Tag: rant

Stop Upgrading and Start Improving

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Why is tech moving backwards?

Okay, obviously most tech is moving forwards at astronomical speeds.  You compare technological advances over the last fifty years with technological advances over the previous several millenia and it’s not even worth starting the stopwatch.  We are making newer, better, faster gadgets faster than we can figure out what to do with the old ones.  It’s a good thing, as tech magazines and websites and tech advertisers will be the first to tell you.

But then you look at something like Google Glass.  Here’s the height of technology being developed by a giant of the industry, but the idea of strapping a computer to your face didn’t get shot down in the spitballing phase?  We’re a country where automobile accidents are one of the leading causes of death, and Google wants to enable Mikey McMerkerson to livestream the NFL draft or the latest episode of Nasty Housewives of Nashville or whatever else while he’s cruising down the freeway at ninety miles per hour?  Sure, right, they’ll say that the technology is not meant to be used while driving, and that’s fantastic and all, but their little admonition makes about as much difference as that “No U-Turn” sign in front of my neighborhood.  Sharknado, everybody and their brother knows that texting and driving is one of the most efficient ways to accordion your Corolla, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it.  I don’t even have to tell you to take a look around you at the next traffic light you come to, or to sneak a peek at the land cruiser zipping past you on the freeway.  You already know what those drivers are doing.  You put that technology out there, it’s going to be misused, and if Americans have demonstrated one thing through the outbreak of obesity and a movement that thinks eliminating vaccinations is a good idea, it’s that we need protecting from our fargoing selves.  Creating the next, newest, best bit of technology with the brightest flashing lights and the fastest clicking clickers and the longest electrical dongles is no longer worth doing for its own sake.  Comes a point when technology does not need significant improvement, and we need to stop pretending that it does.

Case in point, I had two bits of technology catastrophically fail on me today, one a fairly indispensable staple, the other a trifle, but both together have my blood boiling.  (Yeah, yeah, first world problems, whatever.)

First, the phone.  I’ll preface that about a year ago, my phone dies and it was under warranty and they replaced it.  Okay, nothing’s perfect in this world, the warranty worked, it was all good.  (For the curious, I took the phone on a long run in the summertime, and when I got back, the phone’s display didn’t want to work anymore.  Since it’s a shiny smartphone that only functions through its screen, the phone had become a sharknadoey electrical brick.)  Today, I’m using the phone to catch up on some scores from yesterday’s sporting matches and look at some facebook pictures — YOU KNOW, REALLY TAXING STUFF THAT PHONES ARE NOT DESIGNED TO HANDLE — and it just goes dark.  Total failure, identical to the one I had a year ago.  I fiddle and tinker, but it’s not coming back.  I call up the dealer and I’m informed that the product is out of warranty, but would I like to sign up for their new plan and get a new smartphone every 18 months for free today?  It will only cost an extra $20-30 per month depending on the model I choose.  Yeah, no thanks, I’d prefer it if you’d a) stand by the product that you manufacture and distribute and replace it, given that there is obviously something wrong with that model, or b) manufacture a decent goldfingered product in the first place that doesn’t crap out at, what, the nine-month mark?  But I’m getting onto the cell phone companies now, and that’s not my focus.  My focus is the phone.

I’m of that magical generation that saw the first widespread use of cellphones during my formative years.  Hell, I’m of that generation where the cool kids had pagers in high school, so the cell phones of today are nothing short of monkey-math miracles.

But are they really?  The first phone I had was one of those Nokia jobs that everybody born before 1995 recognizes, the little gray brick with a keypad and the calculator display.  It was indestructible, it could run for seven and a half days without needing a charge, it played the best game ever (MOTHERFARGOING SNAKE AM I RIGHT).  My phone today runs for about 16 hours before it needs charging — that’s if I’m not using it much during the day — and it breaks when the East wind blows, apparently.  THIS IS AN UPGRADE.  And yeah, it’ll check my e-mail and my facebook and let me take pictures and post my dinner to instagram, and that’s nice, but THAT’S NOT WHAT A PHONE IS DESIGNED TO DO.  I have been on the smartphone train for about a year and a half, and I am starting to wonder if this is the station where I get off.

