Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

weak in the knees

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Everyone has their own version of what makes them feel physically fit. For some it’s their weight. For others it’s their abs, or how much they can lift.

For me, it’s always been squatting.

Not “squats,” where I have to crouch down with a fraction of the weight of the world on my shoulders and then power that weight up to the sky as I straight my posture. Those came later.

No. Just good old regular squatting to reach something on the ground.

If I wheeze or grunt while I’m doing it, I am not in shape. That’s my litmus test. That’s what sent me to the gym for the first time back in 2011. I was not quite 30 years old and doing that little old man grunt when I bent over to pick something up.

“Uhnf,” I expel on a little puff of breath as I crouched down, or as I pressed myself back up.

A lot of that “uhnf” came from the knees. I was sure mine had gone bad from years of pounding down Philadelphia’s cracked concrete sidewalks at high speeds in my unforgiving pair of Sketchers boots.

In yoga I could not do “chair pose.” When I ran it felt as though my knees heated up like a paper clip being repeatedly bent. My mother’s knees needed replacement. For me, it was probably just a matter of time.

“Should’ve gone with Doc Martens,” I’d muse. Oh, the folly of youth.

I felt fit at some point in my original gym adventures earlier this decade, which meant my squatting was not bad. No more little puff of complaint at their nadir. My opinion of my knees did not change.

I shared that same opinion with my friend Alison when she coaxed me to start weight training in 2016. Why did I use only half of the weight I needed to use for squats (this time the real sort of squats that required that fraction of the weight of the world)?

The knees, I’d tell her. It’s all in the knees.

It’s now been two years of lifting those weights every week, with a few breaks along the way. I’ve had a lot of little niggling problems in that time – ankles and cramps and my back and a whole litany of other little weaknesses to overcome.

Never the knees.

I realize now that the problem was never my knees. The problem was how I was using them. The only way I used my legs before 2011 were as massive pistons, driving my feet to the ground again and again as I walked four miles at a time. That was the only way they knew how to be strong. Any other kind of leg exercise – from running to yoga to squatting – I’d just rely on my knees to do all the work.

My legs know how to do different things now. I’ve got muscles I never had before, not just those piston pressing thighs. Squatting is fine, with weights or without. When I squat to pick something up I’m using my entire body – my abdominals, my back, my thighs, my calves.

I’ve come a long way from those squats being the delineation of my fitness. They’re not “not bad” now. They feel fine. Good, even. Sometimes I even pretend I am Spider-Man for a moment as I rock back onto my haunches.

How did I get past being weak in the knees? Back in 2016, Alison told me I couldn’t use them as an excuse. “Plenty of people have bad knees and still do modified squats,” she told me. “That’s not a reason to avoid them.”

Yoga teachers had said the same thing to me, but they didn’t know me like Alison did, since sitting on the floor in her dorm room putting together copies of my first demo CD. She met me when I was skin and bones and curly hair, before the singing lessons and the career and my relationship with E.

She knew that I didn’t let minor obstacles stop me from doing what I want, so she made me knees into an obstacle rather than my weakest point. “Just work around them,” she told me, and so I did – and it turned out that working around them was exactly what I needed to do.

I am trying to transport this little lesson about squats and knees into other areas of my life. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else. The place where you perceive the symptoms of a problem isn’t always the spot that needs curing. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else.

Whether it’s squats or something else, our metrics of success measure more factors than we might realize at first.

inspection day

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Today is inspection day.

I’ve spent over 80% of my life living in rented homes, and never once before did I have rental inspections with standards as stringent as the ones here in Wellington.

Maybe a realtor or an owner would drop by once or twice a year to make sure we hadn’t demolished the place. Not quarterly. Not with handy checklists on their phone apps, insisting you raise all the blinds and taking photos of all of the sinks and toilets.

It makes sense. This is someone else’s house, after all. We’re just caretakers of it for a brief period of time during which we also happen to live inside of it.

