Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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upside-down houses (or are they right-side up?)

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Of the vast catalog of cultural differences we’ve encountered in Wellington, one I have found to be both puzzling and ultimately charming is the upside-down houses.

It is utterly normal for suburban houses here to have their kitchen and primary living space on an upper floor. This was consistent across almost every house we saw in person, and anecdotally seems to be the case throughout our entire neighborhood based on glimpses of upper-floor kitchens and dining rooms through windows – since folks don’t tend to hang curtains in a kitchen.

I’m not widely-traveled enough to know if this is a Wellington-only thing, a New Zealand thing, or a British commonwealth thing. Heck, maybe Philadelphia was the only place in the world where you expect to walk into a living room and then a kitchen when you enter a house. I have no idea.

At first the upside-down layouts seemed absurd to me. Why would you want to carry groceries upstairs all the time? Why would you want to exit and enter the house near the bedrooms and clomp all the way to your parlor!

Having lived with the arrangement for a few months now, it’s making a bit more sense to me for three big reasons.

First, houses in New Zealand are known to be poorly-insulated – even modern construction! Heat rises. It’s a pretty simple equation – it makes sense to have that heat rise to the rooms where the most people in your house will be spending most of their time living. It’s easy to heat up your bedroom with a radiator for the night and then switch it off in the morning, which is more energy efficient than an empty bedroom being warm all day long.

(Plus, it means food smells from the kitchen don’t rise to the bedrooms, which is a major peeve of mine.)

Second, due to the hilly nature of Wellington, many upper floors have phenomenal views – whether that’s of the city or a body of water. Many houses have some sort of porch, balcony, or deck. Those views would be wasted on a room used primarily for sleep.

I’ve always been puzzled by American houses that have those features on a bedroom – do people really wake up in the morning and fling open the doors to walk right out onto their little terrace before getting dressed or having coffee? Those elevated outdoor spaces feel so much more useful when attached to communal spaces.

Third, privacy. When your living room is at ground level, it feels like everyone can just stare into it from the street and every passing car to see what you are doing. That means you have the drapes drawn closed all the time if you have any kind of foot or car traffic on your street.

With the living space on the second floor, I feel fine having windows un-shaded. If someone sees the tops of our heads from down on the street as we watch TV or play music, it’s not such a big deal. Meanwhile, you’re almost certainly going to have curtains on your bedroom windows no matter what floor you’re on, as you conceivably want to be able to make it dark and will sometimes be getting dressed in there. Why not leave them on the bottom and have open windows on the top?

Despite all of those positive points, I still remain a bit puzzled by some of the impractical detractions.

When you enter an upside-down home, there’s an odd disconnect between where you take off your shoes and coat and where you’re actually heading. I find myself constantly puzzled about where to set down my keys and charge my phone – things I expect to do in my living space, and not in a disconnected foyer hallway on another level.

Parlor-on-top layouts mean bedrooms tend to be next to front doors and garages and exposed to all the drafts and street noise that entails.  The bedrooms have living spaces overhead, completely with all the noise of footfalls that comes from that. And, dampness is a big issue here, which means you’re sleeping in a potentially damp space – ick.

Plus, it makes the daily routine feel a bit backwards – waking up in the morning, walking up the stairs for breakfast, and then back down the stairs to leave.

Finally, there’s the aforementioned lugging of groceries up flights of stairs, whereas I think most suburban Americans expect their kitchen to be adjacent to their garage. It’s a minor annoyance, but one that I’d be hesitant to lock in for years if I was buying a home.

All that said, as I type this from our couch looking out over the harbour, I have to say I’m really coming around to these upside down houses. E and I briefly thought about having a house built back in the states, and never once did we discuss a living room or kitchen on an upper floor. It’s one of those “of course things are done this way” cultural assumptions.

Now, if I had the choice, I’m not sure where I’d choose to place those communal spaces in a house built from scratch. There’s no right answer, and some of my objections from when we first started seeing homes now feel downright silly.

I’m sure Kiwis are equally puzzled when they visit friends in the states, wondering why their living rooms are always frigid and where all you can see from the windows are the hedges.

intangible assets

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Here’s an important lesson I’ve been reminded of repeatedly over the past six months of planning and executing an international move:

Your money does not belong to you.

You do not have an unalienable right or even a persistent privilege to access your money from everywhere on this Earth. It does not necessarily translate across borders. You may not be able to carry it with you every where you go in the form cash, checks, or precious gems.