The other bit of technology was my tablet, a Nexus 7 which today decided that life was too hard and pooped itself in a cloud of unintelligible technicolor dots and squiggles run across its display.  Again, I was using it to — brace yourself — browse the net at the time, which, I’m sorry, should hardly force it to break a sweat, let alone overload its tiny little robot brain, but there you have it.  The tablet crapping out isn’t the pulled hamstring that the phone is, but it’s an annoyance, and happening as it did on the same day — in fact in the same morning — it felt downright conspiratorial.  And again, it makes me wonder how much I need the tablet to do things that, in all fairness, I can do on the laptop with slightly less portability and convenience.

I love technology, I really do.  But it feels like more and more it’s designed to be disposable, and that’s a thing which just strikes me as completely backward.  We don’t need a brand new iPhone model to drop every year (and for that matter, we damn sure don’t need to be camping out overnight for days to get it — what is wrong with us [just to clarify, by us I mean people who actually do that crap, which does not and never will include me]).  What we need is technology that enriches our lives and that can be depended upon.  Like that goldfingered little gray brick of a phone.  How I miss her sometimes.

Toddler Life, Chapter 128: Staying with the Grandparents

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Let me preface by saying that I love my son dearly. He is a searing beacon of joyfulness and hope and all things good, and it is my greatest aspiration that I could become half the man he seems to think I am.

But, I am probably going to kill him.

I’m not gonna lie, the kid has it rough right now (as rough as a kid who has everything he could hope for and doesn’t even have to clean up his own room yet can have it, I guess). He’s adjusting to having a baby sister in the house, which has got to be confusing for his tiny lizard brain. He’s also in that “terrible twos” stage where every snack he’s not allowed to have means he’s going to starve to death, every fun thing he’s not allowed to do means he will never have fun again ever in his life, and every moment he’s not surgically attached to my leg or my wife’s is a moment in which there is no happiness in the world (more importantly, the room) for ANYBODY. He is needy, he is demanding, he is a phenomenon of auditory wave production: he can, on demand, produce sounds that are either so loud they have no business emanating from a human who stands knee-high, or sounds that … god, how can it be described? Imagine a mosquito buzzing right next to year, and that mosquito is also scratching its nails down a chalkboard while playing a kazoo off-key and droning in some discordant minor key, “DADDY, WANT POPSICLE”. It’s a sound and a tone that makes me wish I did not have ears. How he learned to produce this tone I have no idea, but HE MUST BE STOPPED. I am sure that if the government could somehow weaponize a toddler’s whine, no military in the world would stand against us for fear of the psychological trauma that the sound can cause.

Luckily, my parents are magnanimous old souls, and they lie to me and tell me that he always behaves fantastically for them, so they agreed that he could stay with them for a night or two.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to foist my child off on his hapless grandparents. They asked for him.

But I’m not here today to write about the kid. No, I’m here to talk about a night without the kid.

Toddlers are like tiny black holes. They drift around, sucking up your energy and time, occasionally throwing toothbrushes into the toilet and sticking lollipops on the backs of the cats. (Black holes do that stuff, right? I may have gotten distracted.) But you can get used to living with just about anything. We can tune out most of his whining. We eat fast and without tasting so that we can finish our meals in less than the time it takes for him to fidget with a few pieces of broccoli and start demanding popsicles so that we can field his tantrum. We step over and around and through the messes he’s left all over the house, somehow having blinded ourselves to them, as if the entire area of the house that is less than six inches above the ground is an enormous SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field (thanks Douglas Adams!). That’s just our life. Every couple of days (…or every couple of weeks) we’ll clean house from all the insanity that he causes, and we live with it.

But tonight, he’s gone. And the house is so wonderfully, terribly peaceful.

There are no tantrums. No screams to go outside. No tugging and yelling to get up and play (“DON’T SIT, DADDY”). No haphazard and wanton destruction of the room: no toys strewn about, no magazines knocked in the floor, no tiny puddles of milk and juice and unidentified sticky substances underfoot.

Have our lives ever been this quiet before?

