selfy-stuff

Freak out! Le freak, c’est chic.

June 16, 2010 by krisis

It’s my first post as a home-owner!

The events leading up to our settlement at eleven this morning were unexpected and rather ridiculous.

Actually, I’ve discovered that any adventure I am allowed to take charge of that involves both cars and big-ticket-purchases becomes ridiculous, regardless of the relative simplicity of its intended result.

Honestly, I don’t know how I do it. I choose to believe it’s the fault of my inner OCD Godzilla. What for most people would be a simple point-to-point drive with a check in hand he transforms into a travelling circus of oddities to satisfy all of his many obsessive requirements. I have no choice but to comply so that he remains sated, lest he begin to devour portions of my soul and gall bladder.

I feel the need to document the whole madcap venture while it’s still fresh and ridiculous-seeming – and while E can confirm that it is the god’s honest truth and I have not exaggerated a single word even a little.

paint chips, forks, and vomitoriums

June 3, 2010 by krisis

The non-extreme portion of Memorial Day weekend found E and I in Home Depot, contemplating paint chips for a redress of our new dining room. Or, rather, E was contemplating paint chips while I idly examined the paper quality and die cuts of the paint brochures.

“What colors do you think the dining room should be?” E queried, fist full of colored slips of high-end paper.

“You know me – everything spartan.”

(I pronounced “spartan” as “spahttan,” a Buffy in-joke about Faith and her seedy apartment.)

While reductive (and an in-joke), as a statement it’s essentially true – the colors I like in a home are white, hardwood, and bricks. That’s it. When pressed for a choice I will always pick the bluest option, unless it’s navy. Oh, and I enjoy stainless steel, where applicable. That’s about the extent of my home decor color preferences.

(Not coincidentally, our wedding colors were sapphire and platinum.)

I continued my careful examination of the paper samples for a moment, at which point E perhaps shot me a look, so I reluctantly joined the color browsing and continued the conversation.

“Well, the wood in that room is pretty blond, so there’s that to keep in mind. Not everything goes with that. You don’t want to pick something that would turn it into a vomitorium.”

Pointedly ignoring my last statement, E produced a deep purple chip. “What about this?”

“No, that would make me vomit.” Here the older couple standing next to us at the paint display began to eye me with caution.

“Can you possibly describe the qualities a color could have that would make you vomit?”

“Well, really there’s two different facets of vomitous colors.”

Having long since grown familiar with my peculiar brand of insanity, E braced for impact.

“First, there’s context. Like, when I was a teenager my mom had our back bedroom refinished for me, and I picked this seafoam-ish green for the walls. It had context – it was part of a palette with the ceiling, the hardwoods, and my area rug. But when you live in a room you’re not always seeing the entire palette, or looking at the walls in the context of the rug. Sometimes you are just staring at the wall and you realize it’s not ‘seafoam’ so much as ‘mint,’ like mint chocolate chip ice cream and, while it made for a beautiful palette, it’s not necessarily the most pleasant-to-look-at color all on its own, but now you’re surrounded by mint chocolate chip ice cream for the next three years.

“Suddenly my room had become a vomitorium.”

At this point the older couple, who had skirted me widely to continue to browse the paint colors, put down their samples and moved to a different display.

I continued. “Then, there are colors that are pretty in the short term but will be vomitous over a longer period of time. Like, see this ‘eggplant’ chip? I love this color. But I can tell it’s like ‘fork.'”

E perhaps thought she had reached an absolute apex of exasperation during my first monologue. However, here she seemed to discover a heretofore unknown height.

“Like a fork?” She said this with a slight steeliness to her voice, like she might abandon me here in Home Depot if I wasn’t the one with the GPS phone. However, I was wound up and could not be stopped.

“No, like ‘fork.’ Like, ‘fork’ makes sense. It’s a tidy little word – four prongs, four letters. But ‘fork’ is one of those words that can get weird. Like, if you say it too many times? Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. After a while it begins to sound made up. Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly have any meaning. Fork. Fork. Fork. Eventually it starts getting uncomfortable in your mouth. Fork. Fork. Why does it have to sound so quacky? Fork. That ‘k,’ it’s so unwieldy, it kind of unsettles your stomach. It kind of (fork) makes you (fork) nauseous (fork) to even say (fork) the (fork) word (fork).

