and keep us tuned in.  A sympathy play as empty as the heart of a god that would allow kids to get cancer.  There’s nothing wrong with trying to ride the coattails of a successful product, but, I mean, at least embellish upon the idea.  TFIOS resonated with readers (and subsequently, viewers) because of its compelling, flawed, sassy but ultimately likable and admirable protagonist and her relationship/obsession (resessionship?) with Cancer Jesus.  RBS takes that trope (compelling, flawed, sassy) and paints a caricature of it.  Bitchy girl is so bitchy she’s unredeemable (but I’ll bet my no-longer-attached-left-nut she will find redemption, oh, somewhere toward the end of season 1, but slip back into her bitchy bitchiness just in time for season 2, should the show survive that long).  Sassy guy has every answer for every situation ever, knows everybody and knows how to get what he wants from everybody, but he’s too smart for his own good.  Horny black teen is horny and black and a teenager in the most transparent of ways (“awkwardly” propositioning his new nurse since he doesn’t want to die a virgin in a scene so painful and forced that … well, the point of all this is that it insults its viewers, so you know, THAT).  Uptight girl is uptight, but she OH SO DESPERATELY SECRETLY WANTS TO BREAK THE RULES.  And the protagonist (how is he a protagonist without being involved in any of the action?) watches (???) all this unfold from the depths of a coma in which he can hear everything around him, and boy has he learned a lot about life!

These are cardboard cutouts of tired characters who have appeared in every teen story we know since FOREVER, and they all have cancer and they all fight ferociously to prove who they are at every stage and they all spout pseudo-philosophical drivel in an attempt to sound deep that ultimately just left us scratching our heads.  Example:

Put-upon Doctor:  I guess the word “no” isn’t in your vocabulary?

Cancer Kid:  If it was, would I be asking you to say “yes?”

That’s not clever, it’s an idiotic non-sequitur.  And EVERY KID HAS A LINE LIKE THAT.  That’s not character development, that’s a sledgehammer with the word “character” scratched in the side by a rusty penknife.  And don’t tell me, “well, of course the characters are simple, it’s aimed at a teen audience!”  It’s going into the Prime-time lineup.  Glee is a show ostensibly for teens, but it has tremendous viewership outside of that demographic (or HAD, until the sharknado writing became super-sharknadoey writing after the second season).  No, teens might be a focus of the show, but they are not the only audience intended for the show.  But even if they were, that doesn’t change the fact that even teenagers are tired of these cookie-cutter characters.  Glee was a bag of chocolate covered potato chips — an interesting treat, but not something you want to eat a whole bag of.  RBS is trying to be a bag of chocolate covered potato chips with a dead frog in the bag for good measure.  They’re counting on the fact that the kids have cancer to bring weight in and of itself to a show as hollow as anything on TV, and it’s not going to make me want to eat a dead frog.

Also?  And this is not just RBS, but all the pilots we’ve watched yet — Narration.  God, gag me with a hammer over some narration.  Coma kid narrates all the comings and goings of the hospital from his coma.  (How does he know what’s going on in the basement, by the way?  Did everybody tell him everything after he woke up?  Isn’t that sort of spoiling the entire show for us?)  Some female voice narrates every facet of the female protagonist’s life on A to Z.  It’s not the female lead’s voice, which is odd, because the female lead is grown and theoretically should not need an “old person” to provide her voice in flashback, so who is she?  If she’s a character who will appear later in the story, why not introduce her in the pilot?  If not, why have a separate voice narrating a character’s life?  This show, also, suffers from trying-too-hard-to-be-significant disease in its dialogue: “Their relationship will last for three hundred, twenty-two days, seven hours, and fifty-six minutes.  This is their story, from A to Z.”  It’s cutesy the first time you hear it in the opening, but then you hear it again as the show closes out and you realize it’s going to keep happening and I just want to reach for a hammer.

