Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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extra sleep sunday

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Last night I slept the sleep of the dead. This morning, too. Really, all day.

I was already nodding off in my chair after dinner. I barely made it through supervising kid bedtime activities. Then I was out again for fifteen hours of pure unconscious bliss until late in the morning, when I woke up, ate breakfast, and then promptly took a nap.

I’m not sick. I hadn’t worked out extra hard. I slept perfectly fine the night before. I just needed extra sleep.

No, not just needed. Wanted. Desired. Craved.

It was glorious. Pure luxury. 5 stars out of 5, would sleep that much again.

Something not enough parents explain to you as a non-parent or an expecting parent is how rare extra sleep will be for at least the next decade of your life.

Or, if they do tell you about it, they make it sound like it will be purely out of spite. The spite of a tiny rage-bomb of an infant who will never sleep. Also, the spite of your partner, who will never again be willing to cover for you for the morning so you can catch up on sleep.

And then you’re like, “of course they will, we both love to sleep in, they’ll never do me like that.”

Here’s the actual secret I’ve discovered, as someone with a kid who has always slept through the night and who has an amazing parenting tag team partner:

Parenting programs your brain to believe that sleeping extra means danger.

I’m not sure if it’s evolution at work or a result of our modern lives, but I find this is true even when my kid is many miles away on a camping trip with said parenting tag team partner, leaving me alone in the house to sleep to my heart’s content.

As a parent, oversleeping is always a scary prospect. It equals not checking on a diaper in time. Or a hungry kid trying to forage for their own breakfast. Or missing school dropoff. Or simply getting your kid up so late that their sleep schedule is ruined for days to come.

They’re all dangers external to your own well-being, so they’re an impossible alarm clock of anxiety to turn off. It’s not the same as hitting the snooze button as you tell yourself you don’t mind having to take the late bus to work. At some point, you stop being asleep because your brain is trained to spring into action.

Over the years we adapt. We affirm ourselves with statements like, “I’m a morning person now” and “I cannot imagine wasting that much of the day.” But the truth of the matter is if we want to sleep the sleep of the dead, usually it involves feeling like death rather than doing it just for the lazy weekend joy of it.

That’s why last night was so delightful. It was a random act of drowsiness. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I slept that long in a single sprint of unconsciousness apart from being ill. I didn’t have a single damn reason I needed all of that sleep and I got it anyway.

And I’d do it again. If my brain would let me.

Harbingers of Failure

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Earlier this year in a jaunty bit of Q&A with Twitter followers, my comic books colleague Adam from the Battle of the Atom podcast asked me the following question:

“Why do you hate the good stuff sometimes?”

Adam was mostly asking about comics, but this is a question that has followed me my entire life. Any of my friends who have gone to the movies with me has asked the same question.

Image by Yatheesh Gowda from Pixabay

It doesn’t matter what the thing is. You can hand me a random stack of anything: comics with no credits, new albums by unfamiliar artists, or even a selection of burger condiments. it’s all the same. I will enjoy a consistent amount of each sampling, and I will tend to prefer some of the unpopular stuff while eschewing some of the most most mainstream items.

I always thought this was because I have unique wiring in my brain. I thought it was that certain tropes or styles simply lack appeal for me.

I’m sure that’s true, to some extent, but I’ve recently learned that it might also be because I am a “harbinger of failure.”

I first heard about this concept last year while watching a 2017 episode of the British quiz show QI, or Quite Interesting, as gleaned from a 2015 MIT News article on a study conducted by two MIT professors. Here is how QI summarized it:

The difference between the next big thing and a turkey is that there are people who will always buy the turkey – as in the American showbiz term for something that flops commercially.

There is a kind of consumer called “harbingers of failure”, whose always buy a new product that later goes on to fail. Thus, people with a “flop affinity” are in demand from people in market research because they are good at predicting what products will go on to be unsuccessful.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed 10,000,000 transactions at a chain of convenience stores, and they found that people who buy the nail polish that fails are also the people who buy the ice cream that fails. Harbingers of failure in the past have also bought watermelon-flavored Oreo biscuits and a range of ready-meals made by the people who made Colgate toothpaste called “Colgate Kitchen Entrees.”

