Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
To be fair, in conversation it came out that David meant a god from Wicked + Divine, which made way more sense, but it was still a hilarious comment. If only I was drawn by Jamie McKelvie!
That’s as opposed to this morning, where the glowiness of the blue was muted down to nearly black thanks to leave-in conditioner.
On the whole, I am really loving this hair … and not just because it’s so easy to look like a Dragonball Z character.
At 1:30 PM on Saturday it was raining in Maryland.
I love the rain. Maybe it’s because I’m not a hot weather person or someone who spends much time outside. I think it has more to do with the cement porch on our row home on 64th street growing up. I would sit on the stoop when it rained and watch it come down safe from the storm, and enjoy that spicy cement petrichor of the city that followed.
I love the rain, but I’ve also never planned an outdoor wedding in a state park. That’s what I was considering at 1:30 PM on Saturday as our car idled at the foot of a little hill that lead up to the pair of pavilions that would house our good friend Karen’s wedding to her partner Matt. From our position, the rain seemed less lovable.
Karen was one of my earliest and most-persistent theatre friends at Drexel, and we worked on a run of shows together. She is like a Chaotic Good version of a typically mean Kristen Schaal character. Also, she is a experienced alto, a lawyer, and a librarian. As with E, she is one of those human beings that can and will achieve seemingly anything set before her.
I finished lacing up my boots and we mounted steps set into the hill. It was raining hard and I tilted my head sideways to keep my lacquered blue hair safe under E’s umbrella, lest my Super Goo [actual product name] run down my face in rubbery sluices. We did not know anyone in the pavilion. We picked up a pair of programs mounted on wooden handles, a bit spongey from the rain. Printed on the rear was SATB version of Charles Welsey’s “Hallelujah.” We squinted at the first measure to see if the starting pitch in bass was a G or an Ab and E gave me my starting pitch.
It rained during the ceremony, which was delightfully rooted in literature, law, and pop culture. At one point a sustained peal of thunder caused the pavilion to shudder, and while some guests winced Karen grinned madly and gave us all a thumbs up. It was an extremely Karen moment. Inside the pavilion there was love.
After the ceremony, we guests shuffled through the rain across a stone patio to a second pavilion. Inside this one there was magic – lights and glass and color and a murmuring of friends reuniting. I hewed closely to Hillary and her husband, who I can never spend enough time with, and their friend Amanda, who I have met a half a dozen times yet never had a conversation with. We discovered a guest book was full of empty pockets and were supplied with library cards on which we could write our notes.
I decided to catalog the check-outs and returns of our relationship, Karen and Peter: A Brief History (abridged). There was a gap in the middle 00s as we graduated and Karen accumulated degrees, which ended on E and my wedding day; Karen sang “Open Window” for our first dance. I still remember our first listen to Sarah Harmer’s record, driving around in Karen’s dinged little car to buy groceries or supplies for a fraternity event. The memory is mirrored by dozens (if not hundreds) of occasions of E and I singing through the entire You Were Here LP in our car, trading harmony and vocal percussion, me crying during the refrain “Lodestar” every single time.
I looked up from my sketching of our timeline to see that it wasn’t raining anymore. The sun was low and obscured, casting a pinkish hue across the cement patio between the two pavilions. It was perfect light – a sustained “magic hour” to capture every wedding memory in photograph. (“Are you a photographer,” our neighbor inquired later as I extolled the virtues of the light. “No, I learned it from E.” “Oh, she’s a photographer? “No, she’s an an engineer, but her degree is in photography.”) I heard a certain melody lilting through the air…
Here, witnesses appear
And recognize how sacred
Love can be when stated
I leapt up from my seat on our bench to find E already on the patio waiting to dance. We spun slowly and whispered the melody into each other’s ears, pausing occasionally to smile away a potential sob.
As the song ended, a whirling dervish of smiles and flowing white enveloped us in a muscular hug: another perfect memory with Karen.
I hate commercials.
Every since 2004 when we gave up live television and I purchased my first iPod I have been completely removed from the concept of advertising you are forced to consume. Sure, I still use the internet and read magazines, but the ads can be ignored or the page turned. I will never wait through a pre-roll ad to watch a video – I either give up, or silence it and come back a minute later. Every time some great new streaming service pops up and it has ads, I skip it. If I’m going to consume advertising it will be by choice, and I’ll stop when I feel like it.
