Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

off-topics

Living Marginally

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As I’ve alluded to in recent posts, an interesting confluence of events has lead Elise and I to begin searching for our first house a full six months before we intended to undertake such a project.

As we both combed through our finances in anticipation of applying for pre-approval for a mortgage, a certain fact about the two of us became abundantly clear: we are living marginally.

That’s not the same as “living on the margins,” a phrase you might use to describe the forgotten Americans our politicians are currently busy vying over. We are hardly teetering the precipice of hopelessness and debt. Thank goodness.

Instead, what I mean to say is that our lives just don’t cost very much to live, and by extension we have assets but not much equity.

The cost of being us is marginal. We began our adult lives by leaving college with a manageable amount of personal debt. We haven’t owned a car in years, and don’t own our own home. We don’t have any children or pets, or other family members to support. We consume uncomplicated food, and not much of it. We have a finite collection of housewares and consumer electronics that we don’t frequently expand. I quite adamantly dislike vacations, and neither of us participate in a particularly costly hobby or habit aside from music, which is at times a second career.

Essentially, in any given month after rent, food, utilities, and student loans we’re in the clear.

If it sounds like a charmed existence, well, it is. We’re living risk-free. But, that comes with a downside that’s subtly dangerous: we’re naive about how much life costs, and we’re reticent to find out. We have no concept of car insurance or property taxes, or even of paying for parking or needing a lawnmower, and it would be easy to stay this way

Yet, we can’t stay this way if we want to become upwardly mobile adults. No risk, no reward.

Therein lies the thin line between living marginally and living in the margins. You must make the leap into adulthood just right or else you become a forgotten American. You wind up making an effort to make ends meet, and tying up your entire livelihood in the upkeep one major asset – your home – living in fear that its value might drop out from under you. And if the bottom falls out from under your life you don’t just become forgotten – you disappear completely.

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We had to be cajoled into applying for our pre-approval, because we assumed we would be laughed out of the realitor’s office. We read the news – we knew about how bottom fell out of the mortgage industry, taking thousands of forgotten Americans with it. We didn’t think we had a hope.

Well, owing to living marginally, we did; though we don’t have any equity, we don’t have any bad credit either. In the mind of a reeling industry we still represent a good risk – a possible reward.

For a few weeks the potential mortgage check in my pocket made me feel immune to any financial woes. But, now that the euphoria has worn off the sticker shock is settling in.

Can we afford the homeowner’s life? Are we equipped to go from marginal to mobile without falling into the margins?

While I don’t think we will become invisible or disappear completely, both outcomes now loom tangibly, if remotely, over our house hunting. I’ve been invisible before, when I was a child visiting the corner store with a fist full of food stamps. The prospect of returning there – no matter how incredibly remote and unlikely, sets my stomach to roiling.

Life without risk may not be rewarding, but at least it’s comfortable.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about you or me.

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This post is about three things Crushing Krisis has habitually avoided for a number of years – snap reactions to current events, personal opinions on politics, and sex.

Maybe this September CK will be about getting out of my comfort zone?

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Today’s morning Metro declares “Bloggers face calls for Palin restraint” – which, hilariously, could refer to bloggers backing off of any number of major Palin-related embarrassments that arose over the weekend – have you heard the one about how she fired the local officials that didn’t support her bid for Mayor? – but clearly pertains to the unplanned announcement of the unplanned pregnancy of her seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol.

I do feel a certain amount of restraint is due on this matter. Obama himself yesterday reminded the press that family is off limits. It wouldn’t be fair to make Bristol the focus of partisan crossfire, nor is her pregnancy a reason to assail the personal family values of her mother.

What we should not be restraining ourselves on is how Bristol’s pregnancy pertains to actual campaign issues, and to the poor political judgment of her mother Sarah Palin and her partner John McCain.

Make no mistake – Sarah Palin is a woman, but she does not support women. She does not support their right to choose, and furthermore she is a figurehead in a party that largely supports abstinence-only sexual education – something that Pennsylvania’s typically beloved governor Ed Rendell just accepted funding for on the state level.

Let’s me be very clear: abstinence-only sex ed does not work.

I could state this as a matter of personal opinion. I could even state it based on data that supports the assertion.