“After a while,” I intoned, gravely, “you feel like you will vomit if you even see one, let alone say the word.”

“The word for…”

“No,” I interrupted, “please, don’t say it. I’ve already said it too much.”

We stood in silence at the paint display, E staring at me in glassy disbelief.

“You see, ‘eggplant’ as a color is just like f… just like that word. As a paint chip it’s lovely. In a web palette I adore it. On a wall … every day? Eventually it’s just going to wear me down. It will turn that room into a vomitorium.”

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“I know exactly what it means, honey. It means a room that would make me vomit whenever I walked into it.”

That was pretty much the end of our browsing for paint chips.

(PS: This post is dedicated to my dear friend, SLska. Or, I should say, Master SLska.)

The Human Calculator v. The Harmony Jukebox

May 24, 2010 by krisis

That would be a pretty dull superhero fight, huh?

Actually, the title refers to Friday’s post, which drew a quick comment from someone who built a straw-man of “The Human Spellchecker” to stand next to my snarky Human Calculator.

I’m so high-and-mighty about math, but do I use a spell-checker when I blog? Would I deny people a spellchecker too in my dedicated Ludditism?

The answers are, respectively, “occasionally” and “of course!” The existence of tools to assist us doesn’t replace the need to master skills or knowledge on our own.

Consider the source. I take for granted that I’m comfortable doing both of these things. I have to proofread words and numbers as part of both my jobs and my hobbies. It’s in my best interest to be a knowledgeable snob about both.

Maybe they aren’t the best examples for me.

I always say, “music is like calculus to me.” Yet, I’m a musician. I don’t have wonderful pitch, and I am not a natural singer. I can’t pluck perfectly in-tune harmony notes out of thin air like E or Gina, each of whom I refer to as “The Harmony Jukebox.”

When our band learns a new song I usually have to play along on piano at first, and when I sing harmony in the car E has to sing with me the first few times. And I have to pay careful attention to breath support, shaping, and phrasing to stay in tune.

At some point I have to sing the notes myself in an effortless way. If I never eliminated the piano, or E, or the careful attention to every note, I wouldn’t be much of a musician. I mean, yeah, they have auto-tune for that now, but what about performing live.

Bottom line: being a musician is hard work for me! Sometimes it isn’t any fun at all.

What if math was that hard for me? Would I sometimes just whip out the calculator? Probably. But just like music, I’d still want to know how to do it myself. I still want to possess that knowledge.

What about you? Forget grade-school antics like math and spelling. What is a difficult skill that you have to reproduce daily? Do you use a tool to assist you? And, can you still perform the same task without the tool?

There was something so pleasant about that place AKA The House, pt. 2

May 17, 2010 by krisis

Where I last left our intrepid first-time home-buying heroes (i.e., E and I) we went on a financial fact-finding outing that unexpectedly also found a house that met all of our requirements.

That was two Tuesdays ago.

On Wednesday morning our Realtor checked in with us to share some newly-acquired intelligence – the house was being shown frequently (even within her office), and had received an offer while we were looking at it! Did we want to submit a competing bid?

Being the logical-negative (AKA defeatist) person I am in situations involving tens of thousands of dollars, I had talked myself out of it in a matter of minutes. I sent E a series of emails deflating her hopes and lamenting that it just wasn’t meant to be. Too soon, too competitive.

Being the logical-positive person I married, she pushed back – if it wasn’t meant to be, would it have been so oddly perfect for us, with its new fireplace and kitchen of butcher block and stainless steel? Did it matter that there was another bid on the table?

Her bottom line: there was certainly no harm in putting in a competing bid, as long as we were comfortable with it. But were we really going to make an offer having seen the house only once?

(Meanwhile, I was having an intense conversation with Drew via text message and one of my most beloved co-workers unexpectedly gave her two week notice. Between that and the house decision, by 1pm the day had reached a three-ring circus level of crazy.)