My one weak spot is Hulu. Hulu saves me from needing live TV, but it comes with the necessary evil of a handful of commercials. During the regular TV season, we typically have a scant 2-3 shows we keep up on each week, but that exposes us to 10-20 minutes of commercials. That’s not to mention season-long binges of their Drag Race archive.
At first I thought my armor was unbreakable – after a decade going without, they would just bounce off of me brain ineffectually. Plus, I had spent a lot of that time being a marketer, so now I can dissect a message easily. They’d have no effect on me.
I was a little bit right for a little while, but then I noticed they were starting to wear me down. Despite picking apart each ad spot, I actually found myself having opinions about car brands and laundry detergents! It heavily disincentivized me from using our Hulu subscription, even if it meant paying three times as much to watch the same show ad-free on Amazon or iTunes.
Then, earlier today, I saw this:
Introducing #hulu‘s new commercial-free option. Limited Commercials or No Commercials… It’s up to you. https://t.co/KNzleEhx0I
— hulu (@hulu) September 2, 2015
And I responded like this:
Yes. Bought. Charge my card right now. This tweet gives you authorization. Go. #NoCommercialsHousehold https://t.co/fSFd6Up4Uz — Peter Marinari (@krisis) September 2, 2015
I immediately steered my browser to Hulu and steeled myself for the potential charge. I figured the cost of renting my eyeballs for 10-20 minutes a week plus binges would be high, but I told myself it would be worth it to free myself from the yoke of forced advertising.
It turned out we were talking about a difference of four dollars. I was so livid I stopped dead in the middle of updating my subscription. All of that time sending advertising across my eyeballs and into my brain, time I’d rather spend watching another episode or writing or sleeping, was only worth four fucking dollars. For a mere $36 a year I could have stayed ad-free – that’s a week of cheap lunch in Center City! Of course I would pay that!
It was one of those moments where I really considered the massive capitalist machine in which we are all mere cogs with no say in our fates. If it only cost $4 to escape ads on Hulu – a rare network that can quantify its exact amount of impressions and demographics, how cheap might it be to get away from them elsewhere? How much could I pay to live my life completely free of the spectre of advertising in a CPC environment where I’ve already proven myself to be a non-clicker, like on YouTube, Facebook, or Google? How much to get an ad-free version of Rolling Stone or ride on a bus with no advertising? I suddenly have the feeling that for all of this passive junk my eyes and ears are bombarded with I could just empty my change jar and make it all go away.
(It reminds me of early in the life of CK when Blogger was free and always broken, and I would send screeds across the internet to Ev begging to pay him anything it would take to get just slightly better service.)
You might say, “You’re crazy! You’re privileged! You’re volunteering to give your money away!” But, let me ask you something – what is crazier? Paying the actual cost of a thing I want to consume and then consuming it, or constantly having my content diluted and my time wasted in exchange for spending nominally less money? Say, four dollars. Which in turn reminds me of this crude comic, which speaks an ultimate amount of truth to all of these things we think we get “for free.”
I refer to this constantly at work. Constantly.
If you’re willing to give all that control away for $4, I hope you spend it on something you really need.
Me? I updated my subscription.
If we were to look at the pie chart of activities of my life (which would still be a terrible use of a pie chart because even when looking at proportional representation out of 100% it’s harder to compare the relative sizes of things in that format – death to pie charts) it would be obvious that comic book reading takes up a not-insignificant amount of my time.
If we are in a room with this comic book EV needs to run to it and bring it back to me to page through. Spidey who is a girl AND is in a rock band? Is there any better thing in the multi-verse?
That meant that EV had a lot of comic books read to her from as soon as she could be propped up to semi-sit-up on her own. Yet, even when she didn’t even have the means to escape from my reading, her attention span wouldn’t necessarily last an entire issue, let alone a whole trade paperback. That changed quite suddenly when I read her Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Avengers Assemble: The Forgeries of Jealousy last summer, a story primarily staring Spider-Girl at its center. EV sat transfixed by the whole thing. She let me read the entire book to her multiple times in one sitting.
I didn’t think too much of it – I just love reading DeConnick’s dialog, so maybe that did the trick, which also explained EV staying put in the fall for Captain Marvel, Volume 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More. The realization didn’t hit me until I read her the critically acclaimed, newly-Hugo-winning Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1 (and to E, who lingered in the room, feigning not paying attention but actually listening quite closely).
