Tag: rant

An aside on side pieces

Pavowski3 Comments

This post is part of SoCS:http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1914/

The prompt for a stream of consciousness piece this week is the word “side”, and when I read that, for whatever reason, the phrase “side piece” jumped into my brain and burrowed in like a tick.  A side piece, for those not in the know, is essentially “the other woman”, a woman that a man has an ongoing relationship with despite having a primary relationship with a long term girlfriend or even wife.

The concept is obviously nothing new, but what baffles me is the term itself (yeah, yeah, another one of those “I fixate on language” posts, I can’t help it, this is my brain).  “Side piece.”  “Side” is obvious, given the fact that the relationship that has been entered into is one on the side, and that’s fine.  The problem is the word “piece”.  It’s not a word you use for a person.  You have a piece of meat, or a piece of pie, or a piece of a puzzle, or if you’re the vulgar type, a piece of ass.  A person is not a piece!  And if you feel like defending the terminology to me, YES, of course I understand that it’s “just a figure of speech”.  That doesn’t make it okay.  Here’s just another example of objectifying women that has become culturally sanctioned and, as a result, accepted (see the video).

To go further still, women are embracing the term.  This is what baffles me.  I mean, okay, you won’t see a classy woman embracing the term, but there are scads of women out there bragging and boasting about being somebody’s side piece or becoming a side piece.  In fact, just searching for that video above on youtube displayed a page full of GUIDES designed to HELP A WOMAN BECOME A SIDE PIECE.

Far be it from me to tell a woman how she should think.  I fully own and accept that any view I might have on the subject is colored if not tainted by the windows I look out through up here on White Male island.  Your sexuality and the relationships that you enter into are your choice.  Do what makes you happy. But accept and understand that in the culture you live in, being “the other woman” is a scarlet “A”; it will get you shunned and judged, doubly so if you brag about it.  And, seriously, despite all the gains they’ve made in the last century, women are still fighting a neverending tide of injustice and inequality in this country (and others).  The last thing they need is dissenters within their own ranks setting women back by embracing and making light of this vicious sexism.

I’m cutting this one short because even thinking about this topic is putting a sour taste in my mouth.  Our country needs to grow the fargo up and stop standing for crap like this, and I mean the men FAR more than I mean the women.

…My blarg has been way too preachy over the last couple of days.  I’ll have to remedy that.

Hot Car Summer

Pavowski2 Comments

Is there something in the water?

Does this kind of thing happen all the time and it just never got news play this big before?  Is it the fact that this schmuck who apparently murdered his toddler by locking him in the car that’s thrown the spotlight on other inadvertent cases?

It seems like every day there’s another news story of another kid locked in another car, and it just makes me wonder, what the fargo is going on?  Are people really forgetting about their kids?  Or, worse, are they really just not thinking about the fact that it’s summer and the temperature in your car can get up over 120 degrees in the space of a few minutes in the sun?  Or, worse worse worse, are people who hate their kids trying to murder their children without actually having to murder their children?

(Strap yourselves in, it’s about to get preachy in here.)

Whatever the case, this sharknado is happening too often.  I refuse to believe that a rational adult, functioning with all the years of development in a human spirit and parental instinct could at best forget about his kid, or at worst leave the kid in a hot car to suffer and die.  It’s torture in addition to neglect.  Does this not bespeak the need to step up the penalties for committing a crime like this against a helpless child?  I understand that not every parent wants to be a parent, and certainly not every parent is cut out to be a parent, but that doesn’t mean that the kid should suffer for that parent’s shortcomings, EVER.

I think it’s time to get a little bit medieval on this particular crime.  Throw it back to the old code of Hamurabi.  This is not facetiery.  I’m being very serious.  To commit a crime like this against a child is indicative of a fundamental lack of something human, whether the crime is intentional or accidental.  If your own parental instinct isn’t going to keep you from torturing and murdering your child, isn’t it the job of society to make sure you don’t, through deterrent and harsh punishment?  You do this — you lock your kid in the car, INTENTIONALLY OR ACCIDENTALLY, and part of your sentence is that you have to sit in the same car in the same heat for at least as long as you let the kid sit.  The kid died in the car?  Guess what, waste of skin?  You get to suffocate and burn just the same.

