Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

elise

Weekending

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I have eleven minutes to write this post. I will just pretend I am on a bus.

Somewhere shortly before or after Albany Elise and I stopped at a rest stop that supposedly had wireless. It did not. It did, however, contain a rather dubious “Fish’n’Chips” connected to Roy Rogers.

In the future i will refrain from eating mid-state rest stop fast food shrimps.

Last night around eight we arrived at Kat & Jeremy’s home slash small farm, situated just on the rim of the sixth thirteenth biggest town in Vermont, Middlebury.

As with our last Vermont excursion, there are lots of friendly people and very little cellphone and broad-band wireless reception. Kat showed us the special spot in her house where she can take cellular calls. There was no internet at the spot.

This morning Elise and I headed into Kat’s backyard to feed her chickens. I have recently discovered that – in defiance of my general bird-despising – I somewhat adore chickens, which makes my refraining from eating them all the more sensible.

(aside: are all people that work in libraries weird? if i worked in one would it just confirm i was weird?)

After the chickens we toured Kat’s robust garden, sampled fresh snap peas and committing as much cucumber beetle genocide as possible. Each patch of plants had its own story – trials by cold soil or pests, favorite growers and runts.

I don’t consistently commit to buying local, but after this weekend I think I will have changed my mind. I’m glimpsing not only a tiny microcosm of farm economics, but also witnessing the love and attention that goes into each egg and potato.

I don’t know that “organic” really means anything special to me, but local now means a lot more.

I also played some Michael Jackson songs on Jeremy’s banjo.

Time’s up.

whiling away the hours

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(1) A few years ago I saw Malcolm Gladwell deliver a speech at the New Yorker Festival that is largely recapitulated in the second chapter of Outliers, called “The 10,000 Hour Rule.”

In it, Gladwell draws our attention to a data point converged upon by countless studies of experts in a variety of fields. He says, “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin:

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. … It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Gladwell supports the rule using Mozart, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles as his examples. Not to say that their genius and success is purely a result of 10,000 hours of practice – the book as a whole explains other facets – just that it was an essential component of their expertise.

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(2a) 10,000 hours is a long time.

If as a child starting at age five you had piano lessons two times a week (an hour each) and also practiced an hour a day, you would clock nine hours a week. 468 hours a year. 4,680 hours a decade.

If you kept that up until age 26 you’d finally have served your time.

(2b) 10,000 hours can go by before you know it.

Maybe you got into video games at age 11. You played them every night after homework and dinner, let’s say from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m. on most nights, plus extra on the weekend. That’s more than 25 hours a week. 1,300 plus a year.

You’d be a master by the time you started college. Most kids are.

(2c) Time is relative.

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(3) In the car today Gina and I were singing in harmony to the amazing Hezekiah Jones album Hezekiah Says You’re A-OK, on the way to see his band split a bill with the equally fantastic Up the Chain.

“You know, Gina,” I said, breaking from my lead vocal, “I’ve been thinking about this 10,000 hour thing. Not everyone’s an expert at something. I mean, what do most people spend 10,000 hours doing by the time they’re 25? Watching teevee, I suppose.”

“More than likely,” she replied.

“But, think about me. I watched a lot of television, sure. Mostly, though, I read until I was old enough to write, and then I wrote and read. That’s what I spent my 10k on.”

(Perhaps she interjected, “Oh, I remember.”)

“And, you know, is it any surprise that I’m good at communications? I’m not an expert, but no wonder it’s my calling. I spent my whole life practicing for it.”

We sat and sang for a moment, contemplating that.

“What about you?”

Gina paused in her harmony. “Hmm, me?”

“Yeah. What did you spend 10,000 hours doing?”

“This. Listening to music. Singing harmony.”

“Really your whole life, right? Your mother singing, your father playing guitar…”

“Yeah, since I can remember.”

“Right. So, no matter how much I rehearse, you’ll always have the edge. It’ll always come easier to you, until I reach that threshold.”

“I suppose.”

We paused as the song wound down.

“What do you think Hezekiah spent 10,000 hours doing?”

We thought on that for a few moments, and then sang together to “Albert Hash.”

