Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

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As I stood in front of a shelf full of unfamiliar jars of pasta sauce, I thought to myself, “What have you done?”

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That the store we chose was named “New World” was not lost on me, because even after 24 hours of travel I can detect thematic content that has the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

People have been asking me, “So, New Zealand – are you excited?” for a couple of months now. It’s gotten to the point where my answers have become rote, though still entirely genuine. I talk about weather, schools, wind, and driving on the wrong side of the road.

After all, Wellington wasn’t going to be so different from Philadelphia. It was another major city with cars and people and houses. I kept that comforting thought fixed in my mind. Even as we traipsed through airports, customs, and wrestling our rental car, the pure weight of our move hadn’t really struck me.

Not like it did in the grocery store.

In that moment standing in front of the pasta sauce, I like to think that I was transmitting a very specific, very serious distress signal that Douglas Adams described so well in the first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.

In fact, I am a mere eight thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-two miles from my birthplace. Maybe that’s why no one caught on to my signal. As distressing as it was to me, it was far too minute for anyone else to notice. [Read more…] about ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

the day that never was

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I missed this entire day.

We took off on Monday, August 21st from San Francisco just after 11pm, which meant we were running from midnight across the Pacific Ocean. Given our speed of travel, I’m actually not sure if we ever experienced the clock turning over from Monday to Tuesday before we hit the International Date Line.

Your author, the slapdash cowboy, sitting in his rented vehicle in Wellington – which is a whole other story unto itself.

Perhaps the pilot made an announcement when we crossed the line to let us know that it was suddenly not just past midnight but Tuesday evening. If he did, I was asleep at the time. All I know is that we wound up landing in Sydney around 6am on Wednesday, August 23rd, which was 5pm on Tuesday, August 22nd back in Philly.

Our flight was without incident, but our de- and re-planing was not.

We decided to fly through Sydney because it meant we wouldn’t have to go through customs in Auckland and then re-check all of our luggage to fly to Wellington. Our bags would simply make the connection in Sydney while we stayed safely within the confines of the International Terminal, like a fugitives waiting on a foreign embassy to take them in.

What no one mentioned to us is that even though we wouldn’t hit customs in Sydney we would still have to go through a re-security check to stay in the International Terminal. That meant that we not only had to do the whole security theatre dance while bleary-eyed just off a 14-hour flight, but that we had to discard all of our awesome snacks and liquids meant to carry us through the final leg of our journey.

On the plus side: the food in the Sydney International Airport was amazing. I had a falafel and pumpkin wrap for breakfast and it was so amazing that I followed it up with a pumpkin sandwich and now I am having serious misgivings about the short shrift we as Americans give to pumpkins. [Read more…] about the day that never was

not failing my first New Zealand test

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I love tests.

I love them because I delight in my ability to pass them. I was always that weird kid in class who loved when we were forced to take standardized tests. I can’t think of a single final in college I didn’t ace. Even my driving test, which caused me over a decade of agita, was just one more set of objective criteria for which I could learn the correct answers.

Ultimately, tests are no different than playing a song in front of an audience – all it takes to pass them is rehearsal. Plus, with most tests there’s not the subjective grading level of the audience rejecting you because of how you look or because you’re playing the wrong kind of guitar.

(But, seriously, Flying V guitars are lame and Gina and I will judge you.)

It’s only the tests you can’t rehearse for that give me any unease, which is why I was very nervous last week as we embarked on a two hour drive to northern New Jersey to one of the only three doctors in driving distance who may conduct a physical for our New Zealand visas. (There are presently only 34 Immigration New Zealand panel physicians in America – you’re screwed if you live in the Midwest, or even parts of the Pacific Northwest!)

Objectively, I knew the questions with which this test was concerned. New Zealand’s health care system isn’t socialized single-payer, but it’s government-subsidized enough that the “good health” of their potential residents is paramount to them granting a working visa.

What’s “good health” in this instance? They make it sound so simple on their friendly immigration site…

  • unlikely to be a danger to the health of the people already in New Zealand
  • unlikely to cost New Zealand’s health or special education services a lot of money
  • able to work or study if this the reason for your visa.

Simple, yes? Yet, getting there while over the age of 55 isn’t easy, and you can be rejected in one fell swoop for having certain medical conditions “deemed to impose significant costs and/or demands,” which include HIV and M.S.. In all of those cases, you can certainly be in “good health,” but it might take more state dollars to keep you there.