Say what you want about capital punishment for murderers; that’s a whole separate issue.  These are, in the unholy majority of cases, parents acting against their kids, and that means they’re unfit at best, and downright psychopathic and depraved at worst.

Let’s take the three cases: neglect (I forgot the kid was in the car), idiocy (I only left him for a few minutes), and outright murder.

Neglect.  You forgot your kid was in the car with you?  Really?  What were you so engrossed with, what was so important?  What, in short, demanded SO MUCH of your attention that you FORGOT about the life that you brought into the world?  You forgot that that life was in your care and depended on you for the basicest of basic needs (shelter from harm)?  “Sorry” doesn’t cut it.  “I wasn’t thinking” doesn’t cut it.  If you weren’t thinking, if you “just forgot” your kid was in the car, you need a reminder.  Enjoy your penance in the sun box.

Idiocy.  You knew what you were doing, but you were only going to leave the kid in the car for a few minutes.  Okay.  Some people are not the most empathetic or sympathetic; in fact some of us can barely see past the end of our own noses.  Look no further than viral videos of morons texting on their cell phones as they wander into traffic or into water fountains to see that some people aren’t concerned with ANYBODY outside of their own skin.  So you aren’t thinking about consequences another person might have to endure, that’s plain.  But that’s not good enough.  This is your child.  A life that you created, that counts on you to make the world a safe place to the best of your ability.  You’re going to knowingly leave that child in an enclosed space in the dead of summer for any length of time?  I feel bad closing the door on my kid and then loading groceries into the back for thirty seconds before I can get the A/C on.

Here’s the rub for this instance.  Would you sit in a car with the windows up for ANY length of time in the summer heat if you didn’t have to?  If you said anything other than “no,” you’re lying to yourself.  You wouldn’t sit in the car while your significant other ran into the grocery store.  While she got her nails done. While he went to have a beer.  And if somehow you DID find yourself sat in a car with the windows up and no A/C running, within twenty seconds you’d be looking for a way to break the windows out, because YOU’RE AN ADULT and you have that capability.  Kids don’t have that capability.  If you really thought it wouldn’t be so bad for your kid to wait in the car while you ran in at the post office or picked up eggs from the store, then you need a reminder.  Enjoy your penance in the sun box.

Murder.  What can be said?  If you intentionally leave your kid in a hot car knowing he’s likely to die, you don’t deserve your worthless hide, and you deserve to exit it smothering and suffering and suffocating, whether your kid died or not.

There’s no excuse for it.  There’s no reason a child should have to suffer for an adult’s idiocy or negligence.  A stronger message needs to be sent to protect these poor kids.

Do We Really Listen to Advertisements?

Pavowski7 Comments

Who loves commercials?  This guy does.  Commercials are fantastic.  They’re an art form, really, and a tremendous challenge: in what other medium are you up against the task of wresting your audience’s attention away from their phone, their wife, their plate of hot wings, their fridge?  In what other medium do you have a limit of just fifteen or thirty seconds to make a convincing point — enough for your ideas to stick in the mind of your audience?  Advertisers have a hard job, and some of them are very very good at it, but some of them are very very bad at it.  Pardon my complete lack of wordsmithery, I’m still coming down off the pain meds and the old bean is throbbing something fierce.

But that’s a nice tie-in, because I want to talk about a specific commercial that’s affected me in a very specific way.  The product in question is Lumosity, a product I neither use nor endorse, because — as is my wont — I know nothing about it aside from what I’ve seen in the ads.  What I’ve seen, however, is beyond stupid.

First things first.  Is the ad effective?  That depends.  I can’t ever see myself buying or recommending the product.  That would seem to be a fail for the ad.  However, I don’t know that I’m in the target demographic for the product (brain training, memory retention, seems to be marketed at an older crowd, even though it’s all young people in the ads), so that’s a wash.  However, the ad has without a doubt stuck with me: so much so that I’m here blarging about it and I’m about to tell you why it’s stuck with me so inextricably, and if the goal of an ad is to plant an idea in your mind — to Inceptionize its audience, so to speak — then it’s certainly effective.

