Year 13

Happy Birthday To This

August 26, 2013 by krisis

Why do you do the things you do?

Our first family photo.

This is a question I find myself asking frequently – and often out loud – as I share the house with a four-weeks-old-today baby girl. Are you crying because you are hungry, tired, or in need of diaper? Are you trying to fling yourself away from my person because you are hungry, tired, being held too tightly, or have a baby death wish. Et cetera.

It’s hard to get an answer out of her – not only due to her still-developing communication skills, because baby motivation is inscrutable. It’s very possible the thing she is doing is some involuntary bodily response she can’t control and that her shock at it happening is only causing it to happen even more, like a cat chasing its own fleeing tail.

A year or two from now the answers might be different because the needs might have evolved. She may cry because she can’t have a specific food or wants to go to sleep. She might fling herself from my person to grab something she’s interested in or to be closer to her mother. Her reasons will take into account emotional fulfillment and desire, but also the way we helped her deal with those bodily needs. If she gets picked up every time she cries, she might very well cry in order to be picked up. Later, she might cry because she can’t go to a concert she wants to see (unlikely) or fling herself away from my person because dads are uncool (equally as unlikely).What all of those reasons have in common is that they are physiological. This is the nature of a body’s hierarchy of needs, Maslow’s or otherwise. Whether it’s baby humans or baby naked mole rats, they don’t generally come out seeking self-actualization. They want to sustain their system.

That’s a whole parenting post for another time.

At some much later point, we’re us – fully-formed, fully-autonomous beings with all sorts of things we do based on a latticework of needs built upon other needs. I need to listen to music almost daily or I start to get depressed. I need to organize a row of books or else it will bother me. I need to present in front of crowds and see or hear their feedback.

Why do I do those things? I can’t tell you, exactly. They aren’t always convenient or good for me. Sometimes they surprise me, even as I am doing them, just like my baby involuntarily trying to fling herself out of my arms and down a staircase.

Among those surprises, is that I still feel the need to blog – especially on this day, thirteen years after the day when this all began on August 26, 2000.

“We all wish something would happen.”

I have an infant daughter and a teenage blog.

Tuning up at the NorthStar in February, shot by Gina.

If you had told the author of my infant blog that he would eventually be writing on the first teenage birthday of his blog about his infant daughter he would have laughed insanely, said he wasn’t so sure he wanted to have children, and then asked if your time traveling would lead to some sort of causality paradox.

Yet, you can easily sketch that progress across thirteen years of Crushing Krisis. Almost everything I do has changed aside from writing songs, while this particular thing has stayed exactly the same. CK remembers a time before I had been in live, a time before I had a career, a time when being in a band seemed like some faraway fantasy.

An examination of past birthday posts track this progression an increasingly celebratory tone. I’m always crowing about some experience or achievement and about how the years just keep getting better and better.

Since I don’t lie on Crushing Krisis, I’ll tell you now: this isn’t one of those posts. The past year was awesome but it was also awful.

We had a baby, but it was not easy to get there as a couple and as a team. I have a new job, but it was excruciating to leave a role I loved and a family I cared about after a decade – it was the hardest decision I’ve made in my life. I watched the best fitness of my life – the first time I was ever happy with my own body – slip away due to persistent injuries and demands on my time.

Arcati Crisis and Smash Fantastic played some of their biggest and best shows yet, but Filmstar quite suddenly stalled and recording has been a slow-going battle for Gina and I. I edited and expanded my novel with a talented group of writers only to realize I have a long ways to go in defining motivation and showing agency before I arrive at a complete work.

And, despite being the most profitable year of CK thanks to the awesome folks who use my comic book collecting guides, to my unending disappointment this year featured lowest number of new CK posts of all time. There are single days thirteen years ago where I posted as much as I did in the entirety of the past twelve months, and the negative space tells the story of my disappointment as clearly as the posts do.

My mom and I, late 1981 or early 1982.

It would be disingenuous and nearly delusional to call that a bad year. Look at all that amazing stuff that happened to me! I am alive, upright, and physically safe. I am fed, clothed, and gainfully employed.

Yes, all of those needs are met, and maybe if I was a well-fed naked mole rat with a charming wheel to run in I would be satisfied with that. That’s not how being human works – at least, not for me. I do things because I want to do more things – bigger, better things, and I write this post every year in celebration but also to prove that things got done.

Earlier this year I couldn’t blog about our being pregnant, because it wasn’t safe to discuss yet, but I still wrote down the stories. I felt compelled to document the insane thrill and danger of each moment unfiltered by hindsight and experience in a way that I could relive later, and I read them to friends breathlessly before they found their way onto the blog.