That baby would sit still to read books with female heroines.
I tested my theory. Spider-Man? A few pages. Hulk? No interest. Thor? Barely a glance. Storm? Entire issues. The lady version of Thor? Glued to the pages. Spider-Gwen? She picks it up every time we walk up to the attic. Hell, one of her first few dozens words was “Lumberjanes” so she could request the comic of the same name (which I dislike; maybe more on that later).
Tonight we read the first few issues of Ryan North’s delightful Squirrel Girl (recommended highly for kids!) while EV spent the entire time hanging off of me and giggling with glee.
What’s interesting about those books is that they include varying amounts of action and extremely distinct artwork, but they are each about more than a superhero who happens to have breasts. They feature women being women. I don’t mean doing “girl” things. I mean as heroes, their women are distinct in their voices, actions, hopes, and fears from male characters. They could not simply be gender-swapped.
The exercise lead me to look through EVs other books with a critical eye. Most protagonist characters in baby books default to male – the female is almost always the mother! And do you know how many books we have that feature a father in something other than a vestigial, dismissal role? Only a handful I can think of – Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Gaiman’s delightful Fortunately, The Milk, the classic Make Way For Ducklings, and my favorite, Maurice Sendak’s Pierre. However, of those, three of the protagonists are male and three have mothers as the primary female.
In case you are ever wondering – representation matters. Even a baby who cannot say a single word will tune in to media with a character she identifies with more readily than one she doesn’t. I didn’t have to run a very length or scientific experiment to figure it out. When we’re asking to see Black Widow on Avengers merchandise or wondering if we could see Miles Morales – a black, latino Spider-Man – onscreen, it’s not just because we like those characters or are demanding diversity for diversity’s sake.
We want the next generation of real life superheroes to see themselves in the media we allow them to consume.
(Little does EV realize that I have every issue of Wonder Woman from 1975 to present sitting in the attic, waiting to be read to her.)
(I’m also excited to capitalize on her Spider-Lady Love when Silk hits TPB later this year, since she is a rarely-represent female asian hero that’s not the sex-bomb yellow-face routine of Psylocke.)
Baseline Peter on the way to play a Smash Fantastic show in June.
I.
I have wanted to have blue hair for at least half of my life.
Not bright, electric blue, but a dark, steely, navy blue that looked like Wonder Woman’s hair back when newsprint comics didn’t print a true black, but instead built it from other colors such that you could always detect blue in the highlights.
I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. I like blue, but not navy blue. I’m actually a bit afraid of it, to tell the truth. I don’t like how it’s deceptively almost-black. Wearing pants that might be black or might be navy blue used to make me physically itch from confusion. Yet that’s how I’ve always described this dream hair.
I described it in high school, when Gina and I tried to Manic Panic it directly onto my long brown locks and failed to even tint it. I described it in college, when I inexplicably went copper-red instead because it wouldn’t raise eyebrows on interviews as it faded. I described it when I worked for Blue Cross, joking that it was the wrong Pantone blue for me to be their mascot. Yet, even as I did so many other things I had always wanted and dreamt of, I never had that blue hair.
All of that is to say I am proud and quite giddy to be writing this post to you from beneath dark blue locks today, on the fifteenth anniversary of this blog.
II.
If I had to speculate on the origins of my blue-hair obsession, I would trace it back to being psychic, which in turn is linked to summer camp. Not to say that my psychic powers came from summer camp. They’re just related.
Embarking on blondness a few weeks ago, here I am in the Spike From Buffy The Vampire Slayer phase of my bleaching.
Let’s step back for a moment. It was circa Junior year of high school and I had a major crush on a younger girl who, in retrospect, was part of a post-punk early manic-pixie-dream-girl movement of chicks who wore black with zippers and patches and dyed their hair awesome colors and who were very briefly my type. (My actually-punk female friends at the time were blonde and wore plaid.)
I was resolved not to repeat past romantic failures in this instance (oh, youthful hubris) and was gearing up to ask said young lady on a date rather than let the feelings linger unannounced. One night I dreamt that I was riding on a school bus with her sitting behind me, and I turned around to confess my feelings only to see that her hair – previously bleached blonde and dyed in streaks, was now blue.