Take a look at the video below.  I saw this ad on my television about three days ago and it’s latched into my brain with white-hot raptor claws.

Anything in there strike you as odd?  Nonsensical?  Let’s ignore the central claim about games being able to strengthen your brain.  That may or may not be a valid claim; I certainly haven’t done the research, though I did play a sharknado-ton of video games as a kid, and well, let’s just say I didn’t become a rocket scientist or anything.  But no, it’s not that.  Ads claim all kinds of things that are dubious.  Just look at any ad for a weightloss product.  No, at about the 14 second mark, the talking head in the ad says something so idiotic that my brain actually made me play back the commercial — I ACTUALLY REWOUND THE PLAYBACK TO RE-WATCH A COMMERCIAL, OK — and watch it again to make sure I heard it properly.

He says “It makes my brain feel great.”

Ponder that for a moment.  Let it marinate in your thinking parts and ooze its septic juice all over your cortices.  Feel the throbbing pleasure build in your brain as you process the wonderful feeling that critical thinking produces.  Oh, what’s that?  You don’t feel anything?  That’s because the brain is not a sensory organ.  Ergo, it can no more feel great than it can ride a bicycle or teach a monkey to dance.

I’m straying into the realm of science I don’t know enough about here.  I know that.  The brain is nothing short of a miracle of evolution.  But it can’t feel things.  It can interpret electrical impulses that your various organs that actually do sensing relay to it, but it does not create sense data of its own.  Claiming that your brain can “feel great” is beyond stupid.  YOU can feel great.  YOU can feel intelligent or smug or satisfied or capable of world domination after playing Lumosity’s games, but your brain doesn’t feel ANYTHING.

But, they said it.  And it made it through first draft to the final draft and into the commercial, so they obviously thought it was a good line.  And why not?  Who wouldn’t want their brain to feel great?  I know I would!  Gosh golly gee, my brain just lives in the dumps all day long.  It feels like total crap most of the time.  I want my brain to feel better!

…See how dumb that sounds?

There’s another ad in recent history that I sadly can’t find online at the moment.  It was an ad for a toothpaste, Sensodyne I think.  In it, a woman says she suffered from tooth pain due to damage to the enamel that drinking coffee had done over years and years, and that Sensodyne helped her get some relief.  WELL AND GOOD.  But then at the end of the commercial, she starts listing the virtues of this magical angel’s butt-paste.  It whitened my teeth.  It repaired the damage I’d done.  It allowed me to drink cold beverages again.  It helped me to eat healthier.

Wait.  Hold on.  Stop the train.  You want to claim (or rather, the company wants you to claim) that this toothpaste turned you from a french-fry mobbing, pizza-devouring, I’ll-have-seconds-on-my-ice-cream-no-make-that-thirds unhealthy eater into a healthy person that makes smart food choices?  NO IT DIDN’T.  Sorry, it didn’t.  MAYBE in learning about the toothpaste and the damage you were doing to your teeth you realized that you were eating like a human garbage disposal and THAT realization made you reconsider the things that you put into your mouth-hole.  But the toothpaste has no more to do with the decision than it did with Obama’s re-election.  (Unless I’m on to something here.  In which case.. uh… yay, Sensodyne?  Please don’t bug my house?)

Okay, I’m fixating.  I’m reading way too much into what should otherwise be a throwaway moment in a commercial that shouldn’t matter to me.  BUT THIS IS THE POINT.  Advertisers will say anything — literally, ANYthing — to make you buy a product.  Who among us doesn’t want to eat healthier?  Who wouldn’t like to have their BRAIN FEEL GREAT?  These nonsensical claims, ridiculous as they are, sound good when we hear them and they work on us subconsciously , tricking us into thinking that the products they’re hawking are actually worth a monkey’s turd.

All this is to say, next time you see an ad, just think about what’s really being said.  Seriously.  Stop and think and engage those critical muscles in your brain (OH WAIT THE BRAIN DOESN’T HAVE MUSCLES JUST KIDDING) and actually consider what they’re saying.  You might just stop yourself from wasting your money.  Or at the very least you can get a preachy blarg topic out of it.

