Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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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

Crushing On: J. S. Bach’s Lute Suite in C minor, BWV 997 performed by Evangelina Mascardi

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As a rule, I try not to let social network algorithms touch my life.

Why would you let the whims of an algorithm meant to keep you on a site change your priorities, dictate your schedule, or change your mood?

Yet, sometimes… sometimes you peek into the vast abyss of the algorithm by mistake and you see one tiny glimmer within it. Not a distraction. Not a waste of time. Not a cheap piece of disposable joy.

It is the glow of something extraordinary. Something life-altering on a deep, meaningful level that you will carry with you.

Here is Evangelina Mascardi playing J. S. Bach – Suite in C minor BWV 997 on a period-accurate 24-string Baroque lute entirely from memory, recorded a year ago. It was composed for (and typically performed upon) a Lautenwerk (lute-harpsichord) – a keyboard instrument.

(If you don’t have the patience to watch all 24 minutes, at least go watch the final movement. Just extraordinary.)

While watching this I had… I don’t know if I would call it an “epiphany,” but it was a moment of extreme calmness and presence within my own body. Not just a moment, though. Entire minutes. It is one of the most beautiful juxtapositions of composition and performance I’ve ever seen and heard in mylife.

19 thoughts

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When I wake up early in the morning for a meeting with my team in the states, one of the first things I do afterward is visit the 8YO’s room. She claims she will wake up at 6:30am to read; she is a voracious reader. The alarm goes off, and she shuts it off and continues sleeping. “No reading today?” I’ll ask, as I give her a kiss on the cheek.

In 2012 when the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting happened I remember sitting numbly at my desk at work. We were just one month pregnant. “How can you send a child to school in this country?” I thought to myself.

She likes to have a whole orange sliced up into wedges at part of her lunch, no matter how incongruous that is with the rest of lunch. But, you have to transfer each half orange as a perfect bisected globe onto her plate so she can be surprised anew that it’s actually comprised of wedges. She’s a slow eater. So slow that I can cook my lunch, eat, and tidy up while she’s still eating. Yesterday I finished all of that and then stood behind her chair, my hands resting on her shoulders while she ate.

In 2015 when the Charleston church shooting happened I remember solemnly saying the victims’ names out loud to keep their thought alive.

In 2016 when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened I was a stay-at-home parent. I remember watching the Democrat filibuster in real time while tweeting and blogging about it, and calling my Senator and representative. I was crying so hard that day that I think I asked someone else from the family to visit to play with the kid. I remember thinking, “How can you raise a child in this country?”

In 2017, almost exactly five weeks ago to this very day, E had a job offer in New Zealand.

In 2017 when the Las Vegas concert shooting happened we had just moved into our first house in New Zealand. I remember frantically checking on my former bandmate, Ashley, who was in Las Vegas and attending that music festival. She was already on her plane home, and it was one of the longest days of my life waiting for her to land and reply to my messages.

In 2018 when the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting happened we hadn’t even been in New Zealand for six months. I remember thinking, “even after Pulse, nothing changed.”

Later in 2018 when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened I remember loading and reloading the profile of a friend in Pittsburgh, only for him to later affirm he was okay but that was his synagogue on his block.

In 2019 when the Christchurch mosque shooting happened I was sitting at my desk at the Ministry of Business, less than 10 feet from the Chief Executive of the ministry, watching as her office transformed into the war room. I felt physically sick. Didn’t we leave America to move away from this?

Later that same day, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden told our nation and the world that New Zealand’s gun control laws would change.

Just 18 days later, all but one member New Zealand’s parliament voted in favor of a ban on (and buy-back of) semi-automatic weapons.

I saw news of a shooting in Philadelphia and rushed tearfully to Facebook to check that my friends were all okay only to realize it was a headline from several years ago. It had already happened, I had already grieved it. I just didn’t remember. There have been so many mass shootings in the United States this year alone that I cannot remember them all and the ways they all made me feel. I can’t remember all of the places I’ve been when I heard about another shooting this past decade. I can no longer remember all of the names and stories of the victims that seemed so indelible to me at the time. I still say their names when I look them up to remind myself.

Yesterday as news emerged that 19 children and 2 teachers had been killed in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting I stood at the kid’s chair, my hands resting on her shoulders while she ate. The kids were her age, in her grade. 19 children. 19 families who would never get to linger in these little moments with those children every again.

10 years ago I wondered if we could raise a child in a country that would allow Sandy Hook to happen and not doing anything to change it.

5 years ago we decided we could not.

Today we live in a country that has banned the kinds of weapons most often used to perpetrate these murders.

Every day I live in grief for every child who has died to gun violence in America, but also for those who walk into school each day wondering if this will be their day. Children younger than my own child. Children who I know and love and children I’ve never met.

Every day I wish America would change.