This was a weird dream not because of the girl or the hair but because of the school bus. I had never ridden one of those yellow-colored, vinyl-seat school busses in any context other than summer camp, and just for one summer.
Summer camp was a miserable experience for me, because it involved spending unadulterated time with other boys my own age. I mostly didn’t like other boys my own age, but mostly because they didn’t like me. That started around the seventh grade, when I was suddenly teased for not being boy enough, which was a different sort of teasing than the teasing I’d experienced for having massive beaver teeth or Spock hair. Sure, all those times I was being teased for being different, but now I was teased for not being the same.
That summer was probably when I stopped really enjoying sports. I was actually a voracious watcher of football and wrestling around that time, and I had always loved gym class. Yet, at a sports-oriented camp, I discovered there were two kinds of boys – the boys who were good at sports and then the boys who got teased for being gay. And, of that subset, I was the one who actually seemed as though I might really be gay, which made me the teased-in-chief.
With that being the experience I associated with yellow school busses, you would think I would have recognized that my blue-haired school bus dream was not a good sign but instead a terrible portent of impending failure. Yet, the next day I waited in the hall in the stairwell outside one of my dream-girl’s classes. Out she emerged, and as I wound up for my actual-life confession of teenage crushdom, I noticed her hair was blue.
“Hi,” she said, smiling, not expecting to see me there.
“Hi,” I replied. Her hair was blue. I searched my memory, trying to recall if she mentioned she would be dying her hair blue. Nothing came up.
“Your hair is blue.” I remarked. It seemed like a good sign.
“Yeah, I did it last night.” Funny, that, since I had dreamt about the blue hair the night before as well.
I did ultimately comment on my feelings in that exchange, referring to them as “non-platonic.” She agreed. I was thrilled. Yet, a week later, she was surprised when I had Gina act as my valet to deliver her roses in homeroom on Valentine’s day, later commenting, “I didn’t know what platonic meant.”
Just as she had misinterpreted me, clearly I had misinterpreted the dream.
As it turns out, she was not amongst the most significant unrequited loves of my teenage life, as displayed by my songwriting habits of the time. However, the blue hair stuck with me. Maybe that part wasn’t such a bad idea.
After one wash, my hair hadn’t quite settled down to the silvery, ash-blonde we were shooting for as a base-coat for the blue.
III.
Last week I went to summer camp for the first time in half my life – since circa the beginnings of my blue-hair urge.
It was not a weeklong hipster summer camp for Brooklynites (not that there is anything wrong with that). Instead, about a quarter of RJMetrics packed up for a weekend of sports, swimming, sun, and sleeping in cabins for no reason at all, although ostensibly the reason was team-building and camaraderie.
A lot of it was the most fun I’ve had while not playing with a band or with a baby in… I don’t know how long. A long time. And, in having that fun, I found myself doing things I’ve never done before – or, at least, had never had fun while doing before. I competently played sports, actually scoring and at one point sliding into a base (I was out). And, a gaggle of much-younger, much-fitter guys taught me how to do flips into the pool – something I’ve always wanted to know how to do.
Due to said band- and baby-having, I don’t get to do a lot of these off-hours team-building and camaraderie things. I’m missing one right now, actually. As a result, I try to do my team-building and camaraderie during my time in the office as much as I can, which means I have to figure out how to do them while working.
That recently took the form of a workgroup around selling analytics to content-based sites. I paired up with a group of people I never get to work with and dissected our favorite money-making blogs to understand how they ticked, which inevitably lead to dissecting this blog to expose those gears and guts of visitor patterns and affiliate links and conversion tracking.
I didn’t give it a second thought. Having a blog is part of who I am just like the band and the baby. I don’t hide those things, so why hide the blog? All of them are a part of what makes me a success.
Driving home on Sunday morning from my idyllic day at camp, it struck me that all the fun had to do with trust. I trust those three-dozen other people every day with my success and the success of our company. They trusted I would do my best to catch a ball. I trusted they wouldn’t make fun of my twenty back-flops into the pool on the way to a full 360 degree rotation. They trusted I wouldn’t make fun of them as they sang to my guitar playing around the campfire and that I could lead them through enough sun salutations to warm ourselves from the cold, dewy dawn that surrounded us. I trusted I could use my blog as an example for my colleagues and they trusted that I was doing something that would help them sell and service clients better, even though it seemed a little unorthodox.
All we had to do was trust each other.