Do We Hate Women This Much?

Pavowski2 Comments

My wife and I don’t have cable.

I view this as a good thing because gone are the nights of watching something just because it’s on.  (Oh, a 36-hour marathon of Law and Order, Extra Sassy Unit?  SCORE.)  If we want to watch something, we have to seek it out.  But it’s also a bad thing, because there are times when there is a serious dearth of decent entertainment to be had, and that time is the summer time.

Anyway, if you, like we do, get your programming on a streaming device, you know the glory of the commercials that you see five, six, twenty times in an evening.  The computer tailors ads to your interests and funnels them into your eyeholes, banking I suppose on the law of averages; if I see the ad enough times, I’ll just go ahead and buy / watch / ingest the damn thing.  One thing I won’t ingest, however, is the show on the advertisements of the last couple of weeks, Celebrity Wife Swap.

A brief sidebar.  As a creative type, I think — and it may be wishful thinking, I’ll grant you, but that won’t stop me thinking it — that Reality TV may have run its course.  It’ll kick around and thrash in its grave for a little while longer, and we’re certainly not done with the likes of rinkydink shows like Duck Dynasty or Pawn Stars, but the days of Reality dominating the discussion are over.  Recent ratings of powerhouses like American Idol and others tell me that.  The fact that a bizarre, quirky, what-seems-like-it-should-be-a-niche-diversion show like The Big Bang Theory can run the show when it’s airing tells me that.  But that doesn’t stop the Reality ship from setting out to sea again, like the Exxon Valdez transporting its load of hey-you-need-this-stuff-for-real on a crash course with your unsuspecting occipital lobes.

/soapbox on

I won’t be watching Celebrity Wife Swap, in the first place because it’s just another Reality show putting “ordinary” people in “everyday” situations and I have real fargoing life if I want to see that.  But this show has really struck a nerve with me, and I’ve not even watched an episode (I don’t even know if it’s a first run or if it’s back for another “unbelievable” season).  To be clear, it’s struck two nerves.  One: can our entertainment-obsessed society delegitimize women ANY MORE?  Two (and it’s a far lesser concern than the first point, but it still irks): it seems on the surface like the worst kind of celebrity worship extant.

Let’s start with marginalizing women.  It’s not bad enough that our “great” nation’s highest court has just placed the rights of intangible corporations above the rights of women, or that women’s roles in narrative entertainment are always viewed and evaluated through a male gaze, but now for your evening entertainment, we have Wife Swap, a show whose very title is working to shoot Feminism in the kneecaps in between adverts for spaghetti sauce and overpriced luxury sedans.  If you’re a regular reader of the blarg here, you know I’m an English teacher, and as an English teacher, I tend to fixate on language.  The way things are said matters.  Think about the LANGUAGE OF THE TITLE OF THIS SHOW.  Celebrity Wife Swap.  “Swap.”  What do you swap?  Property, first and foremost.  The searing I-can-hardly-call-it-subtext-with-a-straight-face subtext of the title says that YOUR WIFE IS YOUR PROPERTY.  Brilliant, I knew there was a reason I married my wife.  Now I remember, it’s because I got sixteen acres of land and a couple of donkeys into the deal.  Wait, no I didn’t, because it isn’t THE FARGOING DARK AGES ANYMORE.  The last time people were considered property in this country, I’m pretty sure there was a pretty significant disagreement over it, and that disagreement reached the conclusion that hey, no, people aren’t property.

To dig further into the entrails of this fetid carcass of a show title, what sort of property do you “swap?”  The kind of property that has no practical value to you anymore.  The toys that you’re done playing with.  The intrinsically worthless “collector’s items” that you’re hoarding for no reason other than that they’re “exclusive” or “limited edition.”  “Swap” is a word most at home between preteen boys and their baseball cards.  What’s that?  Dated reference?  Sharknado.  Um… Pokemon cards?  No?  Damn… look, the point is, you swap something because you don’t want it anymore.  So your wife is your property, and you’re done playing with her so your neighbor can have her for a while.  Brilliant, ABC.  I mean, the housewives that are watching this steaming pile of horse turds are probably past the point of redemption, so I’m not worried about them, but what about the next generation of women in this country?  That’s the message we want to send on NETWORK TV, of all things?  It’d be one thing if an obscure cable network were showing it to garner some viewers, but this is a broadcast network.  We have to do better.