However, allow me to state it based on the fact that I was a peer educator for four very defining years of my life – high school.

In those four years I believed, practiced, and taught that abstinence was the best possible decision for a high school student when it came to sex. However, I also believed and taught that abstinence is not the only option, just like pregnancy doesn’t only result from missionary position vaginal intercourse.

Teenagers don’t come pre-equipped with this information. Someone needs to communicate it to them, or else they wind up as misinformed adults who think the withdrawal method is a valid way to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease, or who think they can’t get pregnant if they have sex just before or during or after their period, or who don’t realize that mutual masturbation or trading oral sex can deliver sperm just as effectively as intercourse, or who can’t recite that the four bodily fluids that transmit HIV are blood, semen, vaginal fluid, and breast milk.

That’s why teens need sex education, and why the best sex education is often supported by peer education. Peers are not afraid to talk about condoms, whether it’s how to put them on or how they feel. They are are not afraid to disclose facts that parents don’t know or are afraid to admit: that sex is about a lot more than intercourse, and that teens can abstain from any or all of it while still developing and affirming their sexual identity.

Many teens are put in the position where their abstinence is no longer an option, let alone their best or only option. That situation is different for each teen, and it’s not the place of the mainstream media or political bloggers to contemplate what that situation was for Bristol Palin.

However, if all teens – Bristol included – received education on contraceptives that was supported by their peers and parents, they could be better protected from pregnancy, and from the risk of disease.

And, let me ask you, how would this be playing out differently if the headlines blared, “Bristol Palin: HIV Positive”?

That’s just as likely a result not only of her actions, but of the ignorance of her mother and the Republican party. Birth control is not just about birth. Pharmaceutical birth control is about regulating the body, and physical barrier protection is about just that – protecting yourself.

Sarah Palin does not care about any of that, and by extension, neither does the Republican party.

This dissonance is an example of the ultimate failure of the GOP – how they barely practice what they preach, and even in practice the preaching tends to fail. And it’s a single issue indicative of all the reasons McCain and Palin are the wrong choice to lead our nation.

Forget Bristol. Forget, even, that Palin is pro-life, as that is an issue equal parts personal and political.

Remember that Palin wants to swap out sex-education programs for abstinence-only programs.

Remember that Palin supports creationism being co-taught with evolution.

Remember that Palin believes global warming may not be entirely a man-made phenomenon, and Palin also believes global warming might not even being happening.

Remember that Sarah Palin does not feel that crimes motivated by discrimination against sexual orientation should be classified as hate crimes, because in her opinion “all heinous crime is based on hate.”

Remember that in Sarah Palin’s opinion the message written on my door last month – the cat shit shoved into my home – was motivated by normal hate. And so was the deaths of Matthew Sheppard and Larry King. Not hate based on bias, on fear, on lack of acceptance. Not hate that requires specific regulation and punishment to dissuade others from acting on it. Just regular, run-of-the-mill hate that wasn’t meant to threaten me based upon my identity, real or assumed.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about women, teenagers, or our planet. And she doesn’t care about me.

A vote for John McCain is a vote that endorses all of those positions – the policies of a party that’s no longer just assaulting logic, but outright denying it.

Bristol Palin is just one small example – teach abstinence, knowing that isn’t effective but claiming that it’s more moral, and when the teaching (and the associated morals) fail convert that failure into success by endorsing the family values that will raise and love that unplanned baby, and support that unwed mother.

Nevermind that not every young mother in the nation has a determined state governor for a mom. Nevermind that for every potential baby there is also potential for another life marked by HIV. Nevermind the implicit failure of abstinence-based education in the very home of the potential Vice President who supports it.

Nevermind?

No.

And that is why we cannot and will not restrain ourselves.

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(A big thank you to Five Thirty Eight for planting this kernel, and for many of the links.)

Taking The Dive

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Last night Gina and I were completely out-of-sorts, which lead to not one of our more productive rehearsals ever, except for it seems like whenever we have one of those “Real End” is impossibly great. Probably because it’s our oldest tune.

(Actually, en route an LP meeting last week I discovered that Gina has a Blogathon 2001 best-of disc in her car, which is the only existing high fidelity copy of all of those songs, including the first ever demo of Real End. Which is kinda awesome. Like, it doesn’t sound like us – it’s got a borderline indie-rock awfulness to it but it still totally holds together. I think if we still sounded like that people would like us better.)