The moment I heard this explanation, I recognized myself in it.

More on that in a moment. First, let’s talk about the flipside of being a Harbinger of Failure: disliking popular things. [Read more…] about Harbingers of Failure

the spider in the mirror

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For over a year, a spider lived inside our car’s driver-side mirror.

I suppose it might not have been the same spider the entire time. It might have been an entire intergenerational spider-family.

I’m sure that the spider (or spiders) lived there, somewhere in the gears that adjusted the tilt of the mirror, rather than paying an occasional visit, because of their omnipresent web.

It didn’t matter if the previous web had been whipped off by Wellington’s world-famous wind, rained off by Wellington’s prodigious mid-day and all-night storms, or just gradually worn away over the course of a drive on the highway. By the next time I left the house via car, the web would be back in full force.

Image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay

I brushed the web away the first few times I noticed it, until it dawned on me that the same spider must be deliberately spinning it again and again. At first I was a little bit grossed out. Eek, a spider! Lurking right outside my power window!

Yet, what was that spider going to do to me? The mirror was controlled electronically from inside the car. The web didn’t especially obscure the mirror, and at high speeds it quickly dissolved. I had never actually seen the spider, even when brushing off its web early on in its residence. It had found an apparently cozy little artificial burrow that would protect it from predators. Apparently it was eating decently enough on the bugs that would get tangled in the mirror itself, though I never saw any evidence of those, either.

All I knew was that there was a fresh web on the mirror every time I get in the car.

(I suppose there might have been some amount of spider-leavings going on behind the mirror, but I assumed that between the rain and the occasional electronic adjustment it was effectively self-cleaning. Either that, or we had a very tidy spider. No, I don’t want to consider the alternative. Moving on…)

This grew to be part of my daily landscape in Wellington. I saw my family every day. I ran into the same parents at school pickup. I chatted with the same cashiers every weekend at the supermarket. And, every time I arrived at my driver’s side door I would note that the web had been recast from the last time I saw it.

Then, disaster struck. Not all at once, mind you, but a disastrous chain of events began to unspool. [Read more…] about the spider in the mirror

(un/)settled

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Last week I threw away some expired prescriptions from at least a decade ago.

I know what you’re thinking. “Krisis will really blog about anything to keep up these regular posts. Maybe we’ll get a YouTube show reviewing the contents of every trash can in the house.”

Honestly, I wouldn’t rule it out. But, I promise, this trip to the trash can was particularly significant!

When we bought a house back in 2010, in many ways my life entered “accumulation mode.” I never had that much space to fill before, or a space that felt so permanent. After an entire life spent in rentals, I finally felt like I could have and do stuff. I’m not just talking about my comic collection! Having a house also lead to me fronting a full band, learning to play bass, writing a book, and making a huge career pivot.

In short: I felt settled. That extended to more than my stuff. It came with a feeling of psychological safety.

Image by tookapic from Pixabay

Then, almost exactly five years ago, we packed that entire life into a shipping container. We had fewer than 90 days to go from committing to our move to hopping on the first of three flights en route to New Zealand, so the packing wasn’t very discerning. All of the comics, musical gear, kitchen appliances, and expired medication got boxed up regardless of if we’d ever want to see them again in New Zealand.

Even though we’ve long since unpacked all the essentials, in some ways I’ve been living out of boxes for the past half decade. Heck, I needed an almost 90-episode web show to motivate me to unpack all of my collected editions! It’s not unusual for E to send me on a scavenger hunt through the garage for something we haven’t seen since leaving America.

This set me back to a mindset of everything in life being temporary. Having to move again in 2019 when I finally felt at home in our first rental in NZ made things even worse and it was compounded by our deportation scare in early 2020.

I was back to being unsettled.

If feeling settled came with a warm, tingly feeling of safety, feeling unsettled again introduced a constant, low-level of buzzing anxiety in the back of my brain.