Screenwriters:  If the action is strong enough, YOU DON’T NEED A NARRATOR.  If the action is not strong enough, WRITE BETTER ACTION.  The only time you need a narrator is if there’s some seriously deep behind-the-scenes stuff developing, and even then the narrator should be hamstrung and chained to a post with a five-foot leash.  Narration KILLS stories.  And while I’m on the A to Z show, are you just going to make 26 episodes?

The only show that’s shown any promise yet, to my mind, is Selfie, and even that promise is dubious.  I found myself wondering how I was supposed to identify with and root for a scummy shell of a human being, but at least the show had the good sense to poke fun at the shell and make the show about redeeming that person.  It’s a good message for our technologically-advanced-socially-retarded society, but I wonder whether there’s any longevity in the concept.  I fear that, more likely, it will splash around in the waters of social commentary for a little while and then get sand in its britches when it realizes that depth is hard and move to the kiddie pool with the other sit-com-rom-com dropouts (looking at you, A to Z).  It does, however, have that girl from Doctor Who, so that’s a plus, though hearing her speak with an Americanized accent seems wrong somehow.

To be fair, I’ve not looked at any of the new dramas this year, but do I need to?  More crime procedurals, more gritty tales of outside-the-box, not-by-the-book antiheroes with hearts of gold?  Is there anything coming out with a legitimately original concept and a legitimate chance at longevity?

It’s all so depressing.  Why can’t we have a show like Sherlock being produced in this country?  Where is the next Breaking Bad, the next Dexter (prior to season 3)?  Where, in short, is the next show I can get lost in?

That Kind of Morning

Pavowski5 Comments

I usually don’t use the blarg to vent about little things; it’s not my jam to get overly worked up over the ticky tacky stuff that happens to everybody all the time.  Then again, sometimes things happen that just throw you so far off your stride it’s impossible to get past it.  Douglas Adams made a fantastic comparison once (and I’m paraphrasing heavily): It’s as if you’re going along happily in third gear, and feeling how wonderfully powerful you are and how smoothly everything is going, and then as you shift into fourth gear you miss the shift and throw the vehicle into reverse, and your vehicle vomits its engine out onto the highway.  I feel like that was in The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, but I can’t be certain.

There are just some things you take for granted in your day.  Some simple things that are so very simple they cannot fail.  The sky, for example, will hover merrily above your head.  Gravity will tug gently downward at you.  People will generally be decent, if a bit self-absorbed.  Doors will operate by the simple use of their handle.

But you can’t take all of those things for granted.

wpid-20140826_072051.jpg

That’s my driver’s side door, moments after I attempted to open it to go to work this morning.  I took hold of the handle and pulled it toward me in the proscribed manner, and then with a comically loud snap, it broke off in my hand, sending me windmilling wildly backward in my driveway.  (I wish I could have said windmilling wildly westward, but I don’t know if that’s true and it’s a bit aggrandized.)  I can still get it open, but I have to slide a finger behind that tab of remaining handle to lift up the metal bit which lies flush against the back of the handle well, and then get my other fingers under that to open the door.  So it’s about five times as much work as opening a door should be, plus it looks like absolute ass.  And okay, yes, first world problems and all that, but ugh.  Of all the things that can go wrong with a car, you don’t expect the door handle to be anywhere near that list, or in fact on the list at all, or even adjacent to the list.

I’m not one to ascribe significance where there is none.  The breaking of a door handle has no bearing on the rest of my day except for leaving me a little bit in doubt as to whether other taken-for-granted elements in the world will also cease to function as advertised.  Still, this strikes me as pretty odd.  I mean, I didn’t know this could happen through what I can only assume is normal use of the product.

Am I wrong?  Does this happen?  Are we all just in some long invisible queue waiting for the automatic certainties of the universe to decay on us?  Or is all my working out paying off, so much that I now need to be really careful when I handle delicate objects?

Ahem.  So this is Tuesday.

Things Writers Need – Dictionaries

Pavowski4 Comments

In this next installment, it’s time to talk about more tools of the trade.