In any event, the point of this post is that after our incredibly unfocused rehearsal we walked a few blocks over to The Dive to open for our new band-friend Kursten Bouton.

It was an interesting excursion. The Dive is, in fact, a dive. It’s essentially a South Philly row home that happens to be a bar.

We were in the upstairs, a tiny triangle of a room fronted with an abbreviated bar and terminating in a stack of huge speakers and a strange, little, wooden sidecar of a room containing an awesome, old, 16-channel board with wooden trim that I had way too much fun with. The mics and stands were a little suspect, though, and if we ever head back there I’ll probably bring my own.

Despite a relative lack of audience we had a good time hanging out with Kursten again and hearing even more of her repertoire (though my favorite pair is still “Don’t Surrender” and “Polaroid Migration”). After a few songs of intro I talked Kursten into doing an Ani song with me, and in a pinch we belted out “Gravel.” Afterwards AC played a solid 45 minute set, ending with a comfortably loungy rendition of “Noncommittal.”

Pretty fun, but mostly because of Kursten. The Dive is a cool bar to have in the neighborhood, but I’m not sure if I’d head out there just for the open mic when I could hit South Street instead.

Exteriors.

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Over the past few days I’ve spent most of my free moments unknotting the multi-thousand post mess that is my neglected Google Reader.

It’s fascinating to me that I let it go unread for so long, because I’m always looking for something to consume. I spend all night pinging in a circle from LiveJournal to MySpace to FaceBook to Huffington Post to Ain’t It Cool News, seeking out ever-more-incremental updates. Eventually if none of them seem to be in motion I’ll settle for mindlessly playing the newest game over at Kongregate.

Think about that for a moment. Elitist, progress-oriented me will settle for the empty feedback mechanism of a flash video game rather than check up on the lives of hundreds of my peers via my Google Reader.

What the hell? It seems my introversion extends to the blog arena as well.

And, I know you’re all like, “Peter, enough with the introversion already, you’ve kept a blog for eight years and in each of those years I’ve seen you make a willing spectacle of yourself in public at least twice.”

I had that in mind as I caught up on Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, reading her tongue-in-cheek FAQ post. In response to a question about agoraphobia, she says:

I diagnosed myself with mild agoraphobia because although I PREFER to never leave my house, I still CAN leave my house if it involves doing something fun. But even then, I usually choose to stay home. I’m emotionally, physically, psychologically, urologically, and ophthalmologically attached to my home.

Note that this woman lives and actively works on a ranch, so to some degree the concept of “home” likely includes some portion of the vast outdoors, which makes her not your traditional agoraphobe. Yet, in her mind she is still mildly agoraphobic, because left to her own devices her natural orientation is to remain in her home space.

That description perfectly fits my view of my own introversion. In areas I define as “home” I’m a natural socializer: work, meetings with friends, the stage … all perfectly comfortable environments where I can be myself.

However, socializing with co-workers, attending friends’ parties with people I don’t know, or hanging at the bar prior to playing … those experiences all make me feel weird and out-of-place. And, I know not everyone is a social butterfly and that it takes time to adapt to different environments, but my reaction is on a different level. I stop being interesting, opinionated, vocal me. I literally forget how to do it. I’m back in grade school, unsure of which lunch table I should approach to garner the least teasing.

That can really get in the way of my success in the arena of local music. Because, much to my disappointment and chagrin, you do not get booked all across the town just for showing up once or by being able to play for an hour without interruption. I assumed people would listen if I trained my voice and wrote well-structured songs.

Well, I was mostly wrong. You have to be persistent. You have to make connections. You have to build to your own personal tipping point. Otherwise, you’re some asshole stranger trying to make a splash in an unreceptive room.

I’ve been that asshole too many times, and I’m really trying to learn how to just be a regular regular, even if my regularity is slightly irregular, because being regular is really an extroverted attitude rather than a frequency of appearance.

I’ve been striving for that this summer, both solo and as Arcati Crisis. Each has their own challenges.

Solo means its hard to get me out of the house, but once I’m out I’ll sit and endure hours of open mic. Usually after my set I work up the nerve to say hello to a few people, as prior to it I am endlessly revising my set list. (One day I’ll play a solo gig and adhere to my setlist exactly. Once. Eventually).

