Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

the big kids are in the next room

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Tonight I brought EV to a party with more or less the complete collection of college friends I regularly attended parties with in the summer before I met E – sans Erika in Boston and Jack, off being a turtle doctor somewhere, or doing whatever a turtle doctor does in cold weather when the turtles are presumably moving more slowly than normal.

(I’m sure Jack would tell me that’s a turtle misnomer, but Jack is not the topic of this post.)

The difference between college and today? We’re now all married (well, one re-married, two divorced), we drink less by an order of magnitude, and between the eight couples we have eleven children with another incoming.

(No, not from us. For heaven’s sake, get a hold of yourself.)

It is moments like these that remind me that I’ve never seen EV spend time with other children. Not by design, really. None of the children in the neighborhood passing my extensive background check to make sure they won’t tell her about Disney or princesses, she’s not exactly hanging out with babies.

(Just kidding – none of the neighborhood kids have even passed the qualifying verbal and potty exams to get to the background check.)

I set that chubby baby down on the floor and a fascinating thing happened. She had no interest in the other kids running and whooping all around her except for briefly babbling with another baby around her age. Instead, she wanted to explore, examine things, and smile at the adults.

(She also signaled for and used the big girl potty four times, because she is the best baby ever. In case you were wondering how that was going. Because you were.)

Effectively, it was like watching a young me exploring a social space. I never had any interest in other children – almost disdained them for their running and whooping. I never lacked for creative play ideas, but if I was at a party with adults I typically wanted to enjoy their company. Even now, I am not an extrovert at a party unless I am the host. I wander from conversation to conversation, sharing a laugh or a smile, and then I settle down in a corner regardless of if it is inhabited.

For a few hours tonight, EV and I both did that – sometimes together, sometimes independently.

I don’t mean to project that smaller me onto EV. She will be the person she will be, and that doesn’t have to be a reflection of me. Nor would I want it to be, honestly – I did plenty of great things as a child, but there’s a lot of things I could have handled better.

I suppose that’s the point of parenting just as much as it’s hard not to see yourself in the behavior of your child when they already look half the part.

type a-ness

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Tonight Jake came over to play bass.

This is kind of a big deal. Jake had become a sort of essential, twice-a-week presence in my life in 2012 when he was the bass player for Arcati Crisis and – more than that – a rare male friend. Then he was off to Rochester for some life changes, and a year into that Arcati Crisis ceased to be an ongoing concern.

There were some good things and some bad things about both of those happenings, but the worst by far was not playing music with Jake at least once a week. Tonight remedied that situation by a measure, as we began to get him up to speed on some of our many dozens of Smash Fantastic cover songs with an eye to him joining the band.

That’s a lot of songs, for which I have a lot of finely detailed lead sheets. They each have a little “At a Glance” box at the top that details their key, BPM, and a quick summary of chords and special performance notes. No song enters our repertoire without a sheet. The practice of making one all-but-assures that I not only know a song before we attempt it, but that I understand how it works.

I insisted on printing our entire binder of leads for Jake at the end of our rehearsal. That took a little while, and resulted in a large chunk of a ream of paper which I methodically alphabetized and hole-punched as it emerged from the printer while Jake noodled on a series of Dave Matthews songs that I half-sung under my breath. I grew frustrated with the jumble of sheets and muttered, “fine, we’ll do it as a merge sort,” as I spread them on the floor.

Finally, I was satisfied. I carefully tapped the sheets against the floor to get their edges flush, and then handed the packet to Jake.

“Wow,” he replied as he received them.

“What?”

“Just… you,” he left that hang there for a moment before gesturing to the stack of nearly a hundred songs I had handed to him. Some of the pages were no longer perfectly flush. “This Type A thing you do. Your Type A-ness.”

“It’s a thing,” I said, honestly. It’s not quite OCD in a unpreventable, diagnosable fashion, but it’s close. “Plus,” I continued, “who wants to constantly ask to have things reprinted or figure out the chords again or have the sheets out of order or argue over lyrics, right?”

“Wow,” he said again.

This is why Jake is joining a second band with me. Not that he covets the sheets – the guy plays a by-ear circle around me. Because he understands that I need to do it that way, and he just says “wow” and then does things his way too, and when we’re both doing our things our two ways at once it makes some lovely sounds – lovelier than the sounds that would be made by two people doing things the exact same way as each other.

need you in my arms tonight

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Part of my daily routine is now to briefly lull a small human being to sleep in my arms before deftly placing her down in her crib to rest.