Out to dinner at about the mid-way point of our pregnancy, my mother handed me an envelope with an spiral-bound flip-book of photos nearly as old as me, and an extremely tiny composition notebook. The photos were of a very tiny, very chubby me. The book was written in an unfamiliar scrawl.

“Your father wrote about our labor in this,” she said. “I thought you might like to read it.”

My dad’s baby live-blog.

The book details her (my?) labor in far greater detail and hilarity than I mustered for any record of ours. Here is a little of what he wrote, all in tiny, slightly-italic capital letters:

This is it? E [ed note: my mother] says it is. It’s been over 12hrs now. Lynn [my godmother] and I ate but mom’s starving. We all wish something would happen.

Note: Outrageous omition [sic]! Around 5AM Lynn uttered the word outrageous and Mom promptly asked to hear “Jean Genie” (Bowie). Sorry about late entry. It’s thanks to Mom I remember at all.

I just realized I can’t fill in name slot on cover because I don’t know what your name is going to be. Now I think this may really be it. It all started around 8:30 A.M. Thursday and dragged ’til now. But I’ll put that in later on.

Well, good luck kid! I love you,

Dad

Why did he do that thing – write down his thoughts in this tiny blue book instead of just thinking them? He didn’t need to write them down. He never remembered to give them to me, although I’m sure he has some funny stories about carrying it around in his pocket.

My dad live-blogged my being born in 1981.

Maybe that’s why I do this.

Why not be happy instead?

Baby E’s first bath.

This evening we had three generations of the women of E’s family in our house for dinner. E’s mother and sister, E, and me holding our baby sat around the dining table enjoying a rare dinner together.

A few bites into my plate, the baby started fussing. She had just woken up and had a bottle, and I had just changed her. I was holding her comfortably in such a way that she could see many interesting things. She wasn’t even trying to dive bomb onto the floor. Yet, her fussing began its familiar bloom into tears.

We walked together into the parlor and I sat her on my knee. “Why are you so upset?” I asked her. “You’re missing dinner with all these ladies. Some of them came a long way to see you.”

She squeaked a little cry of response.

“I think you have everything you need right now,” I said to her, maybe a little apologetically – as if I was missing something obvious, “so, I think you should cheer up and we should go back to dinner.”

She gave me a puzzled little look, halfway to tears. And then, for no reason I could discern, her temper passed like the shadow of a cloud. She met my gaze, looking as ridiculous and adorable as she has looked in four entire weeks.

“Okay then,” I said, and then added, “Do you know how cute you are?”

She cooed back at me and we returned to the table to laugh and coo and make ridiculous faces and enjoy our meal.

This life is not pure science. We do what we do and need what we need not just to fulfill our biological imperatives, but because we are more than the sum of our atoms and molecules, our bones and muscles. Each one of us is a fleeting series of electrical crackles across the mottled grey surface of a brain. Some of us are happy all of the time, and some of us are never satisfied, but we can do whatever we want to do.

I don’t know why my baby suddenly cheered up, but she did. I don’t know if this year was awesome or awful or both at the same time, but I can decide to be happy about the life-altering results and try a little harder next year.

I don’t know why I blog, but it’s what I want to do. Maybe not every fifteen minutes, or even every day or week, but life just wouldn’t be the same without it. A year or two from now I will forget all of the awful and only remember the awesome, because that’s the story I chose to tell. And, maybe thirty years from now my daughter will pull it up from some digital archive and read all about how I got to be her father.

Thank you for reading – especially if it makes you happy. Thank you mom-E and dad – somehow I do this thing because of you. Thank you E and baby-E – there wouldn’t be as good a story to tell without you.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

Oh, Baby

August 8, 2013 by krisis

The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

Despite all of the hilarious and challenging things that happen in your home when it houses a newborn baby, I haven’t found the right way to articulate any of them for you.

Last Sunday night as our midwife drew our baby out of the womb she was purple. My father and mother both warned me – “The baby will be weird colors. It will be alarming.” It wasn’t. She was lovely and purple fading to pink like a violet, wailing all the way with a wide mouth and a broad nose. In her face I saw my father’s mother smiling at me for the first time in twelve years.

There was no card in the camera. All these things they tell you to remember – remember the onesie and remember the paper you want the footprints on – and not one list said “remember to put the card in the camera.” So there are no purple pictures. E didn’t see it, either. It’s one of those memories, those crystalline moments, that resides only in my own mind.