Arcati Crisis gets me out of the house more quickly, because – duh – I get to hang out with Gina. But, once we’re installed at a coffee shop or bar I clam up around the other musicians because – duh – I get to hang out with Gina.

For a while we’d hit entire strings of open mics without making any new connections or friends, but lately we’ve been taking turns being sociable, and we’ve been rewarded by meeting some amazing musicians, like Andra Taylor, Year Long Day, and Kursten Bouton, just to name a few we’ve gotten up the balls to talk to.

So, that’s going well. The more people I meet, the more reasons I have to get out of the house and play – I am cultivating pocket of “home” at every open mic in Philadelphia. At Lickety Split I can be myself at a single table, but at Blarney South I’m me at the whole back half of the room.

Google Reader presents the same opportunity – to turn peers into pockets of extended home. Yet, if I neglect to read Pioneer Woman, and Mark Larson, Akkam’s Razor, Moose In the Kitchen, What If No One’s Watching, You’re Doing It Wrong, and dozens of my other favorite blogs, then they stop being familiar, and my barriers go up. No emails, or comments, or track backs. CK becomes the splashy asshole.

In my Google Reader cruise I was also catching up on longtime CK peruser Karl Martino, and happened upon a post about the apparently ongoing Philly Blogger Meetup.

Imagine that – a setting that can combine the terror of going to an unfamiliar open mic with the daunting task of talking to total strangers alongside the deeply uncomfortable experience of talking about my blog to someone who has never read it before.

I signed up.

Happy Birthday To This

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I.

Lately I’ve been struggling with the concept of success – specifically, how to discern the difference between progress and success.

I am always progressing – I do not do well with sitting still. Nevertheless, moving forward doesn’t equal succeeding. Motion doesn’t equal a milestone.

Or, at least, that’s my typical mantra of over-achievement.

It can be hard mantra to upkeep; over-achievement requires a lot of regular achievement to maintain, and that requires plenty of milestones to mow down while you’re in motion.

It’s an especially hard mantra to have when no new milestones are in sight … when it starts getting tempting to view motion as a milestone. It’s akin to the kid who wants a teevee break just for doing the first page of his homework. Should I reward myself just for learning one new song, or completing one workout? The slope from those minor successes to learning a new chord or doing one push-up is treacherously slippery.

This was the quandary that stopped my progress cold last week, grinding my life to a halt. I spent a long night of discussion with Elise, reviewing the successes of the past year, and trying to figure out how to translate further forward motion into more milestones.

Elise is the panacea to those inconsolable moments, and as we laid in bed talking it became apparent that part of the problem is that I had forgotten the other, single, proven solution to all of my various doldrums – eight years of Crushing Krisis archives documenting every success and failure, and all the moments of paralysis found in between the two.

Eight years of proof that I am always in motion, and always finding a new milestone.

II.

As of today Crushing Krisis is an alarming eight years old – absolutely ancient in blogging years, and still the reigning longest running blog in my fine city of brotherly love.

I have a blog old enough to be in third grade. If that’s not a major milestone, I don’t know what is.

Not only is CK itself a milestone, it’s a collection of them – a chronicle of my greatest hits, the succcesses that sketch my evolution from aimless straight-A college student and hapless singer-songwriter through hopelessly overcommitted yuppy and emerging artist.

The amazing thing about the last twelve months is how many successes they encompassed. I played a show at the Tin Angel with my band (two, actually). I got engaged to the love of my life. I completed six months of voice-lessons, emerging with newly revitalized vocals. Lyndzapalooza threw not only a hugely successful music festival, but two modestly awesome off-season events. I finally became the senior member of my team at work. I’m planning the most kick-ass party I’ve ever thrown, which coincidentally happens to be my wedding.

In hindsight I feel as though the vast majority of my personal greatest hits record is contained in the last year of my life – like I’m one of those artists who has one big album and that ten years later my record company will release a 21st Century Masters collection of me that regurgitates that one album end-to-end, plus some random cover I did for a soundtrack.

In the midst of all those hits I could easily lose track of the progress I made, but that’s exactly what CK is here for. I already chose the best of them to feature in the Year 8 topic, but my most indelible memories extend far beyond the posts I’d deem as “best.”

