Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Stuff Takes Time

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I rung in 2009 the same way I spent December 25th – quietly at home with Elise. The reality is that every other day has become its own holiday spectacle, so the actual holidays are one of the few chances we have to lay low and relax.

Our wedding is a scant 16 days away. When we set the date for January I was concerned that it would compound all of the craziness of December. Now that we’ve crossed over to a new year I feel exactly the opposite. We’re changing in a time of change. The wedding extends the exfoliation of a prior year, as though our NYE kiss will last from midnight yesterday through when we touch down back in Philadelphia after honeymoon.

My mantra in 2008 was “stuff takes time.” If it sounds unspecific, good – that’s the point. The point that everything in life – my education, my music, my blog, our relationship, our music festival, my career, and our band – has taken a lot of time and effort to get to this point. The point is that no goal worth attaining is instantaneous. I didn’t have a senior position at work and four CDs with my band in 2004, yet here we are. We couldn’t have gotten married in 2004 or rented a farm for our music festival in 2006, but that’s where we’re headed.

It would be pointless to spend the rest of the post back-patting for all of my accomplishments in ’08 – I sortof already do that once a year, anyway.

Let’s not look back. Let’s just devote our time to the people and the things we love, and move inexorably closer to our goals, one year at a time.

The Cost of Maintaining Me

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One of the pitfalls of working in the middle of a major city is that it’s easy to blow your paycheck before it ever makes it into your bank account.

Since I don’t take actual lunch “breaks” too often (and because there is no guitar store in easy walking distance) I’ve stayed relatively insulated from midday shopping. Where I’m at risk is food.

When I first started working after graduation I was in the early throes of my obsessive budget-keeping, and I figured out quickly that the breakfast smoothies and muffins I had been accustomed to ordering every day during my internship added up to a bank-breaking amount over the course of a year – I wouldn’t have had to borrow money from my mother for a down payment on our first apartment if I had gone smoothlieless as an intern!

On my first day of full-time work I showed up with my own homemade smoothie and bagel, and continued to do so for several months, until finally my slothfulness caught up with my budget. Rather then blend up a confection every morning, I opted to allow myself a fixed weekly lunch budget to use however I pleased – buying groceries, eating modestly every day, or starving myself all week to go out for one big lunch.

Over four years of employment I’ve hewed pretty close to the budget, which rendered my $5 a day smoothie habit an obsolete luxury. The casualty was breakfast – I altogether stopped eating it, which made me a ravenous beast around 11:15 a.m.. I shrugged off plenty of health-concious co-workers bugging me to start my day with a meal, but when I began working on our healthy living initiatives earlier this year the message was drilled home by project after project: I was wrecking my naturally awesome metabolism, and I needed to eat more fresh fruit.

So, this summer when I found a nearby fruit cart that made $3.25 16oz. smoothies I was ecstatic – $16.15 a week was only a portion of my food budget, and it meant I’d actually eat my daily recommended servings of fruit. I immediately became a daily customer, and they’d have a smoothie ready to be blended when they saw me coming from a block away!

Two weeks ago my precious cart disappeared like clockwork on the first near-freezing morning, and without thinking about it I retreated to my four-year old smoothie/bagel habit. By the end of the week I had racked up $30 in spending – a huge chunk of my weekly food allowance, and over $1500 over the course of the year!

I had to put a stop to it, but I had become addicted to the energetic, breakfast-eating me I rediscovered over the summer. Could I produce my own smoothies and bagels for the convenient $16.25 I had been spending weekly over the summer?

The first hurdle was that I’d have to buy my supplies at the supermarket most convenient to me, which meant a slight markup. Five bananas came out to between $2-$3. Over the winter I’d rely on frozen organic strawberries, which were $.218 an ounce, and I’d need 50 oz. a week, for a total of $11. I’d also need a carton of off-brand OJ to fill out my concoction ($3), and a can or two of coconut milk to sweeten it a little (less than $2).

That’s a total of $18 for smoothie ingredients, proving the value of my cart-bound friend. Add to that a six-pack of everything bagels for $4 and $.90 weekly for my share of non-hydrogenated buttery spread for a total of $22.90 a week – a scant $7.10 savings over my gourmet breakfast. It would net me $555 in savings a year, but it still cost a bank-breaking $1195! And, that’s not including my time expenditure of thirty minutes of grocery shopping, plus 15 minutes a day of preparation.

No matter how I slice it, my morning smoothie is a major budget hit – a significant detraction from my ability to acquire new gear, my potential to pay off credit cards, my plan to save for a house.

Yet, what’s the comparative value of starting every day with a healthy breakfast, and getting my daily fix of fruit? Not to mention that my bagels and butter are healthier than the ones I’d be served in town. Sure, the monetary expense seems steep, but in the long term is it costing me less than the effects of eschewing fruit and starting my day with lunch?

Since the answer to that is unknowable at the moment, I’m going to have to find another way to justify my smoothie-enabling weekly shopping trips. Next steps? See if I can score my ingredients more cheaply elsewhere, or create a better economy of scale by also rolling in shopping for my lunch rather than buying it.

a little ocd is still ocd

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Chaz and I were talking about something during the drumming rehearsal – I forget what. Could have been anything, really. Maybe lead sheets.

Anyhow, the point is I said something about being organized in a typically obsessive compulsive way and he just nodded in agreement and kept talking. Because we are equally as insane as each other.

I know I don’t have an actual problem needing medication, but let me just given you two samples of my behavior:

(1) Walking with Elise this weekend she took our street all the way out to the next main North to South block. When she went to turn North, I stopped her and asked, “Where are you going?”

She replied, “To the car, which is north.” And, I said, “No, I can only walk down this street if I’m turning south.”

We proceeded to have a fight about taking the street for the purposes of turning north.

(2) Sometimes in the process of blogging I have an idea about a future post, and I jot it into a blank post as a draft so I can remember it later. However, I absolutely cannot allow posts to go up outside of their numerical order in the database, even though it has no effect on the order they are posted. It just makes my skin crawl. I have literally spent an hour pasting from one draft to another in a daisy chain to make sure I get posts to come out in the right order.

I mention this because the post that is set to post tomorrow was jotted before this post, so it will technically come out of order. It almost physically hurts to acknowledge that in writing. Of course, the number is ultimately meaningless, but once this post is posted there is no going back. Unless I post it into an entirely new post. Which I still might do.

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Any time anything I do starts to feel excessive, I just remind myself, Peter, you are not compelled to vacuum your bedroom three times a day, so everything is fine. You still have not turned into your grandmother.

That’s (not) all, folks! (or, The Conclusion of NaBloPoMo)

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This evening marks the end of the third annual National Blog Posting Month, during which I posted a healthy 37 posts in 30 days, including 10 songs in the first 10 days in three Trios (Good Bones, Morning Light, and Instants) and a bonus tune. I also blogged on my typical wide range of topics including a celebration of our President-Elect, a two part recap of my wedding style, thoughts on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a list of newly discovered blogs, my experience playing a terrific benefit show, and a few random inane thoughts.

As with the first NaBloPoMo in 2006, I found that a month of enforced posting transforms me into a more inspired and productive blogger, and a cheerier, more fulfilled person in general. The first time around I reinvented myself, read 2000+ blogs, and relaunched CK on WordPress. This time the effects were much subtler, but no less worthwhile.

I’m now heading into recording a new Arcati Crisis demo and playing the last few shows of our productive year, toiling through a holiday season I hardly celebrate, and enduring 47 more days of wedding preparations until the big event finally arrives. Hopefully in the course of that I’ll squeak out another Trio or two, as well as a few posts that might catch your attention.

As always, thanks for tuning in.