This wasn’t always the case. E used to handle bedtime, but it felt weird that EV only knew how to get to the sleep in the arms of one particular human being. We began to split the task, and it turned out I had an unexpected knack for it. Sure, I have my difficult nights and the odd sleep regression where all that baby wants to do is stand up in the crib, but on a typical night I get her down in record time without a peep.

Bedtime became mine in short order – I conduct the proceedings six days a week, leaving one night for E to dabble in sleep-making.

As it happens, I haven’t been on bedtime duty for the past two nights. On Tuesday E’s brother was on duty while we were out. It did not go well. There was much thrashing, gnashing of tiny teeth, and ASL signals to return to the potty. Last night E took her once-weekly turn. It did not go well, though it usually does. The problem? I stopped by the room to give EV a hug goodnight and then left. Instant and irrecoverable baby meltdown followed. I stayed tucked away in the attic while E dealt with the aftermath.

Tonight? Back to father, back to easy-as-pie sleep without a peep. She practically threw her head at my shoulder as I read her our nightly pair of pages of Neverwhere. “Two paragraphs are fine tonight,” she shouted with her body language, “let’s just get to the sleepy part.”

I knew that I was going to be responsible for taking care of this small human. I acknowledged that she would have some preferences only I knew or understood. However, this might be the first time where I’ve become essential to her biology – she simply doesn’t like going to sleep without me.

It’s at once delightful and ludicrous. I don’t know if I’ve ever been required by another person in such a central fashion, and there is something immensely pleasing about it. I like being the irreplaceable assistant for someone – to a point that I considered working as an Executive Assistant earlier in my career before a more defined path opened up for me. Yet, it’s also insane! I can train anyone to say the things I say and do them in the order I do them. Why wouldn’t she go to sleep for them? Why does it matter so much if I hug and run rather than conduct the entire procedure?

I know the why. Because those other people don’t have my voice, my movements, my scent. They don’t hug the same, play her belly like a drum while they dress her, or sing her name to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while they brush her teeth.

Nor would I want them to. That baby needs me to go to sleep, and I need that baby to fall asleep in my arms. I could have a dozen nights left or a hundred, but when it’s over it’s never coming back again. We’ll be on to the next routine.

For now, we belong to each other, six nights a week.

two sides of a naked truth

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There are naked pictures of me on this blog.

What can I say? I went through a brief, months-long phase in my late teens where I was at the edge of my early-college thinness, had a web cam, and thought I was some form of internet soft-core porn star. I was young, newly single, and attractive.

Even in my youthful pride and vanity, I understood the context of my actions. I knew that by posting the images to CK I was committing them to the collective consciousness, and that they would exist in perpetuity through my every job interview or public exposure. I was okay with that. It was my choice, which I own even if I may later regret it.

This weekend one of the biggest stories on the internet was that the private photographs of dozens of actresses had been hacked from Apple’s iCloud service and posted on the internet. These images were not taken to be committed to the collective consciousness, but for personal use. The only choice made was to take them – they may have even been deleted later, only to persist in the cloud. They weren’t carelessly misplaced or lost. They were stolen.

This is not only a theft, but a sex crime – which is to say, the criminal behind it intentionally and with harmful intent removed the sexual agency from these women. Yet, the general reception to the photos was not disgust or icy dismissal. Many people rejoiced in the chance to see these stars naked. In catching up on the story, I read one particularly disturbing comment from a woman who said she loaded the photos, handed her laptop to her husband, and said only, “You’re welcome.”

I suppose he was supposed to be thanking her for acting as an accessory to a disgusting crime she was now implicating him in as well? I’m not sure.

Let me state plainly that there are important issues of misogyny to unpack here. I’m not the writer most-qualified to contend with those topics, or even list them. I’ll simply point out that few if no men had their solo photographs leaked as part of this crime. It would be just as much as a theft and a sex crime if there had been, but the crime would be in a different context.

That’s the context I find myself mulling over, since I have the capacity to do so – the one we might be discussing if this had not been a sex crime solely against women. That is the idea of public versus private communication.

(No, not in the disgusting, victim-blaming, “don’t take the photos if you don’t want them to be seen” way that I’ve seen it happening so far. We can be surprised that stars might take these photos – I personally am – but let’s not pretend that the facts that a human is sexual and that a body can be naked in front of a camera entitles us to see the results.)

At work, I lead a session for new employees on Brand Voice. The prevailing theme is that when you represent a brand you should assume all of your communication is public-facing and brand-representing. There is no private. It doesn’t matter if it’s an internal email, a comment on an elevator, or a personal posting. If you can be construed as a representative of your brand, your comment counts! Once you fix that in your brain and use it as your global filter, your risk is greatly reduced. If something runs counter to your brand, you don’t say it or share it willfully.