The other point, here, is much more of a personal one, and it’s one of celebrity worship, which is one of the most useless forms of idleness and of opiating the masses that I’m aware of.  I understand a fascination with celebrities… to a point.  They star in your movies and TV shows, they run the touchdowns, they lounge around inheriting hotel fortunes.  Bully for them.  By all means, watch the celebrities in your movies and TV shows, watch them run the touchdowns, watch them do whatever the likes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian do WHEN THEY’RE DOING THE THING FOR WHICH THEY ARE FAMOUS.  As soon as you start wasting your time worrying about what Ryan Gosling has going on in his personal life, you’re essentially saying that your own life is less interesting to you than the life of somebody you will never meet.  Ultimately, celebrities are just people.  On one level or another, their lives are as mundane as yours and mine.  When we (and by “we” I mean people who are not me, because I don’t go in for that sharknado) live vicariously through celebrity, we give up a bit of ourselves, and that is really, really sad.

So what’s the point?  The point is (and I’m conjecturing, here, because again, I’ve not seen an episode and I don’t plan to) that Celebrity Wife Swap is going to show you some of your favorite “celebrities” and put them in the ridiculous situation of stepping into another family’s life for a few days for the purpose of your amusement.  This is idiotic thinking of the highest order.  One family’s life is not like another’s, OF COURSE there will be conflict and misunderstanding and argument about what should be done.  It doesn’t take celebrity to make that situation any more compelling (and here I say compelling not in the sense that it’s actually compelling but in the sense that the network execs think we’ll just HAVE TO WATCH IT).  What, then, is wrong with putting celebrities in this situation?  Because it’s just an iteration of knocking down the other guy to make yourself feel better about your life, which is lazy and lame and sad.  “Oh, look at how silly *insert celebrity name* looks trying to deal with *other celebrity name*’s wife, MY LIFE IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT.  God, I feel good about myself.”  No.  Don’t.  Begrudging somebody their success is just being selfish.

You might argue that the show is just a bit of frivolous fun, that I read too much into it.  Maybe so, but if you want an idea of how screwed up a society is, look at what they do for fun.  Roman gladiator arenas, anybody?  Greek debauched wine-fueled orgies?  TV is possibly our nation’s greatest escape, and the things we PUT on TV and the things we WATCH on TV say a hell of a lot about us.  In short, if you’re watching the show, you should be ashamed, because you’re telling the network that this is the kind of thing you agree with.  That is, you agree with trading women like cattle and with watching the lives of other people rather than living your own.

/soapbox off

Advice for Finally Getting Around to Writing That Novel You’ve Always Meant to Write

Pavowski9 Comments

Writing a novel is something I’ve told myself for years I would do someday.  In March of this year, I finally decided (for whatever reason) that this was the year, the time was now, and I was going to write the damn thing.  This past week, I finished the first draft. Now, writers of all walks will tell you that this is only the beginning, and they’re right.  But you will also learn very quickly that the world is littered with the corpses of those who wanted to try writing a novel and came up short before they finished their first draft, their first act, their first chapter, their first sentence.  I’m not an expert, but I’ve made it this far.  I picked up a few things along the way, and if you’re thinking of writing a novel, or starting to write a novel, or are bogged down and “blocked” trying to write your novel, maybe some of what I picked up will help you. Note that when I say “novel” I mean whatever your project may happen to be, be it screenplay, novel, poem, limerick, dirty joke.  And when I say “you” I mean “me”.  Let’s be honest, my entire blarg is an exercise in narcissism. Here, then, are 18 points of Dubious Advice (because nice round numbers are way too establishment for me, man) for Writing Your First Draft of Your First Novel.Read More »