We went to dinner, my wife and I, taking sprout the second with us in her carrier. I can remember (vaguely) taking sprout the first with us to restaurants, shortly after he was born (in other words, shortly after our Life Before Children — a time so darkly lost in history it can scarcely be remembered), and thinking how stressful it was to eat out with a child. Then he grew to be a toddler and it got even worse. Now? A newborn in a carrier? We’re on vacation! We sat across from one another at dinner, enjoyed a little bit of quiet conversation, and then stopped trying to fill the void and just enjoyed the motherfargoing SILENCE.

Silence. It’s such a simple thing. You never think about it when you have it in spades. Living alone? Early married life? You can have all the silence you like, you can go crazy on it. When you have a kid — a toddler, no less — you begin to forget what silence even means. Silence might as well be Narnia. Mythical. Impossible. Imaginary. You get snippets of it — an hour while the kid naps, a blissful moment while the kid plays in quiet with a new toy, a handful of seconds after you close the door and walk around to the other side of the car — but you don’t get to enjoy it. There is no stretching of the legs, no draining of the tension in the neck, no softening and unclenching of blood vessels or anuses. You live in fear and dread of the next tantrum, the next shout, the next dropped cheerio that turns out to be the next great calamity.

We eat dinner in silence. We drive home in silence. We do the dishes, pick up some toys around the house, get ready for bed, in perfect, blissful silence. It’s glorious. Wondrous. And we miss the kid.

For all the noise and all the messes and all the noise and all the tantrums and all the noise and all the disagreeing and did I mention the noise, the house feels empty without him in it. Were our lives ever this quiet? How did we ever deal with this much quiet?

I am fighting against my basic urges. I am trying to enjoy the time without having to worry about him, without saving him from pitching himself down the stairs or from impaling his eyeball with a fork or from cracking his skull on the coffee table, without listening to his fits and his whining, but I can’t. Something in your DNA wants to have the child near even when having him near makes you want to kill him.

Thanks, mom and dad, for taking the sprout (the terror, the speaker of demands, the destroyer of rooms, the scatterer of toys) for a couple of days. Keep him as long as you want. But not too long. We miss him over here.

Opinions are Okay, Nonsense Bigoted Politically Insane Opinions Are Not

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Want to give yourself an aneurysm?  Want to feel a blind, all-consuming urge to destroy another human being with your bare hands boil through your veins?  Cruise over to this article by Stephen Webb, entitled “Why Soccer is Un-American”, and give it a read.  I’ll wait.

Okay, disclaimers first.  I don’t know Stephen Webb’s background, but given what I read in this article I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s one of these more-or-less-lunatic-fringe right wingers that LOVES AMURIKA and wouldn’t piss on the rest of the world if it was on fire.  Seriously, there is so much anti-everything-but-America in this article that I actually vomited a little bit of red, white, and blue after reading it.  Just a little bit.  I also don’t know what an article about soccer is doing in a magazine like Politico, which I don’t read regularly, or in fact ever, but I imagine it’s just one of those topical pieces to fill space in a periodical — hey, we have some space to fill, the World Cup is going on, let’s write about that!  Not that I would know ANYTHING about that on this blarg.  Ahem.

So, in this article, Webb lists a litany of reasons why soccer hasn’t caught on in the US, arguing from the standpoint that sports are “a reflection of national character and aspirations,” which I’ll grant is in a lot of ways true.  But basically, after that first sentence, he deconstructs soccer and our nationalism (the way he sees it) in ways which are frankly bordering on certifiable.  When I first read it, I thought the whole thing was a gag piece, until I read the disclaimer that he himself printed at the bottom which states that the entire article is “non-ironic” except for the ADHD study that he completely made up.  Let’s just start there.  You can’t write a serious piece, one meant to be taken seriously and read intellectually and, presumably, to have a discourse had over it, and then just invent a fake study as one of your supporting points.  Okay?  You just can’t.  But we’ll come to that in time.

Here, then, is a summation his arguments as to why soccer isn’t taking off in the US, and why they are so ridiculous, so insane, so bat-sharknado, poop-flinging crazy that if you read Politico unironically, you should rethink your life decisions which have led you to this point.