Minutes later I was sitting in a rocking chair with this tiny creature wrapped in my arms, singing her the song I had been singing to her in the womb, a song about grandmothers and taking things for granted that I wrote while crying.

She did not cry. Not then, but afterwards. The entire way to the nursery for her first checkup and all throughout as I sat with my head resting against the other side of the glass, fighting off sleep. Eventually I was satisfied that she would not stop crying anytime soon and I returned to E’s side to wait to hold her a second time.

The next day I did not want to put her down. How could I put her down and miss her face for an instant? I am writing that here for posterity, as since then I’ve found plenty of reasons to put her down, but the recovery room is a honeymoon and I had never seen a newborn before in person. I didn’t want to miss anything.

The first night at home was hard. I told E I would take the night shift, only waking her to breastfeed – after all, she had done all of the hard work in the past day. But I kept falling asleep in the rocking chair, coming to as my head dipped forward on my neck, afraid I would drop her. I would set her down in the crib, knowing full well she would wake up as soon as she noticed my arms were gone, and sleep fitfully on the floor for three or five minutes at a time until I heard her cries and quickly scooped her back up. I have stayed awake through blogathons, benefit concerts, and music festivals, but never was every minute so hard as that night.

I wish I had written every day last week, but what would I have said? That swaddling was easy when we were in the hospital, but impossible once we returned home. That I quickly learned how to change a diaper and don’t gag at it the way I do whenever I’m tasked with cleaning a toilet. That I am spouting constant puns at her, an endless stream, narrating her every move with pith. That after our most frustrating night so far I played Amanda Palmer singing Carole King and Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre” and cried softly as I sang along. That I decided Curious George was too facile and with bad grammar, so I am reading her The Tempest instead.

My daughter is eleven days old and she now looks like my mother’s mother. It’s uncanny, actually, to peer down at a new human being and see an old one that you can’t have back even while knowing this this moment, too, will pass and never return.

Gestational Delusions

June 4, 2013 by krisis

The eventual baby is really starting to have its own personality – or at least one that we’ve ascribed to it – while still in belly.

Maybe that’s because it’s so obviously a unique unit from E now. There are parts of it pressed assymmetrically against one side, practically screaming, “I am not your wife’s biology; I am sentient and sovereign.”

So we have stories. Stories about its kicks and throttles, its hiccups and turns. We’ve done that very criminal parental thing that I despise, anthropomorphizing a living thing that is just a simple fetus. It turns out, I just cannot help it.

This makes me happy and certain about not finding out the sex of our offspring. For the first four or five months the first question people asked was “Was it planned?” (which: unless you are my bestie best friend (which many of you are; this is the internet), that is such a gross and overly familiar question and I cannot believe you asked it), and then like flipping a switch it became, “Will/Do you know the sex?”

Let’s lay this out. People want to know the sex so they can build a narrative on the behalf of your unborn child. They do not have the benefit of unlimited belly time that you or your partner(s) have to make up all those little stories, so they are grasping at a straw.

A harpy

A few months ago I sat in a meeting where a man just as pregnant as me (that is to say, not at all, but with a wife as far along as E) revealed he was expecting a girl. I watched as harpies bearing weather-beaten cliches descended from every direction, their sagging breasts flopping in the air.

(That’s not a dig at their actual breasts. I’m just working the harpies metaphor.)

“Girls are so precious.”

“You know she’ll be daddy’s little girl.”

“Better to have a girl first. Boys are so difficult.”

It was then I learned the true meaning of the phrase, “I’m so angry I could spit.” The harpies kept unspooling their stories. The dreaded “princess” was wielded. Not one tale was about how smart and capable his little girl would be, how strong and bold. Nope. This wee four-month old fetus would be cute, loving, and submissive, as all girls are and should be.

Excuse me, I’m going to spit right now. I Invite you to do the same.

Okay, we’re back.

I’m sure our eventual baby is going to be cute and loving, but that is not the only story we are painting across E’s belly. Our eventual baby is also going to be intelligent, conniving, adventurous, curious, and a fan of Douglas Adams. Yes, even if it is a boy. ;)

After careful consideration, I have decided to be okay with becoming that standard parent who makes up his own in uetero narratives, because I know that my narratives will always be unique.

Hello, RJMetrics

April 26, 2013 by krisis

I am incredibly excited to share that the next step in my career is working as the first Strategic Account Manager for RJMetrics!

RJMetrics is a Philadelphia-based start-up that provides business analytics to aid companies in making data-driven decisions.