Not an approved INZ panel physician (I checked).

I’m not that old nor do I have any of the conditions in question. I’m in decent physical shape and quite limber. I have near-perfect eyesight. I wasn’t feeling congested enough to be anxious that my chest X-ray would give a false positive that I had tuberculosis.

The only unknowns were a urine sample and a blood test, but I would be fine. As for “preparing” for these tests, they only had three suggestions – which of course I studied carefully:

How do I prepare for my immigration medical examination?

  • If you are mildly unwell or on a short course of antibiotics, wait until you are better before having your immigration medical examination.
  • Do not have alcohol or high fat meals 48 hours before your blood tests.
  • Do not consume kava for 48 hours before your blood tests.

Easy.

Except, in that most Peter of Peter decisions, 24 hours before the test I did something very inadvisable (see also: shaving off my guitar callouses before a big gig; not sleeping the night before my driving test).

Here’s the inadvisable thing:

Yes, that is a Friendly’s Wattamelon roll. [Read more…] about not failing my first New Zealand test

kiwi-flavoured future

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I first proposed that Crushing Krisis might be the longest-running blog in Philadelphia back in 2003 (at which point it almost certainly wasn’t), going further to verify that claim in 2008 (at which point it almost-surely was), and finally started owning up to it on CK’s anniversary in 2009.

Crushing Krisis’s claim to that auspicious title will finally come to an end later this summer, when it relocates from Philadelphia to New Zealand along with its author, moi, and supporting players E and EV6. Oh, and of course, OCD Godzilla will be coming too – I’ve already been assured of that. Repeatedly.

Yes, that New Zealand – the one that is “Down Under” along with Australia. The one where people refer to themselves as “kiwis.”

No, I am not joking.

There is much more story to tell along with the announcement of this major transition but I’m not prepared to unfurl it all at this very moment. Considering I don’t even especially like to travel (or, at least, to pack for travel) and have only left the country a handful of times in my life, this constitutes the biggest possible change to my personal status quo I’ve ever experienced, save for perhaps leaving my amazing job, having a baby, and leaving my previous amazing job for a potential unstable amazing start-up job.

All of that definitely helped me prepare for this and I do plan on talking about it here. A lot.

Suffice to say that my plan was not to stay at home fathering and blogging quite this long. As the possibility of our relocation loomed it became obvious that the present was not the time for a Philly-based job search for a long-term and executive position!

It also explains why I was a bit preoccupied with life in June and fell off of my ambitious (but, not impossible) posting schedule for the month.

Now, in addition to reading my talking about listening to music, writing music, reading comic books, and fatherhood, you’ll now be hearing about the process of becoming an American expatriate as well as us getting to know New Zealand, plus my utter glee at finally having an excuse to spell “colour,” “flavour,” and “favourite” with a “u.”

If you’ll excuse me, OCD Godzilla and I have to get back to a several-hundred line project plan to figure out how and when I’m going to ship an entire home recording studio and over 25,000 comic books halfway around the world.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of a kiwi bird:

feeling heated

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I’ve always been constitutionally incapable of dealing with heat.

My mother was the opposite. You’ve never met anyone more eager to bake in the sun on a sandy beach than this woman. She would wake me up before 7am when we were vacationing at the Jersey shore to let me know she was headed down to the beach, already equipped with her chair and her book.

(I would spent the day reading in the cool confines of the hotel room, punctuated by occasional trips to the pool.)

Memories of being hot as a child are on my brain because our central air conditioning is mysteriously on the fritz at the moment. It turns on and works mightily for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, and then its double-breaker in the basement trips with an audible CLACK. The first few times it happened I simply reset the breaker, but breakers trip for a reason and continually flouting that reason with manual intervention seemed unwise.

We’ve kept EV6 and I entertained and cool throughout this week with a combination of car trips, mall walking, and cold showers. It’s the nights that are getting to me. Like a video game character who cannot recover hit points while he’s poisoned, I don’t actually seem to derive any sort of restorative qualities from sleep when I’m feeling too hot. We are now on day five (the repairman is due tomorrow) and I am starting to feel delirious.

It reminds me of childhood nights spent at my paternal grandmother’s house, which was equipped with fans and a single air conditioner suspended above the kitchen door which I saw turned on only once in my life.  On those hot nights I would sprawl in the middle of a couch or bed, arms outstretched to find the hidden cool spot on the top sheet or beneath a pillow as I counted the slow seconds until morning. [Read more…] about feeling heated