If you’re someone who has never before worried about accessing your bank account, that’s a frightening concept. It was frightening when we saw it on the The Handmaid’s Tale earlier this year. In an early flashback, all of the women in the United States have had their assets frozen. The pair of female protagonists cannot access their own money without a husband to cosign.

(Your level of outrage at this particular development may strongly correlate with your age; American banks could deny women an account until the 1960s and credit cards as late as 1974.)

Based not only on my own reaction to that development but also the “aww, hell no!” I saw from many friends online, I think this scene resonated strongly with viewers more strongly than the same two women losing their jobs. In the real world, everyone is afraid their job could disappear, but we feel like we own our money. Even if that money was deposited directly by our employer into our bank account without our intervention it feels like something real and tangible to us because we earned it. We own it.

Maybe we’re just a pair of unlucky morons when it comes to international banking, but I don’t feel like we own our money anymore.

That started as far back as June, when E tried to transfer some US savings to a new account in New Zealand. Not only did our American bank not offer any tools for such a transfer, but once we found a way to do it the receiving bank in New Zealand declined to open an account for us until we were in the country and could prove our residency.

How were we supposed to land in the country and established residency without a bank account in the country? I’m not sure, but that was the topic of one of my earliest struggles here in Wellington.

I thought we were past those bank shenanigans after our first month here. We have bank accounts now, and debit cards, and E is getting paid in NZ dollars. I thought that meant our money was “real” here in New Zealand, which would make things easy if we needed to get any more of it from one country to another. Yet, earlier this week I found myself breaking down into tears at a bank counter when they wouldn’t allow me to deposit a check made out to me from one of the largest public companies in the world because it was in Euros.

“We don’t do Euros,” the bank teller said, shrugging behind the counter as I buried my head in my hands. “We’re phasing out hard copy checks,” his colleague added, blithely.

(Eventually I’ll get around to taking about the culture shock of customer service outside the United States. I’m still gathering data on how many times I have to cry in frustration.)

As with many things related to our move, I’m sure this is a problem that goes away if you are really rich and can pay someone to take care of it for you. I’m certain packing up my guitars would have been simple if I was Bon Jovi, and my comics would have been taken care of if I was Nick Cage, yet I had to jump through all the hoops to pack and ship them safely with virtually no assistance from our movers.

Similarly, I’m sure Madonna does not have a money transfer problem when she wants to deposit a royalty check from Sweden while she’s in the states.

Yet, for a single family with a discreet amount of savings and a variety of income sources, it’s an ongoing nightmare – now with the added fun of being a race-against-time to figure out how to turn this worthless piece of paper into money before 90 days pass and without giving away a big chunk of it in fees.

Around the world people love to sneer at immigrants and refugees, insisting they’d be fine with a foreign professional who “went through the process” to immigrate and then added to the economy. Well, I’m here to tell you: the process is personally and financially draining, and it makes it hard to add to the economy once you’re through with it – and that’s coming from going through one of the more simple immigrations in the world. I’d never want to try to navigate the process of immigrating to America.

Even if I have to cry at a few more bank counters, this really drives home the amount of privilege it takes to safely and securely make an international move. I’ve barely made it through mentally intact, and I had a partner and a lot of assistance on the ground here. Not everyone is so lucky.

the barber of Wellington / Philadelphian fears

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I knew that when we moved to Wellington I’d have a lot of new experiences, like converting temperatures to Celsius, walking uphill both ways to get anywhere, and feigning interest in conversations about rugby.

What I hadn’t really thought through was that one of the most intimidating new experiences would be one I had been putting off for years back in Philly.

You see, despite a lot of fear and anxiety on my part, yesterday – for the first time in my life! – I visited a barber.

A barber! Back in Philly I had a rather expensive high-end salon habit that I mitigated by only getting my hair cut a few times a year, at most.

I have big, thick, wavy, difficult hair. I’m sure a lot of other guys do too, but they either keep it too short to notice or they just suck it up and get bad haircuts – and I am way too vain for that to happen.

The few times in my life I’ve visited a casual, utilitarian hair cuttery my locks would get utterly butchered. Even a buzzcut on me will stand straight up like a trimmed hedge. My hair needs to be chopped aggressively from every possible angle to give it any hope of laying relatively flat on my head and not looking like a half-deflated pompadour, which in turn tends to make me look like a round-faced 12-year-old boy.  I need layers upon layers cross-cut in every direction for my hair to lay flat or look elegantly tousled.

I have found exactly two hairdressers over the past two decades who understood how to give me a hair cut that wasn’t disastrous and could handle my hair in both short and long configurations. Not coincidentally, they both primarily cut women’s hair. They both dealt with more lengths, more textures, and a much higher vested interest in their cuts actually looking good, because in general women pay more attention to their appearance than men, and especially women visiting a high-end salon.