Celebrities are certainly aware they are brands and in any potentially public-facing venue act accordingly. These women would never have committed these images to the public consciousness, as I chose to over a decade ago. They were all clearly private – just as I expect some of my colleagues might say something in the privacy of their home that would fall outside of my recommendations in the Brand Voice talk.

What defines private? In my colleagues’ case, it’s the knowledge of their surroundings and the assumption of security. They are in their living space with a known quantity of other people, presumably safe from being intruded upon, overheard, or recorded. That assumption could be in error – someone could knock down the door at any second! But, they have a reasonable, evidence-based expectation that they are secure.

What defined private for the victims in this case? They, too, were in secure spaces. They, too, did not think they would be seen by anything other than their own camera and their intended recipient. However, once these digital photos were allowed to sync to the cloud, a whole new set of assumptions came into play.

Do you know what it means when you commit a photo to iCloud, use DropBox, divulge a personal detail on a social network, or even speculatively place something into your shopping cart in the same browser session where you have been logged in to any website, anywhere? I suspect you don’t. You assume what you are doing is private because you want it to be, and because there are some measures in place to maintain that illusion of limited access. You don’t understand the whole chain of custody of your information and how it will be used.

You may not realize the website you visited knows which ads you clicked and what you did afterward, though you would surely object to someone following you through a grocery store, taking notes. You don’t know what server your private Facebook message sits on, or what prevents it from going to another user, yet you are likely as confident (or moreso!) in the privacy of that communication than you are that a letter will reach its intended recipient unmolested. In fact, it is the digital thing is so much more fragile and corruptible.

If this sounds like it’s turning into, “So don’t take a naked digital picture ever!” it’s not. Again, just because a naked photo exists doesn’t mean everyone should be allowed to see it, just as because a woman has a body does not mean every one has the right to comment on it.

It is, “Why do we trust who we trust?” When someone tells us, “your data is private and secure,” do we understand what those words mean? Private unless what? Secure until when? My clients frequently request documentation or NDAs to confirm that statement, but it turns out the most famous people in the world just click “I Accept” on the iCloud user agreement like the rest of us and go on with their lives.

They trust just like we do. They think private means the same thing we do. The violation they are experiencing is the same one we sign up for every time we click that “I Accept” button. We’re all the same, except more people recognize their faces.

If I suddenly became famous tomorrow – joined a reality TV show, or released a hit song, or ran for public office – all of the content on this blog would become fodder for both my fans and foes. Hundreds of details about my actions and beliefs. Indecent photos. Terrible demo songs. That was my choice.

What happened to the victims of this situation wasn’t a choice. It isn’t fair or just. It’s terrible, it’s a crime, and it can never be erased. Famous or not, woman or man, no one deserves to lose their sexual agency or to be treated like an object.

And it’s all because one criminal decided he wanted to change the meaning of the word “private.”

retrain

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When I am not paying close attention, my left shoulder still slouches slightly inward from when I broke my collarbone in college.

I step too hard on my heels when I walk. I speak and sing with too much tension in my jaw and uneven air support. I touch-type perfectly with my right hand, but hunt and peck with my left. I underuse my pinkies when I play guitar.

These are my thoughts as I struggle to get my left pinky facing down into the plane of water this morning as I backstroke.

There are many people who always square their shoulders, walk correctly, speak and sing well, touch type, and nimbly play guitar. I bet some of them even swim pretty decently, too.

For someone with a reputation as a perfectionist, I have a lot of rough edges. As I look back at learning all of those skills, it not as though I purposely skimped on practice. Well, maybe on walking – you’d have to ask my parents.

Sometimes these imperfections make me afraid, as if I am a fraud at posture and walking and talking and typing and playing guitar. I fear that one day I’ll be exposed as a fake and I won’t be allowed to move or express myself ever again.

It’s not a valid fear. These are my skills that people always appreciate the most – yes, even my fast walking. They are part of who I am, even if I do them a bit wrongly. All I can do to alleviate my fear is retrain myself in increments. Roll my shoulder back every time I notice it leaning forward. Let go of a little of that tension and breathe more. Take the time to play the solo the efficient way instead of the quick way.

My left arm breaks through the water. I swing it up, rotate, and plunge down to slice the water with my pinky finger.

We are all imperfect and we are all improving, and that doesn’t make any of us a fraud.