I wish someone had come to inspect our house while we were owners in Drexel Hill. I think sometimes you get so enamored with living somewhere and not being responsible to someone else that you stop being caretakers in small ways. You grow accustomed.

We had a drip in our foyer during a torrential downpour one time in eight years of living in our house. We still can’t figure out why the drip happened just that once. It left a little bubble in the paint. It wasn’t “water damage” per se, because nothing was damaged, but the paint had a bubble. It was in the foyer, which E had painted herself. We could have scraped the paint off of that one bit and repainted it. Instead, we grew accustomed. That bubble in the paint was the first thing we’d see every time we walked in the door. It was almost comforting to see it. It was that way for years.

Do you know how many times that fucking bubble and the “heavy water damage and leaking roof” got brought up when we were selling the house? Good Lorde, I don’t even want to think about it. If someone had just come through our house for an inspection once a quarter, pointed to the bubble, and said, “that is unacceptable,” we would have repainted it in a matter of hours.

I think we could have sold the house three months sooner for several thousand more dollars if we had fixed that fucking bubble. That bubble in the paint was the first thing every prospective buyer would see every time they walked in the door.

This is why I welcome our rental inspections in Wellington. They give us a reason to reconsider every room. They make it impossible to become entirely accustomed to anything that might be slightly askew.

Honestly, I wish I had someone with a phone app checklist to inspect my entire life every quarter. I’ve always been the kind of person to work hard and set lofty goals for myself, but who knows what little leaks I’ve become accustomed to.

It reminds me of when you are trying to learn how to do something physically challenging and you think you’ve got the hang of it, but then your coach or instructor or whomever gives you a little tip. “Elbow should be higher.” “Don’t hunch your shoulders.” “Remember to breathe.” You would probably keep on doing the thing you were doing merrily – shooting an arrow from a bow, or whatever. You’d keep shooting those arrows and thinking, “Gee, I’m grand at this bow and arrow thing.” And then you get reminded that your elbow should be higher, your shoulders shouldn’t be hunched, and that you ought to breathe.

Suddenly it’s a different experience. Not just more difficult, but something you can feel. It’s hard to sleepwalk through something you can feel. It’s makes it impossible to be accustomed, inured.

Maybe that is why I am so obsessed with data and lists and little processes and performance reviews. They are my way of constantly inspecting myself.

The other week I was telling EV6 about how we’d measure her progress in something and she said, “Oh, great, another process.” There was more than a hint of sarcasm there (I now have a child old enough to wield sarcasm as a weapon), but beneath that there was something else.

“I guess I’ll have to be ready for inspection day.”

A Moment of Krisis: Where Have I Been?

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Hello, internet friends and strangers!

It has been a quiet few months on Crushing Krisis, and an even quieter few on my YouTube channel, where I have maintained complete radio silence since the beginning of May.

There’s not an epic tale behind my disappearance. It was actually the result of several smaller details conspiring against my video-making and blogging.

on fathers and borders

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Here are some thoughts on Father’s Day (even though it isn’t Father’s Day in New Zealand until September.)

A year ago today our immigration process had just gotten underway. I would’ve told you it was difficult.

It wasn’t. It was complicated, but easy. We arrived in New Zealand as a family with a place to live, albeit a temporary one, and our belongings on the way.

Today, there are asylum-seeking people who walk into the US with everything they own and the first thing that happens is they lose their children.

I cannot stop thinking about it. We’re the same – parents looking for a better life for their children. I had more privilege to wield and more support, but there’s fundamentally nothing different about EV and I compared to the children being torn away from their parents at the borders of America.

I have made a lot of difficult, life-altering choices in the past five years for the sake of being a parent – choices I would have never made before a child existed in my life. Every one was so she could gain access to some aspect of life, some aspect of happiness, that I was not afforded.

To think that there are parents out there making harder choices, ones motivated by the realities of violence and poverty, and that the first thing that happens to them in the United States is that they experience persecution and having their families shattered – possible irrevocably shattered… [Read more…] about on fathers and borders

suddenly September

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Last week, many music fans sneered at Taylor Swift’s country-tinged cover of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September.” EW&F’s original was suddenly sacrosanct and not to be covered – and especially not with banjos! How dare she!