Last time, of course, I talked about the word processor, and why I like small, minimal ones instead of monolithic, fully-featured ones — for the drafting process, at least. Today, another staple: the dictionary.

Every writer should own a dictionary.  Scratch that — every writer should own a Dictionary, capital letters and italics included and necessary.  There’s a gargantuan difference between a Dictionary and a dictionary, and I’m not just talking about the price point.  Of course, there are alternatives.  To effectively draw a distinction, we need to consider what you’re using a dictionary for. To my mind, there are basically two functions that the dictionary should serve for you.

One, the dictionary needs to let you find and define words that you don’t already know the meaning of.  (Yeah, I just ended a sentence with a preposition.  SOMETIMES IT’S OKAY, OKAY?  Would you rather have read “words whose meaning you don’t already know” or “words of which the meaning you do not know” or the thing I wrote?  YEAH I THOUGHT SO.)  If you’re reading age-appropriate literature, odds are there will be a tasty handful of these little gems sprinkled in there.  Why?  Because variety is the spice of life, and you can only read the word “good” or “fast” or “slow” so many times before you want to pluck your eyes from their sockets and puree them into a gristly soup so that you don’t have to read those boring words any more.  Good writers avoid having their readers puree their eyeballs by using a broad swathe of words so that you don’t get bored to the point where eye-pureeing seems like a good idea.  That means that they will, by necessity, exhaust the canon of “ordinary” words that the average person lives with in his average life and strike out for the far reaches of the unknown, where words have four or five or six syllables (multisyllabical words, oh my!) and the sad fact is that a lot of us just don’t know all those highfalutin’ words well enough to use them in our everyday speech or writing, if at all.  And I say that with full confidence in my vocabulary as an English teacher.  I know my vocabulary sucks.  Sorry, it’s atrocious.

I read once that the English language is composed of something like three hundred thousand adjectives, which is more than 850% of the total words in the language.  Statistics are always true.  The point is there are more words in the language than you have room in your brain for, and a good storyteller will push your limits by throwing some of those words in there.  Sure, you can figure them out on context a lot of the time, but isn’t it satisfying to look up a fancy word so that you know it and can then toss it offhandedly into your water cooler conversation like a foppy prince tossing a bag of change at a servant?  “That episode of The Walking Dead was so guttaperchic, man.  I mean, positively seminiferous.”  See, if you knew those words, you’d know that at least one of those statements is absolute nonsense. The other reason (and it flows from the first, really) you need a solid Dictionary is to help you discover new words to use in your own writing.  Think of it this way.  Electricians have tools.  Carpenters have tools.  Missile building geniuses have tools (right John?).  Hell, even a Comcast Service Technician has a truck full of tools.  What do all those tools do?  Well, unless you have a lifetime of experience running wires or building vestibules or being a totally worthless appendage of a company best likened to the Sarlaac — sorry, a Comcast Service Technician — you don’t know!  Sure, you can guess that the clippy-looking-thingy might be used to, I dunno, cut things, or that the pointy-bit-on-the-end-of-a-steel-doodad could be used to poke holes in things, but when it comes to poking the proper holes in the proper things in the proper place, you’re as educated as a Comcast Service Technician.  (Truthfully, CST’s I’ve had experience with have all been pretty decent human beings, even if they work for the most unholy corporation in the known universe, a corporation that now apparently has religious freedom, so HAVE FUN WORSHIPPING THE BLACK MAW.  Thanks, Supreme Court!)

Ahem.  Writers have a job just like carpenters and electricians and rocket scientists and… no, we’ll leave the Comcast Service Techs out of this one.  Unlike those, you know, technically-abled sorts, we don’t have trucks or toolboxes or closets to keep our tools in, because our only tools are words.  A good, solid dictionary is the best tool repository you can hope for, and on a per-word basis, even an expensive dictionary is the equivalent of getting a 5,000-piece drill-bit and screwdriver-attachment set for $19.99.  You wouldn’t set out to build an addition onto your house with just a manual screwdriver and a hammer. All that said, let’s look at your options.