  1. There is not enough violence and aggression in soccer to satiate our national bloodlust.  Okay, bloodlust was my word, but it’s certainly implied.  In short, he claims that we love sports like (American) football for the innate violence and aggression that the sport demands.  Two things.  First of all, uh, that’s insane.  We love sports because they’re violent?  Sure, (American) football has its share of warlike, pound-your-neighbor-into-a-pulp-for-no-good-reason behavior, but baseball?  Basketball?  I’d argue that soccer is at least as violent, with the potential for injuries as significant if not more so.  Which is the second point.  These guys (soccer players) are running around a field at top speed with feet flying everywhere wearing virtually no protective gear.  Watching the game, I don’t know how any of the players escape without at least a rolled ankle; compound fractures of the shinbone seem more likely.  How is this not violent enough for us? STUPID x1.
  2. The game is about preventing goals rather than scoring them.  Sorry, but no.  American sports are just the same.  In (American) football, it’s oft-stated that the best offense is a good defense.  There’s a huge premium put on preventing the other team’s scores.  Heck, look at this year’s Super Bowl, where the #1 offense (Denver) met the #1 defense (Seattle).  It wasn’t even close; Seattle embarrassed Denver through superior defense.  And baseball?  Yeah, sorry.  Who’s the most important person on the field during a baseball game?  If you said anybody besides the pitcher, hook up some jumper cables to your nipples and try again.  What’s the pitcher’s job, again?  Oh, that’s right, TO KEEP THE OTHER TEAM FROM SCORING.  Saying that soccer is a defense-oriented sport and that’s why Americans don’t like it is as idiotic as saying that fat-free potato chips are better for you than the regular kind.  You’re fooling yourself.  STUPID x2.
  3. Soccer minimalizes the performance of the individual.  This is getting a bit broken-record here, but let’s look again at American sports.  Football.  Is one man responsible for the victory or defeat of his team?  No.  Baseball?  Ehhhhh… maybe you could say the pitcher is, but it’s a stretch.  Basketball?  I don’t care how good LeBron is, if he doesn’t have competent teammates he’s not winning anything.  They’re all team sports, and typically the best team wins.  Sharknado, look at my hometown Atlanta Falcons.  We’ve got some excellent players, but last season, we were one of the worst teams in the league.  Individual performances do not success make.  THAT SAID, shut up.  Soccer teams have stars.  Pele?  Ronaldinho?  I didn’t even follow soccer and I knew those names.  STUPID x3.
  4. Kicking a ball is not as precise as hitting or throwing it.  Oh my god.  It’s getting really bad now.  Seriously?  Okay, deep breath.  AMERICAN FOOTBALL.  Kicking the ball is a major goldfingered part of the game, precisely because you lose control when you kick it.  You know what you gain?  RAW FARGOING POWER (see #1).  They offer points for a field goal because it’s not easy to kick a ball with control through a set of uprights thirty or forty yards away.  And hitting?  Uh, nope, wrong again. If hitting were precise the scores for baseball games would be in the double digits every game.  And has Webb been watching these World Cup matches, or any professional soccer matches ever?  Tell me there’s no precision in the way those guys can kick.  Are they perfect?  Of course not.  Does luck play a role?  YES, JUST LIKE IN EVERY OTHER SPORT EVER.  STUPID x4.
  5. He made up a study about why soccer is basically only appealing to people with ADHD.  Because watching the ball bounce back and forth stimulates the “lesser humans” in a way that “sophisticated sports” doesn’t.  Seriously.  He said that.  It’s so idiotic I can’t even dissect it.  STUPID x5.

Sorry, Stephe.  Five strikes and you’re out.

There’s more, of course.  He talks about how the sport is “socialist” because of the low scores and the way that nobody really stands out.  About how scoring is an accident rather than by design.  And okay, okay, I get that this is an opinion piece, and just like buttholes, everybody has opinions.  Also, this is the internet, so everybody (even me!) can share his opinion just as easily as the next guy, no matter how stupid it is.  The problem I really have with this article is not that Webb (obviously) hates soccer: hates it so passionately that it’s not enough for him not to watch it, he wants you not to watch it either (narcissist).  The problem I have is that he takes all this, all his idiotic mouth-foaming ill-informed illogical hate and then goes and makes it political.

Don’t like soccer?  That’s fine.  But it’s no less American than any other sport, certainly not for any of the reasons he’s listed.  And it’s not a lesser sport, no matter how you slice it.  It’s just not popular in America, and do you know why?  Because we’re not exposed to it.  Check the statistics.  Viewership for this World Cup is through the roof and breaking records left and right because the sport is compelling to watch.  Why have we not been exposed, then?  BECAUSE ADVERTISERS CAN’T PUT ENOUGH OF THEIR BRIGHTLY-COLORED PSYCHO-VOMIT INTO YOUR FACE DURING A MATCH.  Seriously.  That’s it.  There are no breaks during a match except for halftime, and that means no ads.  No ads means no money, and no money means the networks aren’t showing it.

The only way soccer is Un-American is that it isn’t peppered with two-minute breaks for you to get off your donk and go get another beer or tray of chips or buffalo wing.  You know, during the time-out or the pitcher substitution or the instant replay review or the inning change or the scoring time-out or the offense/defense changeover or the injury time-out or the rain delay.

Clicka Clack

Pavowski5 Comments

The body has all sorts of delightful ways to remind you that you’re getting older.  Some are obvious, others are subtle.  Some are tsunamis that strike without warning, others are the slow inevitable creep of continental drift.  (I’m looking at you, my slowly-but-surely receding hairline.)  Today I’m keenly aware of one nasty one in particular — my crackling bones.

I’ll go ahead and be judicious and say that it’s possible I can’t attribute the cricks and cracks in question entirely to age, but I’m living in denial that my running career of the last couple years is causing lasting damage to my body.  It’s not.  IT JUST ISN’T, OKAY?  Now that that’s settled…

I posted last week about another kind of drift, that being the outward slide of my waistline and the upward trend of my bathroom scale.  Okay, my wife was pregnant so it was impossible to be careful about what I was eating, not that I was trying anyway, but that’s over with now, Sprout the Second is a month old tomorrow (!), and it’s time to restore normality.  So: diet starts this weekend, and my new exercise regimen has been ramping up for about a week and a half.  Or maybe two days.  I don’t know because, as I’ve mentioned before, my house exists outside of space and time as we know it.  Or, at the very least, space and time are playing silly buggers on me.

Anyway, that new regimen has me doing some bodyweight exercises on days on which I do not run.  I have a feeling that this is a pretty good way for things to start off because on the first few days I did these exercises, I could not climb stairs properly afterward, nor could I reach the top of my head to wash it in the shower.  I have it on good authority that destroying your muscles like that is a good way to wake them up, so those must be good signs, yeah?  That workout is getting easier, so I’m ramping it up, doing extra sets and extra reps.  But during yesterday’s session, I dunno if it was especially quiet in the room or if I was in a higher state of awareness due to the blood flow or the dizziness induced by my 60-second plank attempt, but I heard a funny sound while I was doing some jumping jacks.

Quick sidenote on the jumping jacks.  I’m not sure if I’m doing them wrong, and I feel that I must be, because they are the easiest part of the workout for me.  Unless of course I perfected the technique in 5th grade gym class and my muscles stored it in memory which is tapped into and processed with perfect efficiency now twenty years later.  That works, right?

Whatever.  The jumping jacks are easy, but I hear a sound.  Sort of like when you have a handful of pop rocks in your mouth; a low crackling that fades in and out as you open and close your mouth.  Or maybe like the consistent repetitive clack clack of chips at a poker table.  Damn, where’s that coming from?  Oh, it’s just my entire both feet clicking and crackling away with every jump.

I’ve had a pretty constant pop to my right ankle for a lot of years: the detritus of a pretty gnarly ankle sprain that I never went to the doctor for because I’m a man.  It goes off if I rotate my ankle in bed or flex the foot going up or down stairs, stuff like that.  But this noise is not that.  This is my entire foot, in fact both feet.  I tune in more closely as I finish the set, and it’s like I can hear dozens if not hundreds of tiny little bones and ligaments and tendons clicking and sliding and ticking against each other like a bunch of ball bearings trapped in a spider web.

What do I do with this information?  Go to the doctor I saw a few months back for my plantar fasciitis and say, oh, yeah, now I can hear every bone in my foot move when I do jumping jacks?  He’ll only tell me to stop doing jumping jacks or stop running, so that’s right out.

I guess I just have to accept that this is my new body, one that makes all sorts of noises I wasn’t planning for it to make.  (I’m sure my wife could tell fantastic stories about my unintentional emissions.)  I have another birthday in a few weeks, maybe by that time my entire skeleton will calcify and I won’t be able to scratch my nose without sounding like a set of dominoes falling down a marble staircase.

Enough Inertia

Pavowski3 Comments

I made a mistake yesterday.

No, it wasn’t the four hours of Sherlock that I watched.  Sure, I could perhaps have put the time to better use, but watching Benedict Cumberbatch in action is never the wrong thing to do.

No, it wasn’t the mediocre writing session I had.  That sharknado is gonna happen, I’m down with it.  The only mistake would be giving up and giving in, and letting the Howler Monkey bite my throat out.

I stepped on a scale.

I’m not going to lie and say it was a great shock to me that I had put on weight.  No, I’ve been on this expectant father trip before, I know what it entails.  Diet and healthy eating kinda go out the window when the wife is eating for two, and well, we’ve made all this extra food anyway, something broken in me since childhood won’t let me waste food on a plate.  Long story short, dear sprout #2 has left me about twenty pounds heavier than I was a year or so ago.  I say a year ago because that’s when I stopped looking at scales in general, not because I was upset at what they had to say but because I’d achieved a level of weight loss I was happy with and didn’t see the need to confirm that I was maintaining.  I was running around twenty miles a week, so I didn’t have anything to worry about.

Needless to say, not only have I fallen off the wagon, but the wagon circled around to pick me up and accidentally ran over my neck.  It’s time to dust myself off and get back on the horse.  (And I think I’m mixing up my metaphors again, goldfinger it.)

Running has been about self-improvement since day one for me.  Somewhere along the way it turned into fun, as well, but that doesn’t let me off the hook for the reason for the season.  I didn’t start running to have a good time, I started it to get my asgard in shape.  And it worked.  Trouble is, when you run a lot, and your metabolism kicks up, you start to feel like you can really eat just about anything and get away with it, which is true to a point, that point in my case being when I tore my foot up back in January and then got plantar fasciitis in my other foot just as the first foot was healing.  So now I’m working on getting back into running like I was before, but I’m twenty pounds heavier and my feet are still a little gimpy.

But I’ve also had the wrong approach with my running of late, which is the running scared approach.  I’ve been running scared of injury, running just to maintain, running to keep weight gain at bay.  I haven’t been running to improve, which is why I haven’t been improving.  I’ve been running most of my miles at just over ten-minute pace for the past couple months now.  For me, for the level I was at before January, that’s kinda pitiful.  So, no more ten-minute miles!  If I’m not improving, I’m backsliding, and there has been quite enough backsliding for one year, thank you very much.

But that’s only part of the equation, a fact I was able to ignore two years ago.  See, I was such an out-of-shape mess when I started running that the shock to my system when I started up was like turning loose a leaf blower in a ball pit.  Total havoc, and I cleared out a lot of balls and lost a lot of weight.  It wasn’t the whole picture, but I was happy enough with the results that I didn’t care about that.  I had lost the equivalent of a big-asgard bag of dog food in weight, who was I to complain?  More running won’t shock my system like that again, though.  I know that because I’ve been ramping up my mileage a little at a time since March, but I’m still gaining weight and I’m not getting any faster.

Time to start focusing on the diet and even doing some exercise aside from running, which is really going to be a test for me.  The only reason I’ve managed to stick with running so long is that at some point I tricked myself into thinking it was actually enjoyable and was therefore not really exercise.  But I have some tools in my pocket, a lot of resources, and I’m frustrated enough with myself that I think I can finally get this fitness thing sorted, and sorted properly.

So, no more lazy running.  No more getting down on myself about my writing.  (Yeah, right.)  If I’m not moving forward, I’m moving backward, and I’m too damn old to be moving backward anymore.

Speaking of moving forward, the novel is at 90%.  Feet don’t fail me now.  Except I don’t write with my… you know what I mean.