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(4) We’re not all Mozart. I might not ever be Hezekiah Jones. But, we’ve all spent 10,000 hours doing something other than sleeping, and hopefully other than watching television. Maybe something incidental that we do out of necessity or habit. Driving? Social-networking? Cleaning? Taking care of children?

I’ve put in more than my share on communications – reading cereal boxes and trashy fantasy novels, writing stories at eight on my manual typewriter and almost nine years of blogs.

I got an early start on 10,000 hours of being Gina’s best friend, which I keep padding. I’m really good at that. More recently I’ve attained well-in-excess of 10,000 hours of being in love with Elise.

I hope eventually I’ll reach my 10,000th hour of serious focus on music. It’s a large piggy-bank of time to fill.

What about you? What have you spent your life mastering, intentionally or unintentionally?

don’t fail me now

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The last forty-eight hours of my life.

At six o’clock on Monday I am playing guitar. I have been playing for hours, drilling songs against a metronome. The bridge of “Unengaged” for twenty minutes straight. I’ve worn through a callous for the first time in ages.

Later I rehearse piano and vocals equally as hard. I fall asleep reading Outliers in bed, which just two chapters in already has caused one blowup with E because I said if I had me as a child I’d call me a failure.

I don’t want to be a failure.

Tuesday I have a fun, frantic day at work – the kind where you realize at the end of the day that you never stopped to hang your coat. I start writing the second my ass is on the bus, and emerge almost three hours later with that last post.

I rehearse. Hard. Again. Trying not to fail. Despite my voice sounding brittle and inflexible due to the lack of a warm-up, I venture out to an open mic while E stays at home and works on freelance.

At the restaurant my first song is awesome; the room is quietly transfixed. (I’m not a failure?) Afterward I promptly break a string and become shy and faltering when I’m handed another guitar. I fuck up “Like a Virgin,” of all things, and promptly lose everyone’s attention.

Today I feel slightly beaten up (thank god I don’t drink at those things), on top of beating myself up. Still manage another frantic work day that barely includes a coat-hanging. On the way home I listen to my own voice on my iPod, which a lot of days is the only thing I can manage to do.

I’m listening to “Like a Virgin” from 2006 and thinking, This is awful. Why am i singing like that? (Of course, I wouldn’t make it ten seconds into “Like a Virgin” from 2001.)

Then I listen to a Trio from 2008 and realize, God, I really did get better.

I am not a failure.

I get home and am kissed goodbye as E heads out to front her band at the Khyber. Another hour of writing.

Hindsight

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Can I just put something in perspective for a moment?

My free time has been devoted to event planning on at least a weekly basis since November of 2007. That’s one and a half years of constant event planning.

We spent two months planning our engagement party. Then wedding planning started in the background of planning LP’s There’s a Stage on My Lawn for last May (coming on the heels of my major advertising event at work, which I adore).

Then wedding planning was in the forefront while I background assisted on LP’s Summer Mixer. Towards the end of wedding planning was honeymoon planning, as well as the beginnings of planning LP’s BYM Fest. And, since the wedding it’s been lots of BYM Fest (plus my major advertising event at work, which I still adore).

So, as of Sunday I will be NOT planning an event for the first time in eighteen months.

Wow.

You are sitting next to my wife.

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I’ve now been married for a little over a quarter of a year.

It’s been really swell, aside from the part where I was really pissed off in France for a day or two. And the quality of gouda there more than made up for it.

We’re still the newest newlyweds in most of our social circles, so we’re still getting those ever-so-nebulous questions: “How’s married life treating you? / Is married life any different?”

At first I thought there was inherent comedy in the idea that something so simple as a wedding would have fundamentally altered the nature of our unbroken seven-year relationship.

On second thought, I realized that some things are different. People treat us as more of a team than they used to. I feel more responsible to be a (dys?)functional part of her family. We own a car!

Really, the biggest difference is the way we look at each other when we’re at home watching a movie. I can’t describe it. There’s just something knowing in the glance, like, “I married you just so we could sit around and do this for the rest of our lives.”

That’s a little too intangible of a nuance for elevator chat, so I usually tell people the biggest difference is that now when people sit down next to Elise on the train I say, “Excuse me, but you are sitting next to my wife.”

They usually move.