I still bought stuff and did new things, but it felt unsteady. Imagine cooking a big meal while wearing roller skates. Would you whisk and chop as confidently? Would you clean up as you cooked? Would it be easy to lift a heavy pan into a hot oven? Or, would you do everything more slowly, with less certainty and more mess.

That’s how being unsettled feels to me now that I know there’s an alternative – slow, uncertain, and messy.

Here’s the thing I’ve slowly accepted about the rollerskate-cooking that is my ongoing immigrant life: forcing yourself to be physically settled helps with feeling mentally settled, and the opposite is true as well.

Sometimes that’s buying a new shelf to improve the clutter. Others it means inviting friends over for dinner, because that is a thing we can do.

And, sometimes that means unearthing a box full of expired prescriptions I haven’t dealt with since 2012 and tossing them all in the trash.

Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

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The tastes of many American snack foods have become a distant memory after five years spent living in New Zealand.

A few familiar American snack brands make it to our remote shores and supermarket shelves, usually via companies with an Australian outpost. We can buy Cheerios and the occasional Fruit Loops, and there are $13 pints of Ben & Jerry’s to be had for the big spenders, but the vast amount of familiar expat snacks are absent from most Kiwi grocery stores

Mostly I don’t mind. My solution has largely been to cook a lot more meals and to eschew snack foods like cookies, chips, and crackers entirely. Why start a fresh snacking habit when I can instead scan down an aisle of unfamiliar cookie packages and not know what a single one of them taste like?

Being oblivious to local brands is a terrific diet.

The one kink in this flawless snack free life is that I sometimes catch myself regaling the kid with one of my distant snack food memories. As she has grown older I’ve realized how many of my stories tie to specific foods, like the routine of buying Twizzlers every time I went to the movies (and how it’s essential to enjoy them when they are fresh) or the excitement of discovering I had a Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpet in my lunch (and the process of rubbing them against your shirt to make sure the frosting wouldn’t get stuck to the plastic).

While I don’t necessarily miss the indulgences I describe to her, I do sometimes regret that I can’t give her the same experiences. I don’t need her to like all of the same snacks as me, but being unable to give her the opportunity to turn her nose up at them makes me feel like I’m missing some essential aspect of the parenting experience.

One snack in particular, has come up again and again in these conversations: Captain Crunch cereal. Yes, I know the actual name is “Cap’n Crunch,” but I’m not typing that repeatedly. It’s undignified for a man of the Captain’s position and tenure.

I explained the mouth-shredding experience of eating Captain Crunch to the kid at least a dozen times over. I’m uncertain why Fruit Loops were able to make the ocean-spanning journey to our shores and stores while the good Captain – himself a seafarer of some renown – could not. New Zealand loves peanut butter!

(E’s theory is that Captain Crunch (actually, a Commander) is obviously modeled on historical colonizers, who aren’t as welcomed as junk food mascots here as they are in the states. My theory is that because Kiwis don’t dip cookies in milk, they simply aren’t interested in more cookie-esque cereals since there’s no built-in allure to eating a bowl full of them.)

(Seriously, they don’t dip cookies in milk here. It’s a whole ‘nother post entirely.)

Occasionally I’ll fall down the internet rabbit hole of looking into buying Captain Crunch by the case. Even in bulk, the cost of having it shipped to New Zealand is prohibitive. Plus, I’d be crushed to find out that customs had incinerated a case of contraband cereal for violating some form of border integrity (which has happened to E before while trying to import spices).

It was these memories (and cravings) for the Captain that found the kid and I staring into the tantalizing maw of US import store in our local shopping center a few weeks ago. It is tucked into an odd corner of the parking lot such that I don’t usually need to walk past it, but a rainy day of household errands had us scurrying from from awning to awning to avoid getting soaked.

There we were, slightly damp and slightly breathless, peering through the window. There was the Captain, his smiling face splayed across a row of familiar red boxes, smiling back at me. It was the first time I had seen him in person in almost five years. [Read more…] about Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy