Tag: SoCS

Parental Exhaustion

Pavowski11 Comments

When you’re a parent, the exhaustion creeps in by degrees.  You don’t even notice it.

I’m not talking about when the sprout is first born and you go from sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours a night to catching three hours at a stretch and being supremely thankful for it.  No, everybody knows parents of newborns don’t get any sleep.  I’m talking about a few months, if not years, later.  The tantrums, the waking up in the middle of the night, the stampeding around the house for hours on end, it’s just a part of life.  You don’t notice it.

Somehow, you find yourself subsisting on less and less sleep.  You get by on five or six hours and you think you’ve won the lottery.  The raccoon rings under your eyes look less like black circles and more like stylish pirate eyeliner (to your mind at least).  On the weekend, you sleep until six AM and it feels like the angels have delivered you to a downy bed of heaven feathers.  You’re still shambling through the day like a hamstrung zombie, but you feel almost normal.  This is your life, and it isn’t so bad.

What you don’t realize (because you’re too tired to realize anything that isn’t whacking you over the head with a pool noodle, despite the fact that you don’t own a pool to necessitate a noodle) is that that exhaustion is piling up like collectible whatzits in the closet, and there comes a point at which the exhaustion you’re sweeping under the rug is now seeping out through the edges like so much asbestos particulate.  And as much as you develop an ability to power through and function on minimal amounts of sleep, the time comes when the exhaustion can no longer be denied.  You find yourself resting your eyes at traffic lights, resting your entire body on the couch during the third episode in a row of Power Rangers, and dashing to bed at the hallowed hour of eight o’clock because you just can’t take it anymore.

The sprout’s bedtime routine has become a little bit more manageable in the past few months.  He’s gone from demanding three or four stories and two songs to just two bedtime stories and a bit of a cuddle, followed by five or ten minutes of me lying in his floor so that he doesn’t have to fall asleep by himself.  This is not a bad arrangement.  He gets the comfort of his big bad daddy being there in the room with him as he drifts off to sleep, and I get a few blessed minutes of quiet to recharge for the sprint to bedtime.

But tonight the exhaustion crept in by another degree.

I read a Dr. Seuss double-header, tucked him in, turned the lights off, and stretched out on the floor, and the next thing I knew my wife was poking me in the back in the dark.  In the space of about thirty seconds, I’d fallen into a deathlike, dreamless sleep and logged nearly a full hour of blissful naptime right there on the carpet.

I used to wonder how my dad could sleep anywhere in the house, at any time of the day, for any amount of time.  I think the picture is becoming a little bit clearer.

This post is part of SoCS.

The Shape of a Story

Pavowski7 Comments

There’s a shape to writing, and that shape is a pear.

No, I’m kidding.  To be fair, writing does go pear-shaped, almost every day if I’m honest, but rare are the days when it doesn’t turn around and end up feeling productive or enlightening or, at the very least, right to have written, even on the days when the writing is total bollocks.  But to say that writing is pear-shaped is to oversimplify in the worst way.  It’s calling a baby a factory for poop and tears and snot.  It’s calling a puppy a factory for poop and vomit and midnight barking.  It’s calling my car a lumbering bucket of soon-to-be-rusted-and-worthless bolts.

Also, to call writing pear-shaped is to essentially say writing is fruity, and it’s certainly not that.  Fruit can’t shave away at your soul like writing does.  Fruit can’t make you feel impossibly brilliant and numbingly stupid in an instant.  At its best, fruit is delicious but transient.  It doesn’t stay with you.

No, I think writing is not so much a shape as a line.  Specifically, it’s a line describing a downward arc through the depths of the soul and the psyche.  You start high, full of motivation and ambition and giddy thoughts that you’re writing the best thing ever, that the story will be momentous and the characters transcendent and the themes and the symbolism and the echoes of the real world will reverberate through the annals of literature, or, at the very least, score you an interview segment on Conan.  You start at the top.

Then the work begins and you lose steam.  You start to struggle.  You realize that writing is hard.  That it’s incredibly difficult to write believable characters, that making multiple plotlines weave together is as easy as playing Chinese Checkers blindfolded, that the nuts and bolts of your narrative make as much sense as a box of chocolates without the label card.  You bite into this thing and you don’t know if you’re getting coconut or caramel or a goldfingered disgusting cherry.  Then you get halfway through your draft and it gets really hard.  The characters are stupid.  Your idea is stupid.  Your narrative might as well be a bile-soaked hairball for all that you want to try and straighten it out, and the end you imagined makes about as much sense as the Duck-Billed Platypus.  And down, down, down you slide.

But you FINISH.  And you float there for a moment, translucent and gleeful, basking in the fact that you finished this monolith task.  Slew the mammoth.  Ate the five-pound steak.  And then you re-read the thing and you realize it’s even worse than you feared, and DOWN, DOWN, DOWN you slide, all the way to the bottom, where maybe one day you finish the thing, and it’s terrible and crippled and ugly and squealing and you feel like you really should put it out of its misery but you spent so much time on it that maybe you ought to just send it out, and then the bottom really, finally, truly, for realsies, drops the fargo out and you plummet into the all-consuming black hole at the bottom of your self-doubting soul.

No, that’s not right.

Writing is a line, but it doesn’t arc downward.  It curls up, like the pointy ends of Snidely Whiplash’s majestic mustache.  You start at the bottom.  Your idea, ill-formed.  Your characters, half-baked.  Your voice uncertain.  But you pick the ball up and begin to write.  For days, you struggle.  You fight the momentum of non-productiveness and you urge the story forward, bit by agonizing bit.  And then a little miracle happens.  The lights start to come on.  The engine turns on, splutters, then catches.  The story starts to move under its own power, just a little bit.  And this gives you hope.  And you keep writing and the story develops its own momentum and one day you’re writing but it doesn’t feel like you’re writing anymore, you’re just seeing the story unfold and transcribing as it does, like some lunatic translator scribing a lost manuscript into English for the first time.  The dragons you’ve yet to slay don’t seem so large, the sharks don’t seem to have quite so many teeth, and you feel you may actually finish this thing, and that momentum lights in your fledgling little wings and spirits you off the ground.  And you finish the thing, in a heady swirl of accomplishment and drunken confidence and sheer self-amazement that from nothingness you have created SOMEthing, in an act that flies in the face of everything you thought you knew before.

You still have doubts, but you know you’ve accomplished a capital “T” Thing, and then you go back and read it and you realize that for all its problems it’s not that bad.  And that realization buoys you even further up, into the rarefied air that only the astronauts and the gods get to breathe (okay, astronauts don’t breathe the outside air, I get that, I’m on a roll here).  And you begin to refine your creation, to shape and polish and sharpen it into the thing you never knew it could be, and then, finally, giddy with achievement and drunk with confidence, you send it out, and Icarus himself could not fly closer to the sun.

Maybe Icarus is the wrong comparison, or maybe he’s the perfect one.  Both of those lines are true, and both are false.  Writing lifts you up on the crests of the highs and casts you down into the snakepits of the lows, in a wickedly exhausting roller-coaster ride that somehow lasts for months on end.  The point is, it’s a hell of a ride, and you might barf at the end.

This post is part of SoCS.  Somehow I wrote all this without an edit.

Sharks.

Pavowski4 Comments

I’m on vacation in beautiful Panama City Beach this weekend, courtesy of a father-in-law who loves it here and takes the family every chance he gets, and a school system kind enough to give teachers a four-day weekend in mid-October.  What’s that?  The kids get the long weekend too?  Meh.

I’ve been here before, but there’s something different about being here as an adult and being here as a kid, or for that matter, a pre-adult.  The opportunities for relaxation are virtually endless.  The beach is powder-fine and not too crowded this time of year, the water is a glorious iridescent bluey-green swirl, the temperatures are warm but not oppressive, the sunrises and sunsets are transcendent.

And I have ruined it all by peopling the waters with sharks.

Metaphorical ones, mind you.  I did see a shark here last time we visited — tiny one, about the length of my arm, just cruising the shallows like a deadly, silent Roomba — but I don’t think those are terribly common to these parts.  No, my sharks are sharks of the mind, because I have done a thing that I swore as a teacher I would never do: I have brought work with me on vacation.

I don’t have any excuse.  It’s a terrible move, but it’s the end of the quarter, I’m behind on grading (juggling 180 students will do that to a man, no matter how well-meaning), and it simply has to get done.  I’ve got a stack of about fifty student essays to grade and a gradebook full of back assignments that have to be put into the electronic grading system before I head back on Tuesday.

So as we pulled in to the condo and took the first breathtaking look at the view from our balcony, I saw not only the vast unknowable expanse of the ocean but also the ominous stack of paper tucked away in my bag.  I saw not only the pearlescent sands where my pasty skin will suffer hideous burns, but also the labyrinth of clicks and categories and long webpage loading times that I must walk to get all these grades put in.

In short, I look at that water and I see mothertrucking sharks.

Because I know that as soon as I let my bare feet sink into that sand, as soon as I dunk one toe in the ocean, the moment I watch my son’s face light up when he hits that beach, those papers and grades and all my obligations are going to melt away from my mind like so much butter on a hot plate.  And then they are going to devour me when I get back to work on Tuesday.  In fact, I’ve already chummed the waters, because in between the last sentence and this one, I brought the laptop out onto the deck with me and the cool night breeze is drifting through what’s left of my hair and the starlight is twinkling on the waves and the headlights are floating slowly past on the strip and all I can think about is how glorious my run will be in the morning and how many hours I can possibly let my son play on the beach before people start to question whether I’m his father.  (You know, cuz his skin will be a delicious ochre color before we leave, I’ve no doubt.)

This might be a time to panic with all these sharks circling about.  Or maybe it’s time to remember that these are only metaphorical sharks, and as such pose as much threat to me as a whiff of vegetarian pasta.  (Unpleasant, but not ultimately harmful.)  Times like these call for bigger boats, or maybe just bigger glasses of wine.

Mm, wine. Time to chum the waters a little more.

This post is part of SoCS.

Routine and Breaking With It

Pavowski12 Comments

This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1214/

The theme for the week is “getting away, or getting out.”  As usual with these stream of consciousness posts, I won’t be doing any editing or fixorating after this post is finished, so it may be a bit unpolished, which I guess is the point.

In the four (now five, yikes) months since I’ve been “seriously writing,” I’ve come to notice a few things about, well, writing.  Specifically, that while rituals are important, they can also be limiting.  What I mean by that is, there’s this box.  And you always hear that it’s important to think outside the box, or whatever, and that’s true.  The box can hold you back.  But that sells the box short, really, because the box can also be comforting, like an old sweatshirt you slip into on the first cold days of Autumn or like a glass of wine before bed.

Case in point, when school was in session, I wrote in virtually the same way every day.  I’d steal a solid thirty minutes on my lunch break to work on my novel, using that time to block out any other distractions.  Really focused work.  Looking back, now, I can identify the work that I completed in that way not just by the timestamps but also by the way it’s written.  Word choice, sentence structure, ratio of dialogue to prose… my work completed by the routine has a certain feel to it that my work outside of routine doesn’t have.  Not to say it’s better; there are certainly merits to the work I completed outside of routine.  But the routine was the box, and I came to depend on it, so much so that in the last month of the Project I found myself mentally blocked, in no small part I fear because I didn’t have my routine to mentally prepare myself.

Now I love routine, but this experience with my first draft has shown me that you can’t always count on routines, so one thing I want to work on in my next project is shaking things up a bit and breaking at least some of my dependence on routine.

It shouldn’t shock me the effect routine has on my writing; it’s the same with my running.  When I was just getting started running, I did all my runs at the mall.  Well, as I increased my ability to run faster and farther, I started to become aware of hitting a wall with my runs at the mall.  After all, it was the same loop, the same hills, over and over and over.  So I started to branch out, to run different routes all around my neighborhood and, as I pushed my distance still farther, around town, and I noticed my pace and my endurance increasing all the more.  Breaking the routine allowed me to make bigger gains faster than if I’d kept doing the same thing over and over.  With new hills and new turns I was challenging myself in different ways, and that helped make me into a better runner.

It puts me in mind of those ads for P90X and Insanity that were big over the last couple of years, the central tenet of which was “muscle confusion.”  Here was a program designed to keep you from getting into the box in the first place.  The focus of these workouts was to exercise in a different way every single day to keep the body and the muscles from recognizing a pattern and getting lazy.  I never tried the workouts myself, but the reasoning seems sound enough.

So the box helps — routine helps — but more and more I think it’s going to be important that I work to get away from routines, get away from what’s comfortable and easy, and force myself to step off the reservation, out of the box, and go tumbling down a cliffside every now and then.  That’s my writing as well as my running and my cross training.  Hell, the fact that I’m cross training at all now — something I haven’t done in two years of running — is a step in that direction.

But I’m not trashing the box.  Just like there is no good without bad, no light without dark, neither can there be invention and experimentation without the norm to return to occasionally, even regularly.

It begs the question, then: what’s “out of the box” in terms of writing?  Off the top of my head, it means straying from some of these habits and tendencies.  Overuse of fancy say-nothing words like “particularly”.  Preoccupation with sounding clever or intelligent.  Fear of the simple statement.  Gravitating toward dark subject matter in short fiction.  Trying too hard to avoid dialogue tags.

For that matter, how can I get out of the box with running?  It’s harder than ever at the moment to break with routine since the sprout joins me for most of my runs, and that means the stroller, and that means I’m very limited in where I can go.  But here are some ideas.  More speedwork and/or interval sessions.  Running without music more.  Varying the dips and twists and turns in my route as much as possible.  Making sure to drive to a more interesting location for a run every couple weeks or so.

In short, routine can be helpful, but it can also be a crutch, and if you don’t escape the routine every now and then, then like a mouse in a cage, you will become trapped by it.

Am I overthinking routine?  How else can you push the boundaries while still getting the most out of a routine?  And do I overstate or understate the value of getting away from it?