After another two washes I had a spectacular, surprisingly realistic silvery blonde. Now, the waiting game began.
IV.
This past year has been a year of everything and nothing, a constantly churning status quo. I don’t quite know how to sum it up. Maybe it’s because the things around me are changing more than I am, and so I am suddenly measuring time by my sameness rather than my difference.
Last year I had a baby and now I have a toddler. Last year I had a scrappy acoustic trio sweating out covers and this year I’m leading a full band confidently unreeling unheard tunes. Last year I wasn’t writing music, but this year I’ve got a fistful of new songs. Last year Arcati Crisis was on indefinite pause, and this year we played one of our best shows ever. Last year I had hired a core of my team, and this year I nearly tripled it. Last year E was also the director at a successful start-up, and this year she is employee #4 at an even-newer start-up and a local tech figure of some note.
All those things changed, but it’s hard to tell if I have. If I did, it was in a much more incremental way. I’m the same shape and weight, the same voice and temperament. I didn’t change many opinions or buy many new clothes. Despite nearly slicing my thumb-tip off a few weeks ago, I don’t even have any new scars to report.
Maybe it would be easier to tell the difference if I was writing more, but maybe I’m not writing more because things seem so the same. I suppose the only way to know would be to write about it.
I should probably do that.
Back to the salon today to touch up my roots and then paint me blue!
V.
Today I almost cried in a hair salon.
To be fair, I cry a lot of places for a lot of reasons – becoming a parent just exacerbated that. But when I hugged my long-time stylist goodbye today with tears in the corners of my eyes it was because she helped me perfectly realize a dream that had stuck with me for over 17 years. It was a complete shock to look in the mirror and see that blue I imagined sitting on my head, perfectly realized.
That blue-hair urge is only slightly older than this blog, seventeen to its fifteen, but where my three week process of changing my hair still feels sudden, Crushing Krisis is anything but. It’s like a fossil record of myself, full of dated thoughts and opinions in each era, crystalized in HTML to be excavated and revisited later. If it wasn’t for this record, maybe I wouldn’t understand how much I’ve changed except for those big, blue-haired milestones.
I’ve been wrestling with trusting other people even longer than with the blue or the blog, and tracing the story of the blue back to its proverbial roots made me realize just where that trust began to elude me. It was at that point where everyone stopped being just kids and started being boys and girls, jocks or geeks, straight or gay. That continued through playing my own songs, always ready to wince away a heckling comment.
It doesn’t make any sense that performance anxiety or avoiding sports or not wanting to hang out with other men could stem back to those formative moments just like it’s hard to believe my wanting blue hair somehow emerged from that marble stairwell, but those are my best two guesses and thanks to one psychic dream they’ve been inexorably connected all of this time in the back of my mind.
This week feels like a sort of kismet in that way, wherein I resolved the camp issues and then my long held hair wishes, and also stayed in a cabin full of a dozen other dudes without feeling out of place for a second, all right in time for the day of the year that I retrospect the most. It’s clear that I’ve changed a lot in the past year despite some semblance of status quo, and not just by the virtue of it ending with me scoring points or dying my hair blue.
I feel like I’ve just put a final piece of punctuation on a long-unfinished sentence – one that’s been playing out here for years. It’s a lot about trust but also about just doing what you know will make you happy when you are sure it can’t hurt anyone – only help.
So here I am, instructing my future self: when you look back at this sort of epiphany and want to know how it feels to get here, do not think of the way your whole body has ached for days or the dye burning your scalp. Instead, consider that second after my feet left the diving board dozens of times and how I shut my eyes and just spun, unmoored from gravity and rotating, spinning free, knowing I would hit the water in a moment but also knowing that was not the point at all. The point is the journey, the spinning, the trying to orient myself the right way, and all the rest is just what results. That’s why I kept diving, even after I stopped landing on my back and got the flip right. It wasn’t about getting the flip right. It was about what happened on the way.
Tomorrow when I wake up I might feel the same, but I will have this blue hair to show me I am different. Yet, blue or not, no day is ever the same and that’s why I keep waking up and doing it again. Sometimes I am the change and sometimes the change is all around me, and no matter what I spin through it again, trying to orient myself.
Thank you for being a part of that change and part of what stays the same. Thank you, and happy birthday to this.
A toddler, a dinosaur, and your author with his long-awaited blue hair.