Online Resources.  Here’s your web-based dictionaries, i.e., Merriam-webster.com, dictionary.com, or whatever website floats your boat.  And don’t get me wrong, these are AWESOME, but they come up short in that “discoverability” factor in the same way that Amazon doesn’t quite measure up to a good old fashioned bookstore with actual walls and shelves and books and snooty clerks.  With an online dictionary, you can only find the words that you’re looking for.  Now, that’s a great feature — albeit one you can accomplish with an old-fashioned dictionary in the absence of a working internet connection, and for those write-at-the-edge-of-society-so-as-to-commune-with-nature types, that’s a monstrous plus.  Sure, these sites will highlight words from time to time and post “words of the day” and other fun stuff, and again, those are GREAT.  But you miss the tactile feel and sense of wandering among corridors and pages of words that a hard copy brings. By the way, just for poops, I scrolled down on the Merriam-Webster site and found a list of the top 10 most searched words in the last week.  They are:

  1. bestiality
  2. bigot
  3. pedantic
  4. et al
  5. biweekly
  6. comradery
  7. holistic
  8. sex
  9. culture
  10. closed-minded

And I think that says JUST A LITTLE BIT about the insane perverted prudish idiotic political culture that we live in.

Cheap, dollar-store dictionaries and pocket dictionaries.  This is a step backwards from online resources, because there is not nearly enough depth or breadth in these.  I saw one in a dollar store once that was literally one hundred pages long.  That was boasted on its cover.  How many words can you cover in one hundred pages?  Not enough.  The really tasty words just aren’t going to be in there, and even the definitions are condensed and crap, like a microwave dinner.  These are useful until about the time you finish high school, assuming you’re not particularly interested in expanding your horizons beyond high school.

Abridged dictionaries.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  If a dollar-store dictionary is a microwave dinner, an abridged edition is a meal-in-a-box.  You don’t feel as dirty using it as you would if you just tossed your food — THE FOOD THAT YOU EAT TO SUSTAIN YOUR LIFE — in the microwave for its entire cooking process, but you know in your heart that you can do better than boiling water to dump the noodles in or preheating the oven to 350 and then cooking for an hour.  The definitions are better and you get a lot more depth and breadth and you start seeing some of those juicy words, but you’re still only dredging the shallows.

Dictionaries.  Here I’m talking about books that might be better classified as bricks.  This book is probably hardcover, because a paperback won’t stand up to being cracked open and laid bare along its spine the way a hardback will, not to mention that there are SO MANY PAGES a paperback wouldn’t even support them.  This is a book whose presence on your shelf demands notice, like an elbowy mafia fatman squirreling for space in an elevator.  It uses that ultra-thin paper like bibles use because the printing costs would be astronomical if it used standard paper; that paper that feels like it would dissolve in direct sunlight, that paper that makes you feel like you need the steady hands you developed from years of playing Operation just to turn the pages without crinkling them.  And ooh, that smell.  Smells like knowledge.  Crack this book open and you can just taste that delicious aroma of every word that’s ever been thought of crashing through your olfactory nerve and wrecking your frontal cortex with the pungent stank of knowledge.  Thumb through the book, put your finger down on any random page and discover words like isogamete and nasturtium and teetotalism (which actually means the OPPOSITE of what I thought it means, in fact I didn’t even think teetotal was a word until just now, I always thought it was “T-total”, like “capital T Total”, in other words COMPLETELY MOTHERTRUCKING TOTAL, but it DOESN’T.  The more you know!).  Add them to your daily lexicon and impress your friends (or, more likely, earn yourself a few raised eyebrows and punches in the mouth).