There is a prevailing trend in music fandom and cultural commentary right now to dismiss any acoustic cover of a pop, R&B, or rap song as minimizing the impact of the original or whitewashing it in a generic way.

While I recognize that there is an amount of inherent bias in people only enjoying a song once it has been covered by a white singer on an acoustic instrument, the idea of summarily discarding all such covers seems wholly ignorant of the power of music as an artform.

Before music existing as recordings, it existed as sheet music and oral tradition. There was no concept of hearing the song “the way it was meant to be heard.” Yes, you could follow the marking in the transcription perfectly or exactly mimic the way that song was taught to you. But music was necessarily spread by reinterpretation.

This extended into the era of modern recorded music in the form of cover songs. In the Doo Wop era it was common for the same song to be recorded by multiple acts. The Beatles got their start covering R&B hits like “Please Mr. Postman” in a rock style. Later, Earth Wind & Fire had a massive hit covering The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life” in an R&B style (for the Sgt. Pepper’s movie). Both covers broadened the appeal of the originals without erasing their impact.

This process is rife with theft and appropriation, and I don’t mean to suggest that we’re worse off now that originating artists are able to receive and maintain attribution more readily. However, I think this new trend of sneering at “earnest” covers is a bad thing for music fans and critics alike.

The furor over Swift’s cover of “September” made me think about one of the most popular songs of all time: Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” … which is exponentially more known as a Whitney Houston song.

As with “September,” both versions of the song are recognizable as the same work with the same inherent structure. Houston’s version strips the slide guitars of the original and adds in many tired R&B and soft-jazz tropes that are the equivalent of a country banjo. She also lengthens notes and adds melisma.

Houston used the good bones of the song to broaden its existing appeal. In that case, the broadened appeal was to bring the song first to a R&B audience, and then to the wider pop audience. Nothing about her cover lessened the original or erased its impact (and made Dolly Parton a TON of money).

Many people discovered Dolly Parton through that cover. I discovered Nicki Minaj through Karmin’s cover of “Super Bass.” Some kids today will discover Earth Wind & Fire through Taylor Swift’s cover of “September.”

And you know what? Others won’t.

Some people – me included – just dig acoustic guitar and piano covers and have little use for more produced originals of *any* genre.

That’s fine.

There is nothing inherently “better” or sacred about an original or grander arrangement of a song, just as there is nothing inherently better about playing a song on an acoustic instrument. If the song itself is good (rather than just the arrangement), it will still be good performed in any medium, from electropop to acappella.

And what if someone says, “I never liked that song until I heard Swift cover it acoustically”? Is that such a bad thing?

Maybe they don’t like male falsetto voices. Maybe they don’t like squalling horns. Maybe they just connect with Taylor Swift. I heard elements of the lyrics and chord progressions in the Swift cover that I never once heard in dozens (if not hundreds) of listens to the original. I unironically love it. It made me appreciate the song more.

The entire resistance to whitewashed acoustic covers is itself a cover. While the original argument was one about how white singers and people who play their own instruments got extra validation for their work compared to black artists or people who don’t play instruments, that has trickled down to “Chad and Becky should never cover that Beyoncé song.”

I think that watered down argument is just as dangerous as people who feel Beyoncé doesn’t deserve to win awards because she isn’t the sole songwriter of her music. You can decide not to like the “Chad and Becky” cover as your own cover of a very valid cultural critique, but there is nothing inherently broken, wrong, or impermissible about them covering the song.

Music is unique as an artform because it so readily invites mimicry by even the most untrained performer, and at this time stringed instruments and pianos are the most readily available means of reproduction other than the human voice.

To the banjo players of the world, I say: cover all of the classic R&B your little pickin’ fingers can pluck!

And to all of the music fans in the world, I say: love what you love, but when it’s a cover be willing to interrogate why you love it more than the original.