Our band got censored for the first time. I had two of my most memorable taxi-driver conversations. I played a game of “what if I managed Britney?” I conquered my quarter-life crisis. I co-invented (and later conducted) an Upscale Bar Crawl. I blogged daily for an entire month for no reason at all, highlighting my favorite (remastered) Trio Tracks along the way.

I dissected Radiohead’s record release, along with the entirety of the “blogosphere.” I became fascinated for an entire night by a trick of photography. I learned valuable lessons from my longest period of bachelorhood in the past half decade.

I began telling the story of our engagement, further chronicled here and here. I disclosed my previously deeply personal delight in hot food eaten cold. I saw Elise’s brother make his theatrical debut. I posted a rare Trio that I liked as soon as it was recorded.

I contemplated being a real band. I reflected on my childhood masquerade as a born-again Christian. I posted yet another awesome-right-out-of-the-box Trio. I celebrated Gina’s birthday by recounting our first time singing together. I cultivated an ulcer. I learned about sibling rivalry by way of working out regularly for the first time in my life, and in the process got to know Elise’s sister a little bit better.

I almost shattered the fragile, bird-like skeleton of one of my SVPs. I taught the entire internet how to edit their MySpace Music profiles (seriously, you should see the referrals I get on that one damn post). I nearly got laughed out of a coffee-shop due to my savant-like knowledge of Clue.

I played my band’s first honest-to-goodness solo gig, and made friends with 13-year-olds. I spoke at my mother’s wedding, and reflected on how just a few decades ago mine would be illegal in some states. I became a big brother, and started becoming my mother, all in the span of a week. I reflected on GBLT rights in Iraq by way of Ani DiFranco and teenage theatre. I posted the best and worst of my teenage poetry.

And, still fresh in my mind, I was the victim of a crime of hate.

Other things happened too – good things and bad things left unsaid as I skipped a few months of blogging while I was out succeeding a life.

I never finished our engagement story. I haven’t been blogging about wedding prep, including dress shopping and invite-making. I didn’t relate how I got chewed out by a co-worker for bashing Jesus on our last Live @ Rehearsal disc. I continuously redacted a post entitled “Figure Skating Pants” because it never turned out as funny on-screen as it was in my head. You haven’t yet heard about house-hunting.

A hundred other things.

If Crushing Krisis is as much about progress as it is about success, as much about motion as it is about milestones, it’s also as much about silence as it is about sound. My evolution is sketched as much by the words I withhold as the ones I write.

III.

I write these birthday posts each year … letters to my future self. Internet time travel.

Last year I said:

If Year 6 of Crushing Krisis was about finding stability, then this past year has been converting stability into happiness.

To amend that quote, if Year 7 was about converting stability into happiness, this past year was about finding a way for happiness and success to finally co-exist in my life.

In their own quiet way, those successes have brought me as close to quitting CK as I’ve ever been. Even though this blog documents my successes the actual act of blogging is all progress, and progress without success in sight can be daunting.

On and off, I plotted CK’s demise. Merge it into a band blog, I thought. Not as important as wedding planning, I decided. My writing has already peaked, it’s time to focus on other things, I resolved. Not saying much of importance anyway, I mused. It’s not as if anyone’s reading it, I whined. Blogs are ubiquitous and thus unremarkable, I opined. I’m out of things to say, I worried.

Yet, here I am, still, heading into Year 9.

Why? Because Crushing Krisis is one of the best ideas I’ve ever had, one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and the best way I know to show that I am not only progressing into adulthood but slowly and surely succeeding at life.

And because of you. You – indefinable and intangible, yet indefatigable.

Not just you – singular you, tu – you there on the other side of the screen reading this now, so much as you – plural you, vous – all of you. The royal you. The Schrodinger’s Cat of you. The mere potential of you.

“You” could mean you – now, in the present, two seconds after I post this; you – far in the future, maybe after I’ve gone; you – both of you; or you – neither of you … some other you entirely.

Thank you, no matter which you I am addressing. Thank you for being a part of and a party-to my never-ending progress and my continuing success. Thank you for reading, listening, commenting, and linking. Thank you for your time, for your attention, and for being you.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.