I’m not making any secret what my preference is.  At the moment I’m flipping through the weathered pages of a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a book bound in beautiful royal blue and weighing in like a bowling ball.  This book could classify as a home defense system if you could get a good swing with it.  And it’s not even a “big” dictionary.  To my mind, if you’re writing in any arena beyond high school, you owe it to yourself to have a hefty hardbacked capital-D Dictionary handy.  One that’s heavy with wordstuffs, so heavy you need a packmule to carry it around.  Thumb through it from time to time.  Make it into a drinking game — one shot for every word that features a schwa.  But more importantly, use it to GROW YOUR LANGUAGE-FU.

What else do writers need?  What else do people think writers need?  Am I wrong about dictionaries?  Let me hear it.

“Keep Running, Faggot!”

Pavowski9 Comments

Short one tonight.

Most of the time when I run, it’s either in the dark of the wee hours or it’s off the beaten path away from traffic.  Today, however, I went for an evening run in the vicinity of the main drag near my house.  Why an evening run?  Well, I missed the chance to go this morning, but more and more in my life of late I am realizing that momentum matters, so I didn’t want to just let it slide, so after the sprout went down to sleep, I laced up.

It was hot out, but the sun was down and a breeze was blowing through courtesy of the cold front that’s on its way in, so it was all pretty pleasant.  And then I hit the little side street by the post office where the sidewalk disappears for about a thousand feet.  I was alternating between the curb and the runaway grass when I heard a honking horn and a brash male voice shouting at me (from the opposite side of the road, let the record show), “Keep running, faggot!”

Not that it matters, and certainly not to generalize where generalizing would be inappropriate, but he was driving a big ol’ truck, probably to match his enormous manhood.

I have to say, I’m perplexed.

First of all, I know that for all the “progress” we’re making in the world, there are still people out there that have no truck with forward thinking and want to stay racist and homophobic and idiotic and drunk all the time.  But it’s a little saddening to me to learn firsthand that we still live in a world where an idiot feels just fine — probably righteously justified or even compelled — to lean out the window and shout at me for no other reason than that he thought he knew something about me.

Second, I really don’t know what he was implying.  Was he implying that there was something I was already running from  and should continue to flee?  His own indignant and puny and inwardly terrified hate speech, for example?  Or was he in a weird and twisted way trying to offer encouragement (keep going!  You got this!) and then forgot himself and added the homophobic epithet at the end?

Third, I cannot for the life of me think what he hoped to gain by his shout.  A momentary chuckle and boost in the eyes of his paleolithic social circle?  That superior feeling you get from watching over-made-up faux-celebrities pull each others’ hair in a flurry of bleeped language on reality TV (well, at least my life isn’t THAT crazy)?  More likely, he just wanted me to feel like an idiot.  I have news for you.  I already know.  You don’t go running during the waking hours in Georgia in the summertime if you don’t have at least one or two screws loose.  Or maybe he wanted to hurt my feelings.  But sticks and stones and all that.  All I really felt, ultimately, was sorry for him.

I know this is a biiiig stretch and a helluva long way to walk, but I wonder if this is an inkling of what women must feel when guys (is it ever anything other than idiotic, small-minded guys?) catcall them for running or in fact for just being a woman in public.  I’m not saying I know how it feels, but I’m saying maybe I can empathize a little bit.  For just a moment — I mean a brief, fleeting, lightning-strike of a passing moment — I felt hurt.  Not because he’d struck at the depths of my soul with his comment, but because it was just so egregiously disrespectful.  Then after that, I felt sad, because for one reason or another, this walking (and driving!) bacterium has made it through his life without anybody telling him that that sharknado is totally out of line and uncalled for, regardless of whether it’s true.  Finally, I felt frustrated that this spineless sack had occupied as much of my thinking as he has, as evidenced by the fact that I took the trouble to write about this little interlude.  I’m sure I was out of his gadfly’s brain without a second thought moments after the encounter, but he stuck with me, and I wonder if that doesn’t make me at least a little bit of the idiot in this tale.

Is there anything more cowardly than the drive-by shouting?