That’s a little corporate-speaky, so they break it down for you in video:

And, if you’re not in the mood for a show, here’s my version:

Businesses – especially in eCommerce – collect a lot of data about their customers. They’re almost in the data business as much as they’re in the business business. They know data is important, but when it comes to querying, analyzing, and reporting on that data it become a big time-suck that I know too well. People get lost in the weeds of data requests, Excel crosstabs, and creating glossy charts for their presentations. The process becomes their whole job, and if it turns out they didn’t quite get the right data the first time around, all that work gets scrapped and repeated.

RJMetrics makes the relatively un-bold proposal that your time could be better spent, and they do that by presenting an easy-to-use, web-based software that connects to your data and presents all of those metrics in a dashboard that anyone (and everyone!) in your organization can dig into. You can change sources on the fly, perform cohort analysis, and output data and charts with just a few clicks. I learned how to use it in less than an hour.

It’s intelligent, it’s elegant, and it’s the kind of obvious product that ought to be ubiquitous across all businesses that live and die by understanding the trends emerging from their customers. And, as an Account Manager there it will be my job to help make it ubiquitous – and to ensure clients are getting the most out of the product!

As with many amazing developments in my life, my new position is owed almost entirely to social media interactions.

I recently attended a “Working for Start-Ups” seminar with @Marina_Rakhlin through Girl Develop It – an incredible global org that helps women (and men) lifelong learners acquire the skills they need to develop software. E sometimes teaches with GDI, and I mostly took the course so that I could better understand the start-up world that she occupies at Monetate.

Just a few weeks later, one of my local Twitter musician friends, @BenGarvey, mentioned he was starting his new job at RJMetrics. Ben had recently told me about his new adventures in software at a chance encounter at BarCamp Philly, so I was intrigued to see where he landed. And then I learned all of the above, and saw that RJMetrics had a Strategic Account Manager position available.

Having just taken such an amazing seminar on working for start-ups, I took a shot at it! I went through the most awesome and entertaining interview process, which you can read about in RJMetrics’s post “Data Driven Hiring.” (Their “Getting Startup Jobs If You Aren’t a Programmer” post is also great.) After meeting the RJ team and their CEO Robert Moore – and a very difficult deliberation with my own council of advisors – I decided that after 10 years in health care it was time to try something new and different.

What won’t be different is that I’ll be working for a brand with a product I believe in and with people who I am already excited to collaborate with. It means so much to me to be able to advocate for my brand to my friends in person and on social media, and I’m excited to do that as I learn and grow with RJMetrics!

And that’s the end of this week’s big news! Now, off to a weekend of belated birthday celebrations with E and recording final vocals with Gina. Nothing could be better!

Goodbye, Big Blue

April 24, 2013 by krisis

IBX This is my last week working at Independence Blue Cross – also known as IBX. I have been an IBX associate since March of 2003.

It still doesn’t seem real to see those words written down – not just because they represent the end of a ten-year chapter of my life, but because during that decade the name of my employer has never appeared here on CK (aside from perhaps an archived tweet or two).

No one ever told me not to mention IBX. I had blogged openly about all of my previous jobs and colleagues, and even blogged a bit about my introduction to corporate culture at IBX. I don’t think Google Alerts existed when I first interviewed, or if they did they were not very prevalent.

Yet, as I sat in the interview for my initial cooperative education experience in Provider Communications back in 2003 talking about how I was trying to triangulate my way to the perfect job for me, I must have decided that it was for the best to keep mum about it.

I never thought I would enjoy a corporate job, but my initial co-op position as a Communications Assistant proved that wrong. I loved working with the nuances of words and communicating the position of a brand. [Read more…] about Goodbye, Big Blue

Fathers

March 20, 2013 by krisis

My grandfather, Steven, with my beautiful Aunt Joyce and my grandmother, Florence, in her kitchen – all dressed for my parents’ wedding, October 1980.

My grandfather Steven was a gym teacher.

I never knew too much about him. My relationships have always gravitated towards the women in my life, and grandparents are no exception. I spent countless Sundays at the kitchen table with my grandmother, reading the Sunday paper. We watched Golden Girls together on Saturday nights. I would hover at her elbow every Christmas, awaiting my first ladle full of her Italian Wedding Soup.

My memories of my grandfather are more scant. He was retired. He would drive down to Florida and return with a Nintendo game for me, bought from a pawn shop – cartridge only, no instructions. He was genial beneath a gruff exterior, and I never once believed he was actually mean or angry with me. He liked baseball, which I still don’t, and The X-Files, I think, which gave me something to talk to him about when we would sit in my Aunt Susan’s sun room at family parties in the 90s.