The one problem with this arrangement is that I was paying high-end salon prices for what would sometimes be a pretty short, barber-esque hair cut.

Why not just go to a barber? Not only do I not know the first thing about barbers, the idea of being in a guy-filled barber shop scares the hell out of me.

I have an ingrained hesitance to placing myself in any kind of all-male environment. Once I was done with high school gym class I swore them off almost entirely. I don’t understand how to interact with a room full of randomly sampled men. They put me on edge. I cannot tolerate their leering humor. Sometimes they can even be threatening!

This tracks with my generally not having any idea about any sort of typical “guy stuff” (that really ought not to be gendered at all, but that’s another post entirely).

No one taught me how to shave; I got rid of my burgeoning adolescent mustache by stealing one of my mother’s Lady Bic pink disposable razors and just figuring it out for myself. (And, honestly, I’m still pretty terrible at it). I learned about power tools from working backstage in college theatre. I learned about sex by becoming a certified peer sex educator.

So, I was scared about the barber shop in more ways than one. I’ve been procrastinating on making an appointment since the week we touched down here, despite my hair growing from a length I could manageably slick back to an unruly shag of curls.

Every time I got past my fear of a bad haircut I’d advance to my fear of entering barber shop. Then I’d look at the prices to go to a fancy salon instead. Then I’d just give up on the entire effort for another week or two.

Finally, the sheer weight of my vanity forced me into action, as I was skipping perfectly good opportunities to shoot new videos because of less-than-ideal hair days. I asked short-haired Kiwis for advice, found a shop with decent recommendations, and booked an appointment online – which took me three entire days of mulling over options, cancelling on the last step, and having tiny anxiety attacks before I finally selected a “full service” cut and hoped for the best.

The good spirits of Wellington must have been watching over my barber selection process. My selection turned out to be a tiny, two-chair shop on an alley-way blasting New Wave music, occupied by a brightly tattooed barber with a shelf full of classic G.I. Joes and a daughter the same age as EV6. I spotted Cobra Commander just as some B-52s popped onto the stereo and I breathed such a sigh of relief.

There was no crowd of leering, lecherous men. It turns out there was not any kind of secret dude-code I needed to get me through my appointment. I had a couple of stymied moments, like when he put a sort of paper cuff around my neck (??) and later when he asked me my clipper number and I said, “my what now?”

My first hair cut isn’t perfect, but it’s not awful either. Certainly not the worst I’ve had in my first outing with someone new! And, I’m very happy to go back. We didn’t even get to talk about G.I. Joes yet!

Not only do I finally have all my curls shorn, but I feel like I learned an important lesson. My fear of men and masculinity shouldn’t stop me from engaging with the world any more now than it did when I was 17. Both men and masculinity are different in a different country, as are many other aspects of the world around me that I take for granted.

I didn’t move here to maintain the same set of fears and prejudices that I built up as a form of defense in Philadelphia. If I’m ever going to become a Kiwi, I need to let some of these assumptions go and try new things (and re-try some old ones).

 

creature comforts / window screens

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We’re in the midst of a bit of a late Spring heat wave here in Wellington and today it got as hot as 24°C.

For those of you not super quick at converting celsius to fahrenheit (I’m getting there), that’s 75°F.

Seventy-five degrees fahrenheit. It’s a wonder I survived!

Maybe I didn’t survive. Maybe I’ve died and gone to heaven – because this is my ideal weather.

My hatred for hot temperatures is widely known to my friends. Unless I am in the middle of leaping into a pool I can barely function once the mercury slips past 80°F. When Philly gets into the 90s I go into complete system shutdown.

I’d often remark that it would be nice to move to somewhere with lower highs, like the Pacific Northwest, but I never imagined I would move to place like this – where the average temperature is never over 65°F, it never drops below freezing, it hardly ever gets higher than 77°F, and the worst heatwaves of all time top out in the mid-80s.

Seriously, if I was an alien life form and biologists were charting my ideal habitat temperature range, their findings would simply say “Wellington.”

When you live somewhere where the temperature basically ranges from “chilly spring” to “warm spring” for the majority of the year, if you cannot be outside at the very least you want every possible window open. Luckily, our house has a lot of windows – including skylights – which means there’s double the motivation to open them, as spending a whole day indoors can start to feel like you’re under a magnifying glass.

Here’s the rub: of the many quirks I have discovered about Wellington, one is that they do not seem to believe in window screens.

(It’s actually not much of a Wellington-specific quirk. It turns out that’s the case in a lot of the world outside of North America.)