I had such a huge list of house-buying best practices I planned to execute – staking out the house for an entire day to observe the neighborhood, interviewing all of the neighbors, creating a photo & video walkthrough to show friends, measuring each room for potential mapping, singing and playing guitar throughout the house…

All of you home-owners out there are probably having a chuckle at my expense, but my internal Godzilla runs 24/7 on a proverbial OCD hamster wheel to generate these levels of obsessive-compulsiveness. Despite the implied rush from the frequent showings and competing bid, I couldn’t entirely quell my giant, imaginary, bipedal lizard without engaging in at least a portion of his proscribed OCD investigations.

Since the idea of all of that was crazy and the day was crazy (and, frankly, I’m crazy enough for the both of us), we decided to put the house to the insanity test – cramming as many of my Godzilla metrics into three hours as possible.

It was with that mission that we returned to the house 24 hours after our initial visit, armed with a camera, flip cams, tape measures, graph paper, my electric guitar, and Gina’s overpoweringly loud Fender guitar amp.

We knocked on every neighbor’s door and chatted up anyone we could find. We measured, photographed, and videoed every room. I sat in the attic with Gina’s amp on 8 – so loud I could barely bear to play it, while E walked down the stairs and out of the house.

Her report? Mild amp sounds in the living room, but outside you couldn’t hear a thing.

We made up our minds – a bid was going in.

What followed was exciting, but not in a recapituable way – three hours of amortization schedules, drawing on whiteboards, and eating Twizzlers – resulting in putting in our first offer on our first potential home.

The excitement did not end there, but my ability to sleep through the night did. More on that in the next post.

Funk-Breaking with Katie Barbato

March 1, 2010 by krisis

Well, here we are in March, with any February funkiness finally shrugged (even though the streets are still not quite cleared).

I have so much weekend to tell you about (Presenting at TrendCamp! Our first Arcati Crisis show of 2010! Another performance upcoming at Tin Angel!), but first I want to focus on my funk-breaking.

Even the cheeriest, most pro-active person (i.e., me, possibly you?) can fall prey to a crummy mood – where nothing we do seems to be worth doing. That was my February Funk.

Of course, funk is not exclusive to or contained within February. Nay, THE FUNK can capture you at any time of year. We’re just most susceptible when it’s dark and icy and we haven’t had a garbage collection for 16 days.

When you are me, and spend your spare time opening up your head and letting art out, THE FUNK is a pretty crippling condition. My internal editor is vicious enough already without any added incentive!

Luckily, I have the good fortune to be friends with many other people who have art inside of their heads, one of whom is Katie Barbato.

I’ve blogged about Katie before. She is an outstanding songwriter, a typically flawless singer, and leader of The Sleepwells, one of my favorite local bands.

Katie, too, had fallen prey to THE FUNK, and invited me over to her apartment for a serious funk break-up session. There was fresh hummus, sugar cookies, a stunning view, and Katie and her amazing songs.

And calling it quits with THE FUNK.

Over several hours Katie and I curated our own special mashup of VH1 Storytellers and Rock Opera, following a narrative from the dumbest things we could do to contending with the apocalypse to the stories of what we had lost in 2009.

Sometimes I can be so insular in my shared songwriting space with Gina that I forget that there are others out there channeling their feelings into songs – and that their feelings can be pretty similar to my own.

Not only did Katie share feelings, but she shared some stunning tunes. A few familiar ones, as well as some brand new ones being birthed. Katie writes with such beautiful, intuitive voice-leading – it was a special treat to follow along from across the couch instead of from across the bar. I should have been jotting down the names of tunes as we went, because I came away with several new favorites.

By the time we made it to our last songs and I played the mated pair of “Shake It Off” and “Regenerate” their equal parts rage and resignation came hurtling through me so strongly that my whole body was trembling for minutes afterwards.

As I wrapped myself up for a walk home through twinkling flakes of snow, I realized that Katie and I had shaken off THE FUNK. It was replaced with the purpose and self-respect I had been missing.

Every day since then has been awesome. Thank you, Katie, for sharing your songs and having the sense to shake us out of THE FUNK!

Gentle readers, if you too find yourself mired in funkiness you should seek out the coolest person you have interests in common with and have them BREAK YOU OUT!

I have a bit more news about Ms. Barbato and The Sleepwells, but that will have to keep for another few days. Let’s just say, you’ll have a chance to see a version of our funk-breaking shtick for yourself very soon…