My father Peter owns a gun shop. He managed bars and restaurants for decades. In his twenties he was a roadie for a band – lights, I think.

I know many facts about my father, but they are disconnected. They’re like a cloud that drifts through my memory, never quite coalescing into a specific narrative. He attended Central (my rival high school) and Temple (my rival college). (Funny, that.) He had a motorcycle accident in one of the roundabouts near the Art Museum that left his butt susceptible to numbness during long movies. He farms hot peppers in his spare time.

My memories of my father are many. He and my mother separated when I was three or four, but I saw him every week until I was eleven or twelve, and then every other week until school work made it impractical to spend alternate weekends away from home. I remember his old apartment with the low mattress, the bar where I spent countless Sundays watching Eagles games, and his first house with his now-wife with its bubble skylight windows off the master bedroom.

My father and I, fall 1981.

I will become a father sometime this summer. Or, I suppose, I am already. I am an account manager, a musician, and a writer.

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a father. I remember a specific point in my teenage years where – in a mix of angst and sudden, acute awareness of the world around me – I decided it would be irresponsible to bring anyone else into such an unfair and capricious world. But before that, I remember that I was always very concerned that I was my grandfather’s only grandson, and that I had to have children to continue our name to another generation.

E and I agreed a long time ago that there would be at least one child in our shared future, though the last name was (and continues to be) undecided. Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the idea. Much like our hypothetical eventual wedding would one day become reality, I knew that one day our hypothetical eventual child would arrive. I would joke with co-workers that she or he would be enrolled in military school at age three to combat all the various foibles of modern youth, but secretly I think I can solve those via limited screen exposure and regular listening to The Beatles.

(More on that, later.)

My grandfather passed away last Thursday. He was 87.

I don’t mention this in search of condolence. To lose him was a tragedy, but not a great surprise. At Christmas my three aunts told me it might be the last time I would see him, winking there from the end of the table.

He was my last living grandparent, including those in my still-new family-in-law.

The aunts brought pictures to his viewing on Sunday night. Old black and white photographs and pages from his yearbooks. I was struck by one photo of him, smiling from his wide face, hair black as pitch in a way I had never seen. On either side of him boys struggled up knotted ropes. Some of the boys were black, others white. The yearbook was from the early 60s.

I spoke at church on Monday morning, the same one where a much smaller version of me served as ring-bearer for Aunt Susan’s wedding. She and her husband picked me up the morning of the funeral and drove me to the cemetery after the services. Two men in crisp army uniforms awaited us there. They thanked us on behalf of our country and our president, and handed my father a flag folded thirteen times before one of them played the most beautiful and somber “Taps” I have ever heard in my life. I cried, finally, beside the headstone that he shares with my grandmother Florence.

I never knew my grandfather served.

At lunch after the burial my aunts and cousins took turns sharing somewhat apocryphal stories about him. He loved teaching people things. He loved cars – or, at least, driving – and aliens, and pointing out how people were “meatheads” and “nimblebrains” while subtly showing you what you were doing right.

He was alive for 31 years of my life – a decade over my next-oldest cousin – but I didn’t have a story to share, aside from those video games without instruction books. No tale from before I was born. No specific, outstanding memory, spurious or not. Nothing he had taught me that I could remember.

I don’t think that was his fault or mine. It was just life, and the years that separated us.

My father is now in his 60s. When our child is old enough to have memories he or she might really remember – those strong, crystalline memories – he will be in his 70s, much older than my grandfather was when I was that age. My father shared so many stories about my grandfather over the weekend, but none of them sounded familiar to me. Had I forgotten, or just never listened?

Now, our child will not have any great-grandparents, but will inherit a set of seven caring and altogether hilarious (and sometimes crazy) grandparents. I can’t say what my child will know or think about my father, among them. Some days I can’t even say what I think or know about him, though I am sure that I love him very much.

We called him a few weeks ago to set up our next dinner together, and to tell him about the baby – because waiting until the dinner would have been far too long. “Great news,” he said, smiling from the other side of the phone, and then asked me about my band.

Last Friday, while we discussed the funeral arrangements for his father on the phone, my father said, “I haven’t told the aunts about you and E and the baby – it’s your news to tell. I think maybe you should wait until after the funeral is over. But, earlier this week I did tell my father about it when I visited him. I didn’t think you would mind, or that he would tell anyone else. And now he won’t, I suppose. ”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks, dad.”