Even believing in properly functioning windows is a bit of a hit-or-miss endeavor from house to house here. The Wellington region is notorious for not-so-well insulated homes, which perhaps seems moot given the ideal temperature range. However, that doesn’t take into account moisture. When we were shopping for a rental it was impressed upon us to search for houses with double-paned glass windows that seemed to adequately seal. Of the over-a-dozen houses we saw, I’d say only three or four fit the bill.

Yet, even in the most beautiful, modern home with thick, well-sealed windows, you are 99.9% likely to discover that not a single window or door in the house has a screen. In fact, they probably couldn’t even fit a screen, since windows here are frequently massive casements half as tall as me or multi-part horizontal sliding doors that might open an entire wall.

I find it completely puzzling. As someone who grew up owning cats (and, at one point, a bird), you could not possibly leave a window open more than a crack or else they would find their way out! Plus, who knows what kind of dastardly squirrels and scuzzy pigeons would find their way in. Which is not to mention that screens gave your windows some minor illusion of providing security for your house even when they were open.

We don’t have pets here, there are no squirrels, and I don’t think the rate of crime is anything like Philly. Of course, there are still bugs. Even as I’ve typed this post I’ve already squashed two, chased out a third, and swatted at a fourth. [Read more…] about creature comforts / window screens

Crushing Comics S01E30.1 – Thank you for watching 30 videos in 30 days!

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I took a breather from my reshelving to record a special out-of-continuity episode of Crushing Comics, wherein I do not unwrap any new books but do express my gratitude for your support as I’ve posted 30 videos in the last 30 days.

For over a decade now I have a habit of making November a very challenging month for myself by setting a lofty goal around producing new content. I’ve recorded 30 songs in 30 days, blogged daily, written the first draft of a novel, and turned CK into a pro-level music and comics blog for a month.

In all of those cases I was challenging myself to do more of something I already really loved – writing or playing music. The hard part was finding the time and inspiration to do it with great consistency.

This year was different. In addition to blogging daily, I challenged myself to do something I am extremely uncomfortable doing – shooting and editing video. This discomfort stretches all the way back to college, where a Film & Video 101 class was the first one I ever dropped.

(Yes, I just searched my own archives for corroboration of that memory. And found it. Because this blog is ancient).

Sixteen years later and I’m still averse to video. There are so many variables to control – all of the potential pitfalls of audio recording, plus a whole new visual layer in which I can make mistakes. My past video efforts have been defeated by everything from bad lighting to out-of-sync audio, and the concept of adding graphics and chyrons was just beyond me. It’s something I’ve only ever done begrudgingly and with great difficulty.

This year changed that. My Crushing Comics episodes certainly aren’t masterpieces of short film, but in recording and editing them I surmounted every one of my prior video challenges and actually learned new stuff along the way. I replaced my own head with an animated version twice!

Here’s the thing: I had no idea at the beginning of the month this was going to turn into a daily endeavor. I had an initial week of videos prepped because I always like to launch a new content project with consistency, but after day eight I had no expectation of keeping up that pace. The initial video editing was taking four hours an episode.

Going 30 for 30 happened because of you. It happened because the view counts kept going up, because you left delightful comments, and because you contributed to my Patreon campaign along the way. I had no idea that daily videos were going to be my monthly challenge, but you kinda forced my hand.

Beyond finally learning some skills behind the camera, I also got the chance to be in front of it for over five hours worth of hosting. That’s more time on camera than most TV shows broadcast in November! For me, it was a chance to get back to being a live presenter after over a year away from fronting a band and almost two years away from emceeing events. That’s a part of myself I never intended to step away from when the stay-at-home parent part of my life began, but circumstances conspired to have it take a back seat. I’m so happy to have it back

All of that is why I felt moved to make a thank you video today. Despite my long history of aggressive personal goal-setting, some achievements require external motivation (even if that’s just eyeballs other than my own to consume them). I did the work, but you made it possible.

The one downside of these many high-effort Novembers is that I very rarely keep up the momentum after the month has ended. Usually I’m too worn out, plus whatever lofty goal I set for 30 days is something unattainable in the long haul.

This year is different – I not only used the month to shoot 30 videos, but to plan ahead for more. Unwrapping will continue on Monday, with new episodes every weekday – I already have the next two weeks in the can! Plus, I’m already brewing plans for Season 2, because eventually all of these books will be unwrapped.

That’s a whole lot of words to say “thank you,” but here are two minutes more. Eagle-eyed viewers may be able to spot some near-future unwrappings in the background!